I did do a blog on Marcel Marceau about 2 years ago but he would have been 100 today. Therefore I thought it to be appropriate to do another tribute to this silent Hero.
He survived the Nazi occupation, and saved many children in WWII. He was regarded for his peerless style pantomime, moving audiences without uttering a single word, and was known to the World as a “master of silence.”
Marcel Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, to a Jewish family. His father, Charles Mangel, was a kosher butcher originally from Będzin, Poland. His mother, Anne Werzberg, came from Yabluniv, present-day Ukraine.
At the beginning of the Second World War, he had to hide his Jewish origin and changed his name to Marceau, when his Jewish family was forced to flee their home. His father was deported to Auschwitz, where he was…
Ciaran was first elected to Dublin City Council in 1991. Back then he campaigned for a light rail system for Dublin, and for greater protection for Dublin’s heritage. Since then, He has served as a TD (Irish MP)for Dún Laoghaire, a Minister of State with responsibility for Climate Action, and a councillor for Dublin’s North Inner City. He sits on the European Parliament’s TRAN( Transport and Tourism)and ITRE( Industry, Research and Energy) committees, and is president of EUFORES(European Forum for Renewable Energy sources). He trained as an architect and urban planner at UCD and the LSE, and he set up a MSc Programme in Urban Regeneration and Development at the Technical University of Dublin (TU Dublin). He grew up in Shankill, and now lives in Stoneybatter with his family. He is proud to serves as Dublin’s Green MEP (Member of European Parliament)for the term 2019-2024.
On 3 October 1934, George van den Bergh, one of the initiators of the Jewish Work Village, stated, “Then perhaps a simple stone will be placed here with the words ‘Here stood the Jewish Work Village Nieuwesluis.’ Then may all passers-by […] behold that stone with reverence,” after that, James McDonald, High Commissioner of the League of Nations for refugees, drove the first pile for the Jewish Work Village. It was a training institute for Jews fleeing Nazi terror in Germany and Austria. The Jewish pioneers would train as farmers, furniture makers, blacksmiths or other practical professions. With training, they could start new lives in Israel or other places in the world. Many residents of the Work Village succeeded, but for some, it ended badly.
The village was opened in 1934 and was managed by the Jewish Labor Foundation. It could house approximately 300 residents, who would follow a short, two-year course.
In 1937, the pupils of the Joods Werkdorp built the community building themselves after a design by the architects Bromberg and Klein. This is how they put their acquired knowledge into practice. The building was a cross between a school building and a Wieringermeer farm. In 1939, the dars( a space in a farmhouse that runs from front to back, sometimes from side to side) were sacrificed for an extra dining room and a dishwashing room. This division has remained intact over the years. The school for mechanical agriculture, part of the Oostwaardhoeve experimental farm, left no visible traces in the post-war period.
After the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, the village was evacuated on 20 March 1941, except for about 60 stragglers. W. Lages and Claus Barbie were involved.
From August 1940 until the evacuation in March 1941, Abel Herzberg was director of the Jewish Work Village in Wieringermeer. Herzberg and his wife and three children were on the so-called Frederikslist and therefore enjoyed a certain protection.
Between 1934 and 1941, 780 people passed through the Work Village and of those, 197 were eventually murdered.
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I am a member of several history websites and I get daily notifications abut events that happened in history this day. Today I got the notification that on this day in 1945 Anne Frank died in Bergen Belsen
I don’t know how they got to that conclusion because the exact date Anne and Margot Frank death is not known. But this is that forgotten tragedy of their deaths their family like Otto Frank and the girls’ Aunt Leni Frank Elias did not have a date where they could remember the death of the 2 girls, and maybe light a candle for them. Nor would they have a date where they could say a specific prayer.
Luckily Leni Frank-Elias moved to Basel. in Switzerland in the 1930s together with her husband and her sons Stephan and Bernhard(Bernd)aka Buddy.
Anne Frank clearly was very fond of her cousin Bernhard
Sophie is the girl on the left in the above picture. It would have been her 90th birthday today. She was born on March 16, 1932 in Amersfoort. She was transferred via Kamp Vught to Camp Westerbork on 23 May 1943. There were another 1172 people on that transport. 1171 Jewish Dutch citizens and one other, possibly a Roma or resistance fighter.
This is the age breakdown of that transport.
From Westerbork,Sophie and her family were deported to Sobibor on 8 June 1943 – with transport number 68. It was transport 68 from Westerbork but it was Transport 15 to Sobibor. On June 8, 1943, the 15th train left from Westerbork to Sobibor. On this train, there were 3017 persons. It was the train of the notorious Children’s Transport. The lives of all 3017 men, women and children aboard this 15th transport, ended in Sobibor on the 11th of June…
Every time I see a picture of a sweet little angel like this, I feel like giving up on the research and reporting on the Holocaust I do. I get an overwhelming feeling of anguish, panic, anger and confusion, and I can feel physical pain.
It feels like someone just ripped out my heart. Then I remember I am not doing this for me but for them. If I will not tell their story, who will? What sickens me most is that I have these feelings 80 years after the murder of Mirjam. Why didn’t those responsible for her death didn’t have any of those feelings? Even if they had just one, Mirjam would still be alive today.
