On This Day in Holocaust History — September 25
1941—At Eišiškės—known in Yiddish as Eyshishok—German Einsatzkommando 3 and Lithuanian auxiliaries began the systematic murder of the town’s Jewish community.
Thousands of Jews had been confined for days without food, water, or proper sanitation. On September 25, the perpetrators selected groups of men and boys, marched them to the old Jewish cemetery, forced them to undress, and shot them into a mass grave. The following day, the women and children were murdered at a gravel pit.
German records listed 3,446 victims: 989 men, 1,636 women, and 821 children. In two days, a Jewish community that had existed for more than 250 years was virtually destroyed. The murdered residents of Eišiškės are commemorated through more than 1,000 prewar photographs in the “Tower of Faces” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1942—German forces and Ukrainian auxiliary police surrounded the ghetto at Korets—then in occupied Poland and today in Ukraine—for its final liquidation.
Before the operation, Moshe “Misha” Gildenman and a small group that included his son Simcha escaped into the forests with only a few weapons. They later formed a Jewish partisan group that attacked German installations and collaborators before joining a larger Soviet partisan formation.
As the liquidation began, Judenrat member Moshe Krasnostavski set fire to his house. The flames spread across the ghetto, forcing the attackers to withdraw temporarily and allowing some prisoners to escape through the smoke and confusion. Most were subsequently captured or betrayed. German forces and local auxiliaries murdered approximately 2,000 Jews near Korets during the liquidation.
The burning of the ghetto was not an act of surrender. It was a deliberate attempt to obstruct the killers and give others a chance to escape.
1942—A conference of Swiss federal and cantonal immigration officials opened in Montreux. Officials defended Switzerland’s existing policy that people fleeing solely because of “racial persecution”—meaning primarily Jews—were not to be considered political refugees.
The policy had been formally imposed in August, when Swiss authorities ordered that people fleeing “purely on racial grounds” be refused entry. Refugees turned back at the border faced arrest, deportation, and death in Nazi-controlled Europe. The policy was controversial even within Switzerland and was opposed by relief organizations, churches, members of the public, and some government officials.
1942—A transport of 1,000 Jews that had departed Drancy on September 23 arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the selection, approximately 475 deportees were sent directly to the gas chambers. Most of those selected for forced labor would also perish.
Among the deportees was René Blum, the Jewish journalist, art critic, and director of the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo. Blum was the younger brother of former French prime minister Léon Blum. Arrested with the assistance of French police in December 1941, René Blum had passed through several French internment camps before being deported.
Accounts indicate that he was identified upon arrival, separated from the other prisoners, tortured, and murdered. His fate demonstrates how Nazi persecution sought to destroy not only individual lives but also Europe’s cultural and intellectual world.
1942—Another train, Convoy 37, departed Drancy for Auschwitz carrying 1,004 Jews. Approximately 729 were Romanian Jews arrested in France, many during a roundup conducted by French police on German orders the previous day.
The transport also included children born in France. It reached Auschwitz on September 27, when hundreds of its passengers were murdered immediately in the gas chambers. The deportation shows the essential role played by French authorities in identifying, arresting, detaining, and delivering foreign Jews to Nazi Germany.
1942—German forces liquidated the ghetto at Kaluszyn, Poland. Abraham Gamzu, chairman of the Jewish Council, had refused to summon the community for supposed “resettlement.” The Germans executed him for refusing to assist in the deportation.
German gendarmes and Polish police surrounded the ghetto and assembled its prisoners in the marketplace. People unable to walk were shot in their homes, while others were murdered during the roundup or at the Jewish cemetery. Approximately 3,000 Jews were marched to the railway station at Mrozy, forced into freight cars, and deported to the Treblinka killing center.
Gamzu’s refusal was an act of moral resistance. Confronted with an order designed to make Jewish leaders participate in the destruction of their own communities, he refused—even though he knew the probable cost.
1942—German forces also began liquidating the ghettos around Łochów, Poland. Jews from Łochów, Łopianka, Baczki, Stoczek, and nearby communities were assembled for deportation to Treblinka.
Many refused to report and attempted to hide or escape. German gendarmes, Polish police, and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot Jews during the marches and roundups. When prisoners forced open a freight car and jumped from the moving deportation train, guards opened fire. The train reached Treblinka that evening.
1943—Soviet forces recaptured Smolensk after more than two years of German occupation. Liberation exposed a region devastated by Nazi occupation, forced labor, mass shootings, and the destruction of its Jewish communities.
Heinrich Himmler had ordered the liquidation of the remaining ghettos in the Baltic states and occupied Belarus on June 21, 1943, but the policy was implemented over several months.
By September, the ghettos of Lida and other communities were being destroyed and thousands of Jews were being deported to Sobibór and forced-labor camps. The Minsk Ghetto, however, continued to exist until October 21–23, when German forces murdered its remaining 3,000 to 6,000 prisoners in gas vans and mass shootings at Maly Trostinets.