dirkdeklein

  • Literally taking a break

    I am taking it a bit easy over the next few weeks. Reason being: I slipped on black ice yesterday and broke my fibula bone, it will take up to 6 weeks to heal, and I will also need surgery, because some ligaments got damaged too. I will be posting but not as often

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  • A First Kiss in the Annex

    Anne Frank and Peter van Pels’s first kiss is one of the most touching and human moments in Anne’s diary, The Diary of a Young Girl. This event unfolds during one of the most challenging periods of Anne’s life, and it provides a poignant glimpse into the emotional complexity of adolescence in the face of

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  • Desecrating Synagogues

    The Holocaust wasn’t only the mass murder of the European Jews and other groups, it was also desecrating places of worships, especially synagogues,. It was showing total contempt and disrespect for holy places. The above picture was taken on September 16,1944. It shows American and Canadian Jewish soldiers clear the synagogue in Maastricht , which

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  • Throughout history warning signs have been ignored over and over again. It is very important to keep history alive but it is even more important to learn from it, alas that is the one thing that is often forgotten. People often think that the warning signs of the Nazi regime were only there since 1933,others

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  • When a nation destroys its own culture it does a lot more than destroy the cultural fabric, it also destroys the soul of the nation, especially when it comes to the musical and cultural heritage. When it murders the artist who performs this cultural legacy, a part of that soul will be lost forever. Magda

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  • I probably could do a whole essay on how Guus van der Wijk and Mina de Vries met, and at some stage I probably will, but for now it suffices to say they were extremely brave people, in fact in my eyes they are heroes. Despite the knowledge that there was a great chance they

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  • The Republic of Ireland was and still is a neutral country but during WWII there were many Irish volunteers who fought with the allies against the Axis power.Like The first RAF bomber pilot to be shot down and killed in 1939 was Willie Murphy from Cork. His navigator, Larry Slattery, from Thurles, became the longest-serving ‘British’

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  • I pride myself to be a bit of a movie buff, but to my amazement I had never heard of this Oscar nominated and ‘Photo Play-Medal of Honor’ winner. Today marks his 140th birthday. He has been credited for directing at least 124 movies and shorts, which is an amazing feat by any measure. Herbert

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  • On January 14,1942  U123 surfaced so close to New York Harbor that the rides at Coney Island could be seen silhouetted against the evening sky. Captain Reinhard Hardegen expected the U.S. east coast to be blacked out after more than a month at war and was surprised to see the glow in the sky from

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  • Statistics often make me uneasy. Stripped of context, they can be twisted to tell a misleading story—and it frequently is. Yet, there are moments when numbers, stark and raw, help us grasp the scale of events too vast for words alone. It is one of those moments. Between July 15, 1942, and September 13, 1944,

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