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1944: Desperate Acts
 pg. 524 
 
Carefully arranged and stored, these sets of china had once been the pride of Jewish families in Prague, Czechoslovakia. They formed part of a massive collection of goods, including books and furniture, plundered by the Nazis from one of Europe's most renowned Jewish communities, and intended as part of a collection in the proposed Central Museum of the Extinguished Jewish Race. Sadly, the goods outlived many of their owners.
Photo: Yad Vashem
Three Jewish men move an elderly Jewish woman to a gas chamber at Auschwitz. The men probably did this in order to avoid a violent response from the SS guards pictured in the background. Many Jews clung to the hope, right up to the end, that what they had heard about Auschwitz was untrue.
Photo: Yad Vashem/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
SS Major Christian Wirth initiated the use of poison gas to kill "euthanasia" victims. He administered the Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibór death camps. At Belzec, he held up a large can full of teeth taken from murdered Jews. "See for yourself the weight of that gold!" he boasted. "It's only from yesterday and the day before. You can't imagine what we find every day--dollars, diamonds, gold!" Later in the war he was put in charge of the Italian concentration camp La Risiera di San Sabba, where he arranged 22 transports of deportees to Auschwitz. He was killed by Italian partisans near Fiume, Yugoslavia, in May 1944.
Photo: Yad Vashem
 May 1944: Many Jews are among the Polish and Allied troops at the Monte Cassino abbey in Cassino, Italy.
 May 1944: The Jewish ghetto at Lódz, Poland, is liquidated.
 May 1944: As mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to death camps begin, hundreds of Hungarian Jews at Sátoraljaújhely and Miskolc are shot after refusing to board trains destined for Auschwitz.
 May 1944: 33,000 Jews from Munkács, Hungary, are killed at Auschwitz.
 May 3, 1944: At Gleiwitz, Poland, near Auschwitz, Germans open a slave-labor plant for production of "black smoke" for use in smoke screens.
 
1944: Desperate Acts
 pg. 524 
The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.