March 2023
-
There is an Iron Maiden song that has the line, “Only the good die young, all the evil seem to live forever.” There was a time when I thought this to be true, but luckily this is not the case. Sometimes the good ones live a long time. Traute Lafrenz Page died ten days ago,
-
She was a maid and came from an NSB family. At the age of 18, she started working as a guard in Camp Vught. She was involved in the Bunker drama that took place on the night of 15 to 16 January 1944. From the end of 1944 to March 1945 she worked as a
-
The Dutch word for superstition is bijgeloof and, in a literal sense, translates into side belief or side religion. This sort of religion was the cause of the murder of Bridget Cleary on 15 March 1895. Bridget Cleary was an Irish woman who was murdered by her husband. She was either burned alive or immediately
-
The Holodomor comes from the term moryty holodom which translates as “death inflicted by starvation.” A man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet Republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. Millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims
-
The above photograph sent shivers down my spine. Not because it is a horrific image but because the opposite is true. Three young girls walk into town, pushing a pram. Why I find it so disturbing is—I know that street very well. I have walked the same route many times. In fact, all my Dutch
-
Rudolf Breslauer was born on 4 July 1903, in Leipzig, German Empire. He was a German Jewish director and cinematographer. He died on 28 February, 1945, in Auschwitz, a month after liberation. Westerbork Film is the title of a film made in 1944 at the Westerbork Transit Camp in the Netherlands. It was a transfer
-
An estimated 1,800 Dutch citizens attempted to escape to England during World War II. The majority chose to travel via neighbouring countries, while a minority went straight across the North Sea. Many different vessels were used and at least 204 people made the crossing successfully. Most of the attempts were made in 1941 when the
-
When you hear about football tragedies, you might think about something like Manchester United being beaten 7-0 by Liverpool, but not about a great number of casualties among supporters. Yet there have been dozens of football disasters with a great number of deaths. One I hadn’t heard of before is the Burnden Park disaster. Thirty-three
-
Heroes don’t always wear capes, or are dressed in uniforms, sometimes they are just ordinary people. I say ordinary but more often than not they are anything but ordinary, as was the case with Fredy Hirsch. I first heard of Fredy a few years ago. I got the book, The Librarian of Auschwitz, as a
History of Sorts 