September 2, 1943:
- "One thousand Jews are deported from Paris to Auschwitz.
- "Ten thousand Jews from Tarnów, Poland, are deported to Auschwitz and the Plaszów slave-labor camp.
- "At Treblinka, 13 Jews use a crowbar to kill a Ukrainian SS guard.
The uprising's 18-year-old Polish leader, Seweryn Klajnman, puts on the dead man's uniform and marches the other 12 prisoners, who are already on a work detail outside of camp, farther away from the camp. - "Thirty-five hundred Jews are deported from Przemysl, Poland, to Auschwitz."
- Art as Resistance
"In the midst of degradation and despair, concentration-camp prisoners refused to allow their creativity to be stifled and destroyed.
Even as they struggled to survive, prisoners used whatever scraps of paper and stubs of pencils they could find to express themselves.
Through poetry and art, they affirmed their own existence and documented the horrors they feared might be forgotten.
"In Theresienstadt, the model camp/ghetto the Nazis established near Prague, Czechoslovakia, artists such as Felix Bloch produced "official" art on command while secretly creating works that portrayed Jewish existence as it was.
Teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis nurtured the talents of her young Theresienstadt charges, enabling them through art to transform the dark and dangerous world of the Nazis into a realm of light and love.
The drawings the children left behind portray images of butterflies and birds, sailboats and family gatherings.
But they also record the trauma of daily life, ghetto guards, and train departures to the death camps.
"One child's poem voices the longing reflected in the drawings of many: 'I'd like to go away alone/Where there are other, nicer people/Somewhere into the far unknown/
There, where no one kills another.' "
"As the architect of the Nazi program of genocide, Heinrich Himmler spent much of 1943 implementing the "Final Solution."
Named minister of the interior in August, Himmler utilized his control over the courts and civil service to advance the racial reordering of Europe, and paid particular attention to the fates of the 600,000 Jews he estimated to be in France.
During an October speech to SS Gruppenführers (major generals) at Posen, Germany, Himmler declared that the Nazis had a "moral right" and a 'duty' to exterminate the Jews.
He proudly hailed the SS role in that process.
Oddly, although Himmler told the group that the Final Solution was 'an unwritten and never to be written page in [SS] history,' he took pains to ensure that his speech was tape-recorded."
"Dr. August Hirt, director of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute in France, works on the cadaver of a Jewish person.
As part of the Nazi quest to prove Aryan racial superiority, Hirt aimed to establish a vast collection of skeletons from all peoples.
In 1943 the collection still lacked sufficient Jewish examples.
Thus, at Hirt's request, 86 Jews from Auschwitz, whose bone structure exemplified the desired characteristics, were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof, where they were gassed.
Their bodies were then sent to Hirt in Strasbourg, where the corpses were reduced to skeletons."
"In August 1943 30 women were taken from Block 10 at Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof, with their corpses then shipped to the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute for study.
Conducted under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) office of the SS, Dr. August Hirt's research was intended to yield an anthropological classification system.
He intended to separate inferior from superior races and prove Aryan superiority."
