History of Sorts

Pip: History of Sorts is the kind of site that looks at a photograph of a selection ramp and refuses to let you scroll past — dirkdeklein has been doing that work, post after post, this week.

Mara: The posts cover a lot of ground: the machinery of the camps themselves, the perpetrators and collaborators who kept it running, and the longer aftermath — how trauma echoes, how memory holds, and how justice sometimes doesn't arrive at all. Let's start with the camps and what happened inside them.

Music, selections, and the machinery of the camps

Pip: The question at the center of several posts this week is how ordinary things — music, paperwork, a photograph — got absorbed into the killing system, and what that absorption did to the people caught inside it.

Mara: The post on music as torture opens with Primo Levi's account from Auschwitz-Birkenau: "The tunes are few, a dozen, and the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards."

Pip: So the music wasn't incidental — it was the texture of the dehumanization itself. Familiar melodies turned into instruments of psychological destruction, permanently fused to the memory of suffering.

Mara: Trumpeter Herman Sachnowitz described playing during executions at Monowitz. Erika Rothschild recalled a band performing folk music as people were sorted on arrival — some into the camp, others directly to the crematorium. At Buchenwald, forced mass singing at evening roll call gave guards a pretext to punish anyone who sang too softly.

Pip: And yet the Buchenwald Song became something the prisoners quietly reclaimed — singing "Then once will come the day when we are free" as a form of resistance, right under the SS officers' noses.

Mara: The post on Action 14f13 traces a parallel structure: the bureaucratic program that sent concentration camp prisoners deemed unfit to work to killing centers like Hartheim. An estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people were murdered under it, bridging the earlier T4 euthanasia program directly to the industrialized genocide that followed.

Pip: The post on Selection focuses on a single photograph from Auschwitz-Birkenau — a woman holding a baby at the front of the left-hand line, a young boy behind her, both looking toward the other line where their family presumably stood.

Mara: The Izbica Ghetto post documents how that sorting logic operated at scale: Izbica functioned as the largest transit ghetto in the Lublin Reservation, funneling Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to Bełżec and Sobibór. Of its prewar Jewish population — over ninety percent of the town — only fourteen people are known to have survived.

Pip: The Westerbork Film post adds a visual dimension: Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish photographer interned at the camp, was ordered by the commandant to film daily life. His footage of Settela Steinbach — a Sinti girl filmed moments before her railcar door was bolted — became one of the Holocaust's most recognized images. Breslauer himself died a month after Auschwitz's liberation.

Mara: The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz, covered in a separate post, were 728 Polish men from Tarnów — political prisoners, intellectuals, priests — deported on June 14, 1940. The camp was not yet a death camp; it became one because, as the post puts it, "a system of dehumanization and violence was allowed to evolve unchecked."

Pip: Behind the Star collects photographs of Dutch Jews forced to wear the yellow star from May 1942 — a boxer, a couple on their wedding day, an eight-year-old girl murdered at Sobibor. Each image is a name, a date, a life.

Mara: And the post on the Polish Blue Police examines the force of Polish officers who, under German command, patrolled ghetto boundaries, assisted in deportations, and sometimes hunted Jews in hiding — while others within the same force quietly aided the resistance. The moral complexity, the post argues, is inseparable from understanding what occupation actually required of people.

Pip: The Crimean Tartars post extends that frame beyond the Holocaust: in May 1944, Stalin ordered the mass deportation of over two hundred thousand Crimean Tartars on a collective accusation of collaboration — tens of thousands died in transit or exile, and the Soviet state spent decades trying to erase them from the historical record.

Mara: Anne Frank's schoolmates — Jacqueline van Maarsen, Nanette Blitz Konig, Sanne Ledermann, and Ilse Wagner — put individual faces on what the system consumed. Nanette encountered Anne through a barbed-wire fence at Bergen-Belsen shortly before Anne died. Sanne and Ilse did not survive. The post on Insult After Liberation closes the loop with Howard Cwick's testimony: a Jewish American soldier who helped liberate Buchenwald, then faced antisemitism from within his own unit.

