in the forests near Vilna. Lithuanians assist the Germans in the
murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Kovno and Slobodka.
Heydrich is appointed by Goering to carry out the Final Solution.
September 1941—In the ravine of Babi Yar outside Kiev, 34,771
Jews are killed by Germans and Ukrainians. The first gassing
experiments are conducted at Auschwitz.
October 1941—Nazis open Auschwitz II (Birkenau) death camp
and Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.
December 1941—Japanese attack United States fleet at Pearl
Harbor. United States declares war on Japan; Germany and Italy
declare war on the United States.
1942
January 1942—Wannsee Conference: A plan to annihilate all
eleven million European Jews is drafted. Hitler speaks at the
Sports Palace in Berlin, declaring that “the war will end with the
complete annihilation of the Jews.”
February 1942—The Struma, a derelict ship with seven hundred
sixty-nine Romanian Jewish refugees on their way to Israel, is left
adrift in the Black Sea and torpedoed by a Russian submarine
whose crew suspects it was a German vessel. One person survives.
March 1942—One thousand Jews in the Theresienstadt camp are
deported to the new Belzec death camp; only six will survive the
war. In the following months, another forty-one thousand follow
in their footsteps. Ten Jews are hanged in Zdunsk Wola near Lodz
as substitutes for “the ten hanged sons of Haman.” The Jews of
Lublin are deported to Belzec for extermination. The Jews of
France and Slovakia are deported to Auschwitz.
April 1942—Einsatzkommando unit reports that more than ninety
48 | Never Again: A Holocast Remembered