1078 Ch. 26 • World War 11

Jews being massacred in Lithuania, 1942.

The fascist states of Croatia and Romania, both Germany’s allies, car­
ried out the mass murder of Jews themselves. The Romanian government
killed 300,000 Jews in the provinces that the Soviets had occupied in 1940,
but few in what the Romanians considered the heartland of the country. In
Lithuania, Ukraine, and, to a lesser extent, Poland, there were many cases
of local populations massacring Jews.
Some people protected the Jews. A small French town took in Jewish
children, producing identity cards for them that made them family mem­
bers. In Marseille, Varian Fry, an American editor, journalist, and member
of the American Refugee Committee, relentlessly planned escape routes,
purchased tickets, and, where possible, obtained transit and other visas
and found sponsors for about 1,000 Jews early in the war, including the
painter Marc Chagall and the poet Andre Breton. A Warsaw woman res­
cued 2,500 children from the city’s Jewish ghetto. In Amsterdam, Chris­
tians brought food and other supplies to a German Jewish family, hidden in
a secret annex apartment in the father’s office building for several years. In
her resolutely cheerful diary, the young Anne Frank described her family’s
hiding place as “a paradise compared with how' other Jews who are not in
hiding must be living.” It frightened her to think of her friends who had
fallen into the clutches of “the crudest brutes that walk the earth.” Sev­

eral months after her fourteenth birthday, Nazi soldiers discovered Frank’s
family. She and her family were deported to Auschwitz. Frank died in the
death camp of Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945.
In Denmark, most of the Jewish population was saved in October 1943.
When word came that the German occupying forces were preparing to