In the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and the other members of the documentary group Oyneg Shabbos collected whatever they could to recount life in the ghetto; newspaper articles, erudite texts, even concert tickets and children’s drawings. When they learnt of the death at Chelmno of Jews from neighboring towns and from the Lodz ghetto at the end of 1941, they realized that the Nazis and their local auxiliaries had embarked on an operation of annihilation.
In mid-March 1942, the ghetto of Lublin was liquidated. After Belzec, the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka were put into service. From then on, the liquidation of the ghettos was systematic.
On 17 May 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich’s security services and organizer of the Final Solution, was fatally wounded in an attack in Prague. For Hitler and Himmler, the process of annihilation had to be accelerated and made more radical.

On 16 July 1942, in Paris, 12,884 French and foreign Jews were arrested and taken to the Vélodrome d'Hiver cycle track. Following an agreement made with the Germans, it was French police officers who carried out these roundups. At the insistence of Pierre Laval, the Vichy head of government, children and old people were also rounded up and deported too. The official propaganda continued to declare that this was to contribute to the creation of agricultural colonies in the east. But rumors began to circulate and people started to hide children so they could escape the deportations, which carried on until November 1944. In total, 40% of foreign Jews in France and 24,000 French Jews were deported.

Goebbels continued his propaganda campaign. In the Warsaw ghetto, wracked by typhus and hunger, his cameramen forced the inhabitants to take part in staged scenes designed to show the exploitation of Jews by other, more privileged Jews. Soon after, between July and September 1942, the Warsaw ghetto was brutally emptied by the Nazis. Some 265,000 people were deported to Treblinka, and 35,000 killed in the ghetto.

After the roundups of summer 1942, Ringelblum’s team continued to collect all documents possible. Everyone began writing and drawing to leave a trace and record the story of the annihilation of the ghetto. To make sure the Nazis did not get hold of them, they put all the documents in milk churns and in iron boxes and buried them in the streets of Warsaw.

Documentary: Annihilation EP5 Final Solution (2014)
Directed by: William Karel & Blanche Finger
Production: ZADIG PRODUCTIONS

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