dirkdeklein

  • Originally posted on History of Sorts: October 5th,1942, was one of the darkest if not the darkest days of WWII for my hometown of Geleen, at the time it was a small mining town in the south east of the Netherlands, in the province of Limburg. Shortly after 21.30 the alarms sounded,warning the population of…

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  • Originally posted on History of Sorts: September 17,1944 saw the start of “Operation Market Garden” a failed allied operation during WWII, which had dire consequences for the Dutch population. However this blog is not about that but about the movie made about ‘Operation Market Garden@ a star studded movie made in 1977 directed by Richard Attenborough,…

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  • Letter to Henio

    The “Letters to Henio” project began in the city of Lublin in 2005 as part of an activity to preserve and reconstruct the city’s Jewish heritage. A local cultural center, Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre, organizes this educational activity. According to the center’s director, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, the main idea of the project is as follows:…

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  • I remember as a kid , my neighbor and I made our own bows and arrows, We used it to target practice on a spare door we had in the storage rooms in the basement of our apartment block. We bought the materials for these ‘weapons’  in a shop in the center of our town,Geleen,…

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  • I was in two minds on how to do this blog. Initially I was considering adding graphic pictures to accompany the text , but then I thought that the pictures may just be too horrific and it would turn people away from reading the text. Additionally there would be a chance that this blog would…

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  • Anyone who knows movies will know the name Charles Durning. He has starred in so many classic movies in a variety of genres, comedies, thrillers, musicals. Movies like “Dog day afternoon”, “The Choirboys” or “The best little whorehouse in Texas” the list is endless. Additionally he has also starred in a great number of TV…

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  • Around this time of year, many 17-year-old kids are getting ready for school exams. Although they may think it is unfair that they have to sit for hours and hours to do their exams(I know I thought it was unfair), they don’t actually realize how lucky they are. Education, although a basic human right, is…

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  • “Evil, I think, is the Absence of Empathy,” the title of this blog is a quote from Captain G. M. Gilbert after the Nuremberg trials. His appointment was as the prison psychologist of German prisoners. During the process of the Nuremberg trials, he became a confidant to several of the defendants, including Hermann Göring. Empathy…

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  • On March 10,1849, a 40 year old inventor filed  an application for a patent relating to an invention to lift boats over shoals and obstructions in a river. The patent was registered today 170 years ago on May 22,1849. The inventor was none other than Abraham Lincoln. “Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln, of…

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  • Many people believe that the industrialized scale killing of Jews, Homosexuals, Roma and others in Auschwitz started immediately when the camp had opened. However, for the first few weeks there were only 30 prisoners. On May 20,1940 the first 30 numbers were assigned to  German prisoners who had been designated as professional criminals. They were…

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