Amsterdam

  • A Poem for Judic Vischjager

    (November 22, 1934 – November 13, 1942) In Amsterdam’s streets, a child once played,Laughter as bright as the morning’s arrayed.Judic, a girl with dreams untold,It’s a story cut short in a world gone cold. Born to life on a November morn,In a city where beauty and strife were sworn.The cobbled paths knew her tiny feet,Her

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  • Eve Simons was born on November 16, 1939, in Amsterdam; the picture above is of the announcement of her birth in a local newspaper by her parents. Less than three years later, Eve was murdered in Auschwitz. For Eve and the light that could not stay In Amsterdam, on a chilly morn,A fragile star, young

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  • I will never forget the moment my wife told me we were expecting our first child. It was pure magic. Bringing new life into the world is a sacred, joyful moment that every expecting parent should be able to cherish—free from fear, focused only on the health and future of their baby. My thoughts drift

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  • They are back

    Below are the translated lyrics of a Dutch song by the Jazzpolitie, they released it in 1993. The song is about the rice if extreme politics and the rise of anti Semitism. Considering what happened in Amsterdam yesterday, lessons have not been learned, And then she wakes upFrom mother’s last kissThe one she could still

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  • Rachel Elisabeth Italiaander (Chelly) was the eldest daughter of Isidor Italiaander and Esther Stad. She was born on July 1, 1929 in Amsterdam. Still, it wasn’t until 1939 that she had a sister, Elisabeth Julia, and in 1941, a brother, Marcus Jozef, followed. The two youngest children survived the war by going into hiding. Rachel

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  • My Letter to Otto Frank

    Dear Mr. Otto Frank, I write this letter with the humility and deep respect that one father extends to another. However, though no words can ever truly capture the weight of what you have endured. As a father of three children myself, I can only begin to imagine the depth of love, worry, and hope

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  • A Cello With One String

    Amid all the horror stories of the Holocaust, every so often, a positive one emerges. I was sidetracked during my research on the Dutch entertainer Rudi Carrell’s life during World War II when the name of Abraham Bueno de Mesquita came up. Better known as Bueno de Mesquita, he and Rudi Carrell worked together in

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  • Karl Silberbauer is remembered in history primarily for his role in one of the darkest episodes of World War II: the arrest of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl whose diary has since become a symbol of the Holocaust. His life is a window into the complexities of individual responsibility during the Nazi era and

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  • Anne Frank has become an enduring symbol of the atrocities of the Holocaust through her poignant and insightful diary, “The Diary of a Young Girl.” During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne and her family were forced into hiding, and their eventual arrest marks one of the many tragic moments of World War II.

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  • The last entry Anne Frank wrote in her diary was on August 1, 1944. In this entry, she reflects on her complex personality, feeling that she often shows a different side of herself to others compared to her true inner self. She writes about her struggle to reconcile these two sides of her character and

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