Today located in north-western Slovakia, Žilina was a concentration camp from which tens of thousands of Slovak Jews were deported to concentration camps in German-occupied Poland between March and October of 1942. Most of the transports from Zilina went to Auschwitz or Lublin. The camp was liquidated in October 1942 and the remaining prisoners were transferred to labor camps at Sered or Novaky.
East Prussia refers to the region between Gdansk (Danzig) and Kaliningrad (Königsberg), in what is today Poland and Lithuania. Historically part of Prussian lands under German rule, following World War I East Prussia was divided between Germany, Poland, and Lithuania.
Site of a Jewish refugee settlement administered by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) under the umbrella of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Located on the site of an abandoned banana plantation, Sosúa was established as an agricultural community with the cooperation of General Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, who at the 1938 Evian Conference offered to accept as many as 100,000 Jewish refugees into his country. Ultimately, some 850 Jewish refugees settled in Sosúa.
An historical region located in southwestern Poland, near the borders with the Czech Republic and Germany. Prior to World War II, Upper Silesia had an ethnically diverse population with large communities of Poles and Germans, as well as Czechs and other minorities, including a flourishing Jewish community. The region was divided between Germany and Poland per decree of the League of Nations in 1921. An important industrial area, Upper Silesia had rich deposits of coal and other minerals, making it strategically important economically and critical to the German war effort. During the war, it was the location of numerous concentration camps including the Auschwitz camp system, and forced labor camps where prisoners worked in factories and mines under brutal conditions.
Israel became a state in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, declared that Israel would be a home for those Jews made homeless by the Holocaust, eliminating restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, and providing a haven for the millions of still-displaced Jews in post-war Europe.