Bialystok Judenrat

... No one wanted to believe the worst. After all, peo- ple thought, the Judenrat in Bialystok had thus far en- joyed modest success in restraining the Nazi savagery. Perhaps the council would be able ultimately to save the ghetto inmates. As it turned out, several of the Judenrat members secretly knew that the Nazis were making preperations to deport the Jews out of the ghetto. In fact, the Judenrat, from the very beginning of its existence, tried to delay this grim finale. But nothing could stand in the way of Hitler’s maniacal plan to exterminate the Jews, even those who had been forced to give up their last bit of energy to support the Third Reich and its war machine.