November 8, 1943:
- November 3: "Three hundred Jews at Borki, Poland, near Chelm, are put to work exhuming 30,000 corpses, mostly of Red Army POWs taken prisoner and murdered late in 1941.
The bodies are burned on massive pyres. - "Jacob Katz, a Jewish cleaner at the Budzyn, Poland, concentration camp, rescues seven elderly Jews by hiding them beneath mattresses.
- "Riccardo Pacifici, rabbi of Genoa, Italy, is deported to Auschwitz along with 200 members of his congregation and 100 Jewish refugees from Northern Europe.
- "Anti-Nazi Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg dies on his way to internment at the Dachau, Germany, concentration camp.
- November 3-4: "The Germans undertake Erntefest (Harvest Festival), a planned massacre of Jews of three camps in the Lublin, Poland, area.
About 18,000 are murdered at Majdanek, 10,000 at Trawniki, and 15,000 at Poniatowa.
At Poniatowa, Jews who resist are burned alive in a barrack. - November 4: "The Germans put down an inmate revolt at the slave-labor camp at Szebnie, Poland.
The camp is liquidated; about 3,000 Jews are deported to Auschwitz. - November 6: "Five weeks after escaping from a work detail at the Babi Yar, Ukraine, mass-murder site, about 14 Jews and Soviet POWs come out of hiding to greet the Red Army as it liberates Kiev, Ukraine."
- Oneg Shabbat
"Driven by the urgency to document the inhumanity of the Nazi attack on the Jews of Warsaw, Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum (pictured, left) initiated an effort to collect and preserve a documentary record of life within the walls of the ghetto.
Under his leadership, a small group of writers, journalists, teachers, and students of history formed Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath Delight).
"This underground operation, code-named after the group's clandestine meetings on the Sabbath, created a secret archive chronicling the Jewish experience.
Ringelblum's team encouraged the writing of memoirs and diaries.
It collected underground materials such as ghetto newspapers, posters, announcements, photographs, and reports and statistics on the ghetto.
The team also recorded testimonials of refugees arriving in Warsaw from other ghettos and camps.
Ringelblum himself kept a diary of events. "Oneg Shabbat archivists attempted to transmit documentary evidence to the West, although they stored most archival materials in three sealed milk cans, buried in separate locations.
One can was discovered in 1946, another in 1950.
The third, reportedly containing information on the resistance, has still not been found.
Most members of the organization did not survive the deportations of 1942.
Ringelblum hid in non-Jewish Warsaw until arrested on March 7, 1944, whereupon he and his family were executed."
"A scale model of crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, built and sculpted in 1991 by artist Mieczyslaw Stobierski, depicts the processing of victims.
Individuals responsible for removing the bodies from the gas chambers, transporting them to the ovens, and burning the corpses were known as Sonderkommandos.
Those selected for these ghastly tasks were given extra rations and were treated better than the average inmate.
Every three or four months, the Sonderkommandos were sent to the gas chambers and processed precisely like the thousands of victims whom they had personally handled."
"Karl Lowenstein, a Jew, was the head of the ghetto guard in Theresienstadt, the "model camp" near Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Lowenstein enjoyed considerable power within the camp as the commander of some 400 young men.
He clashed frequently with the ghetto's council over the privileges accorded to him and his men.
Ultimately, Lowenstein's abuse of power led to his dismissal and imprisonment by the Nazi camp administration."
"The "Jewish Army," a French partisan group, operated from 1942 to 1944.
The group smuggled French Jews into neutral Spain, procured money to aid Jews in hiding, and participated in 1944 uprisings in Paris, Toulouse, and Lyon."
"Bernard Lichtenberg, the provost of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, was one of the few German clergymen to speak out against the Nazi regime.
He joined Archbishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Münster in opposing the "euthanasia" measures and openly prayed for the well- being of Jews.
Arrested by the Gestapo, Lichtenberg boldly proclaimed that he wished to join the Jews who had been deported.
His two years of imprisonment ruined his health, but that did not deter the Nazis from sending him to Dachau after his release from prison."
"U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt signs the UNRRA agreement in November 1943.
The UNRRA was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.
The agency was sponsored by the Allies but, during its five-year life span, was funded mostly by money from the United States.
Headed by former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the UNRRA was of great help to non-Jews and, secondarily, to Jews living in displaced-persons camps."