Despite minimal support and even antisemitic hostility from the surrounding population, thousands of Jews battled the Germans in eastern Europe. Resistance units emerged in over 100 ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. Jews resisted when the Germans attempted to establish ghettos in a number of small towns in eastern Poland in 1942. Revolts took place in Starodubsk, Kletsk, Lachva, Mir, Tuchin, and several other towns.

WHAT WE STAND FOR: Auschwitz played a significant role in Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” to its self-imposed and imagined “Jewish Problem.”: The Final Solution sought nothing less than the wholesale murder of the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe as well as in areas assumed to be conquered later. According to the United States Holocaust Museum, up to six million Jews were killed before the end of the Second World War. The Nazis murdered 1,100,000 of these Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz II- Birkenau.

The Holocaust did not begin with mass killings. It began with the rhetoric of hate. In the first year of Auschwitz's (@AuschwitzMuseum) existence most of the prisoners’ rooms had no beds or any other furniture. The inmates slept on paillasses laid out on the floor, which at reveille they had to stack up in the corner, and lay them out again in the evening.