Mirjam Lewkowicz was born in Gouda, one of the most picturesque towns in the Netherlands, on 14 October 1940. Murdered in Auschwitz on 17 September 1943, she had reached the age of two years old.
How could anyone look into those eyes, and they must have seen them, and think that this little angel was a threat to their lives or a danger to their nations? How?
Dear Mirjam,
My fingers are getting wet because of the tears on my keyboard, tears that fell for you.
It is difficult for me to comprehend your murder. It makes no sense to me. You were born in Gouda, a place famous for its cheese, but I want to make it famous because it is where Mirjam Lewkowicz was born.
Your mother, Bettina, father, Herbert, and your six-month-old brother Hugo, who would have been celebrating his 80th birthday today, faced deportation to Auschwitz, where a gas chamber took the lives of your mother, brother and yourself.
I sincerely hope your story will ensure we never forget how evil mankind can be, or should I say man-cruel?
I never met you, yet your story has moved me. I am not the only one who has never met you. How could they, you were murdered when you were 6 days old.
There are no baby pictures.
There are no baby footprints.
There are no baby shoes.
Six days were all that you were allowed to live. The only evidence that you ever existed is a registration card, which tells us you were born on 12 March 1943, in Westerbork and that you died six days later on 18 March, also in Westerbork. You were cremated the same day.
You did not just die, you were murdered.
A cruel regime did not care for you, you were not seen as a human being. even though your hands had 10 fingers and your feet had 10 toes. You were a human being just like me or those who killed you. It was their sick and twisted ideology that only allowed you to live for six days.
You were born on a Friday and murdered on a Thursday.
Saint Patrick’s Day, a public holiday in Ireland, Montserrat and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, widely celebrated in the English-speaking world and to a lesser degree in other parts of the world.
But who exactly was he?
Early in the 5th century, an Irish ship beat against the waves along the western coast of Great Britain. On the far edge of the crumbling Roman Empire, a band of Irish marauders crept into a secluded cove and raided the village of Bannavem Taburniae.
Among the plunder captured by the band of warriors dispatched by Ireland’s King Niall of the Nine Hostages was a 16-year-old boy named Maewyn Succat. Who would later become known as St Patrick.
Saint Patrick’s real name was probably Maewyn Succat. His father, Calpornius, was a Roman-British army officer and a deacon. Despite his father’s involvement in the church, Maewyn Succat did not, at first, follow suit. He was not a believer. In fact, until the age of 16, his life was unexceptional.
According to his autobiography Confessio, for the next six years, he was kept in prison in the north of the island of Ireland. Here he worked as a herdsman tending to sheep and pigs, on Mount Slemish, in County Antrim.
It was during this time that Maewyn Succat found religion. He believed that his kidnapping and enslavement were punishment for his lack of belief.
He spent a great deal of time in prayer. Eventually, he had a vision that saw him as a stowaway on a boat back to Britain. He soon escaped and was reunited with his family. Back in Britain and safe from his captors, Maewyn Succat had a vision that the people of Ireland were calling him back to minister to them about God. However, he did not feel prepared.
He traveled to France where he trained in a monastery, possibly under Saint Germain, the Bishop of Auxerre. He dedicated his life to learning.Twelve years later, he returned to Irish shores as a Bishop, sent with the Pope’s blessing.
In his autobiography, The Confessio, he tells of a dream, after his return to Britain, in which one Victoricus delivered him a letter headed, “The Voice of the Irish.” As he read it, he seemed to hear a certain company of Irish beseeching him to walk once more among them. “Deeply moved,” he says, “I could read no more.” Nevertheless, because of the shortcomings of his education, he was reluctant for a long time to respond to the call. Even on the eve of re-embarkation for Ireland he was beset by doubts of his fitness for the task. Once in the field, however, his hesitations vanished. Utterly confident in the Lord, he journeyed far and wide, baptizing and confirming with untiring zeal. In diplomatic fashion he brought gifts to a kinglet here and a lawgiver there but accepted none from any. On at least one occasion, he was cast into chains. On another, he addressed with lyrical pathos a last farewell to his converts who had been slain or kidnapped by the soldiers of Coroticus.
Careful to deal fairly with the non-Christian Irish, he nevertheless lived in constant danger of martyrdom. The evocation of such incidents of what he called his “laborious episcopate” was his reply to a charge, to his great grief endorsed by his ecclesiastical superiors in Britain, that he had originally sought office for the sake of office. In point of fact, he was a most humble-minded man, pouring forth a continuous paean of thanks to his Maker for having chosen him as the instrument whereby multitudes who had worshipped “idols and unclean things” had become “the people of God.”
Before the end of the 7th century, St. Patrick had become a legendary figure, and the legends have continued to grow. One of these would have it that he drove the snakes of Ireland into the sea to their destruction. Patrick himself wrote that he raised people from the dead, and a 12th-century hagiography places this number at 33 men, some of whom are said to have been deceased for many years. He also reportedly prayed for the provision of food for hungry sailors traveling by land through a desolate area, and a herd of swine miraculously appeared.
Another legend, probably the most popular, is that of the shamrock, which has him explain the concept of the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God, to an unbeliever by showing him the three-leaved plant with one stalk. Traditionally, Irishmen have worn shamrocks, the national flower of Ireland, in their lapels on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.
History of Sorts 
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