The year was 1943 and World War II raged on. In Leningrad, there was finally a break in the siege of that city as the Red Army opened a land passage that would allow food and fuel to the starving and freezing citizens who had been trapped in the city since September of 1941. The siege wouldn’t officially end until January of 1944 (900 days after it began) and by then an estimated 632,000 people had died of disease, starvation, and the extremely cold winters.
In March and April of 1941, Jewish people in and around Krakow were rounded up and moved into a ghetto in the Podgorze district of Krakow. 20,000 Jews were confined to an area that had previously only housed 3,000. Illness and hunger took its toll on the ghetto inhabitants, and in subsequent years mass transportations to death camps began. Finally in March of 1943, the remainder of the population was either killed on the spot or shipped to death camps. The Krakow Ghetto was completely wiped out.Â
In the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, reports of the death camps were trickling in, and in January residents fired on German troops who were trying to deport another group of Jews. This initial resistance was successful and inspired the fighters, but in April German troops returned a final time. Although they were able to hold off the German troops for nearly a month, eventually they were unsuccessful. 7,000 Jews were killed there. Another 56,000 were deported to meet their fate in death camps.
In Germany, a smaller resistance was coming to an end. Five students and one professor at the University of Munich were opposed the Nazi regime and secretly began printing and distributing leaflets under the name The White Rose in 1942. The leaflets encouraged the German people to rise up against the Nazis. Copies were widely circulated, and eventually three of the students, Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst were arrested by the Gestapo. They were immediately tried, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death. They were beheaded the same day. The remaining three were also caught a short time later and met the same fate. One of the leaflets reportedly was smuggled out of Germany, retitled “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich,” and dropped by Allied planes over Germany.
The invasion of Sicily in 1943 was the first step in taking Italy out of the war and led to Mussolini’s removal from the Italian government.Â Following Mussolini’s ousting, the new Italian government aligned itself with the Allies in September, but the Campaign for Italy would not be over until April of 1945.Â
In the United States, with more and more men being pulled from the workforce to fight in the European and Pacific Theaters, unemployment was down and the need for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was gone; in June of 1943 the program ended. Since its inception in 1935, the WPA provided work for 8.5 million people (and records to many genealogists).
On the home front, rationing extended beyond food to clothing, shoes, fuel, and tires. Women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men, although mothers were encouraged to remain at home and care for their children. They planted victory gardens to reduce the need for canned produce and found other ways to make ends meet for their families.Â