Mara: The Technology and Holocaust post traces how Philips saved 382 Jewish employees at Camp Vught by declaring them indispensable — while its factory simultaneously contributed to the German war effort. That double role, the post notes, was the reality of survival under occupation.

Pip: From the camps themselves, the question of who enabled them — and who pushed back — runs through everything else this week.

Collaborators, perpetrators, and those who resisted

Pip: The posts in this cluster ask a hard question: what made someone a perpetrator, a collaborator, or — occasionally — something else?

Mara: The Dutch Nazis and the Holocaust in Limburg post quotes a directive from Reinhard Heydrich on so-called self-cleansing actions: "No obstacles should be made for the efforts aimed at self-cleaning among anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories. To the contrary, they should be instigated without leaving a trace."

Pip: That's the permission structure. The post on Gottlieb Hering — commandant of the Bełżec extermination camp, where six hundred thousand people were murdered — shows what it looked like in practice: a survivor's testimony describes him arriving on horseback when the gassing engine failed, refusing to remove the people already inside, and letting them die slowly while he raged.

Mara: The Kielce Pogrom post documents violence that happened fourteen months after the war ended — forty-two Jewish Holocaust survivors killed by Polish civilians, soldiers, and police in July 1946, sparked by a child's lie about a kidnapping. The Dance of a Mother follows Catharina Brücker, who survived Westerbork and Theresienstadt partly by performing in camp cabaret — and whose life was spared when Adolf Eichmann, in the audience one night, kept a promise. The Girl with the Red Hair covers the Dutch resistance fighters Hannie Schaft, Truus, and Freddie Oversteegen, teenagers who chose active opposition. Peter Stumpp is the post that sits slightly apart — a sixteenth-century case of alleged werewolfery and serial killing in the Rhineland, included as a study in how societies construct monsters.

Pip: The through-line is that the machinery needed people at every level — and some of those people found ways, small or large, to refuse it. That refusal is what the next segment keeps returning to.

Grief, memory, and what endures

Pip: The final cluster of posts is about what survives after the fact — in testimony, in art, in the refusal to let a crime be called something smaller than it was.

Mara: The MH17 post publishes the full passenger manifest — all 298 names — and states plainly: "Each passing day where justice isn't served, we are betraying the 298 victims." Twelve years on, no one has been brought to justice.

Pip: Words from Diaries collects entries from Holocaust diarists — Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Etty Hillesum, Renia Spiegel, and others. Hillesum, writing from Westerbork in September 1943, said: "I want to be the thinking heart of these barracks. I want to be the voice that speaks even when everything else falls silent."

Mara: That impulse — to speak, to record, to resist erasure — runs through A Cello With One String, about Dutch entertainer Abraham Bueno de Mesquita, whose ability to play even a one-string cello at the Dossin Barracks in Mechelen kept him off a transport to Auschwitz. He survived, became a television star, and wrote a memoir.

Pip: The Day the Clown Cried covers Jerry Lewis's 1972 film about a clown who leads Jewish children to the gas chambers — a movie so misjudged, by Lewis's own account, that he kept it locked away for decades. Karl Rauscher's Journey offers a Luftwaffe photographer's images of occupied Europe — Greece, Romania, Amsterdam — a view of the war from inside the apparatus that made everything else in this episode possible. Santa Ana Winds is a brief detour: a conversation with Jim Peterik about a Survivor track that has nothing to do with the Holocaust, included as a reminder that the site holds more than one kind of memory. And Sada Abe examines a 1936 Japanese murder case that became a national mirror — a story the post argues endures because it forces confrontation with how societies transform individuals into symbols.

Mara: What connects them is the question of what we do with the record — whether we look at it, preserve it, or let it be buried.

Pip: Music that becomes a weapon. A photograph taken on orders. A name on a manifest. The record keeps insisting on being read.

Mara: And the posts keep insisting that reading it carefully — all of it, including the parts that are uncomfortable — is the only way any of it means something. More next time.