The trains left mainly for the ghettos of Litzmannstadt and Warsaw, from 1942 directly for the Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps.
Among them are Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor assigned to Auschwitz; Klaus Barbie, Gestapo Chief of Lyon; Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's assistant; and Amon Göth, who was sentenced to death and hanged for committing mass murder during the liquidations of the ghettos at Tarnów and Krakow, the camp at Szebnie and the Plaszow camp, portrayed in the film Schindler's List.
Jews constituted a vast majority after large numbers of them forcibly relocated in August and September 1943 from the ghettos of Kovno and Vilna in Lithuania and Salaspils in Latvia; smaller numbers were from Estonia, Russia and Romania.
Some of their songs are satires on stars like Louison Bobet, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Maria Callas, Jacques Chirac, Jodie Foster or deal with more serious topics like war: "Libannais raides", "Hiroshima"; drugs: "Le Manège enchanté", "Kaliman"; and misery: "LSD for Ethiopie", "In the Ghettos" — always with irony.
During the Second World War, the Nazi authorities solicited Shalit to sit on the Judenrat, the consultative committee designed by the occupiers and formed of prominent Jews from the city's two Jewish Ghettos.
The rude boy phenomenon had existed in the ska period, but was expressed more obviously during the rocksteady era in songs such as "Rude Boy Gone A Jail" by The Clarendonians; '"No Good Rudie" by Justin Hinds & the Dominoes; and "Don't Be A Rude Boy" by The Rulers. Crying was a theme in some rocksteady songs, such as Alton and the Flames' "Cry Tough", which urged Jamaicans in the ghettos to stay tough through the hard times.