dirkdeklein

  • In 1944, a little Jewish girl named Elianne Muller wore this dress made of parachute material – dyed orange – during the Liberation celebration that took place in the village of Neerkant in the Dutch province of Brabant. It went beautifully with her reddish curls. The family Tijssen, Peter and Maria Tijssen had 11 children,…

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  • The world has gone crazy honouring ‘Heroes’ whose only achievement is being famous for the sake of being famous. It is time to start honouring the real heroes again. The men and women who sacrificed their lives so that we can live in freedom. Cpl. Patrick Mazzie, who is buried in Netherlands American Cemetery, died…

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  • Ironically Camp Westerbork had been set up in 1939 to house Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Nazis took over the camp and turned it into a deportation camp. From this camp, there was a deportation of 101,000 Dutch Jews and about 5,000 German…

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  • A RING FOR ROZA

    After their hiding place was betrayed, Roza and Siem Vos were deported via Westerbork to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp in Poland on 3 March 1944. They were immediately separated from each other. Siem ended up in the men’s camp and Roza in the women’s camp. Contact with each other was basically impossible. Despite the appalling…

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  • Gottschalk, the son of a physician, was born in the small town of Calau, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, on April 10 1904. He attended the Gymnasium high school in Cottbus and from 1924 worked for four years on seagoing vessels. He later began an theatrical education in Cottbus and Berlin. During an engagement…

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  • Winston Churchill (November 10, 1871 – March 12, 1947) was an American best selling novelist of the early 20th century. He is nowadays overshadowed, even as a writer, by the  much more famous British statesman of the same name, with whom he was acquainted, but not related. Their lives had some interesting parallels. Churchill was…

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  • It was the New York police commissioner who would nickname brothers Anthony and William Esposito ‘the mad dog killers,’ a description that would catch on in the press. On Jan. 14, 1941, the Esposito brothers held up office manager Alfred Klausman for the $649 payroll he was carrying, shooting and killing him in the elevator…

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  • This is a Friday the 13th story with a positive twist, on top of that it is one of those rare positive Holocaust events. On Friday, the 13th of April, 1945. A few miles northwest of Magdeburg there was a railroad siding in wooded ravine not far from the Elbe River. Major Clarence L. Benjamin in…

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  • On March 4, 1942, two Kawanishi H8K “Emily” flying boats embarked on Operation K, flying the longest distance ever undertaken by a two-plane bombing mission to that point. The planes refueled at an atoll 500 miles from Hawaii and then launched to drop their bombs on Pearl Harbor. Due to extensive cloud cover and confusion…

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  • Café de Paris is a London nightclub, located in the West End, beside Leicester Square on Coventry Street, Piccadilly. It opened in 1924 and subsequently featured such performers as Dorothy Dandridge, Marlene Dietrich, Harry Gold, Harry Roy, Ken Snakehips Johnson and Maxine Cooper Gomberg.Louise Brooks made history when she worked there in December 1924, introducing…

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