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1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 392 
 
This title page of the Yugent-Shtime (Yiddish for Young Voice) portrays a hand crushing the symbol of Nazi oppression, the swastika. Typed and duplicated in secret within the Warsaw Ghetto, the paper--the organ of the Bund's youth movement--reached hundreds of people. Its writers and readers faced death if caught.
Photo: Beth Hatefutsoth
The Donau steams with its cargo of Jews from Norway to Germany. In November 1942 the ship sailed with 532 Jews aboard, 346 of whom were killed as soon as they reached Auschwitz. Of the 763 Jews deported from Norway, on the Donau and on the Monte Rosa, only 24 survived the war. Meanwhile, some 900 Jews evaded deportation by fleeing to neutral Sweden. While the Norwegian church protested the deportations, puppet leader Vidkun Quisling aided the Nazis in making Norway "Jew free."
Photo: Oscar Mendelsohn / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
Fate of Norwegian Jews

Numbering fewer than 2000 when Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, Norway's Jews seemed an unlikely target for the "Final Solution" as 1942 began, because ships, which were scarce, would be required to send them to Nazi killing centers in Poland. That autumn, however, the German Navy made shipping available. On November 26, 532 Norwegian Jews--including children, the elderly, and ill persons taken from hospitals--were deported from Oslo aboard the Donau.

Rough seas delayed the dismally packed ship's arrival at the port of Stettin, Germany. The Norwegian Jews were then sent by rail to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They arrived at night on December 1. A selection process sent 346 of them to the gas chambers immediately. The remaining 186 were spared for labor, but within four months only about 20 were still alive. Fewer still survived the Holocaust.

In this relatively remote part of Europe, the Final Solution was quite thorough. In all, 763 Jews were deported from Norway. Only 24 returned. Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 45 percent of the Norwegian Jews. By comparison, 80 percent of Jews in both France and Italy survived.

 November 27, 1942-August 1943: More than 110,000 Poles are expelled from their homes in the fertile Zamosc province so that the area can be resettled by ethnic Germans, SS troops, and Ukrainians. More than 300 villages are affected. Thousands of Polish children are deported from the area to Belzec and other death camps.
 November-early December 1942: Members of the ZOB in Kraków, Poland, disrupt rail lines and assassinate a German soldier, a German policeman, a German flier, two Gestapo agents, and a senior German clerk in the local Nazi administration.
 December 1942: Members of the Siemiatycze (Poland) Group of Jewish resisters kill a Polish peasant and his entire family as retribution for the peasant's capture and betrayal to the Nazis of three Jews.
 
1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 392 
The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.