In fewer than five years, more than one million men, women, and children--the vast majority Jewish--will be murdered, mostly by gas, at the Auschwitz camp complex, which includes Birkenau, Monowitz, Buna, and other subcamps.
The Sobibor extermination camp is established as part of Operation "Reinhard." By early May 1942, Jews deported from ghettos in the Lublin district are murdered in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas. Close to 170,000 Jews are murdered in Sobibor in about eighteen months of its operation.
Nazi occupiers and French collaborators begin to deport French Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, and Majadenek.
At the urging of Zionist activist Abba Kovner, an alliance of Zionist and Jewish Communist youths take up armed resistance against Nazi forces and their collaborators in the Vilna ghetto.
The Jewish underground in the Vilna ghetto issues a manifesto declaring armed resistance against the Nazis and their collaborators. Abba Kovner, a leader of the underground, issues the call to resistance. Kovner later becomes one of Israel's most famous Hebrew poets.