Auschwitz
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Max Hirsch was one of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, the cruise ship that left the port of Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with Cuba as its final destination. The vast majority of the passengers were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Across the Atlantic Ocean, they hoped to find a safe haven. However,…
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Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where…
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On March 26 and 28, two transports of Slovakian Jews were registered as prisoners in the women’s camp, where they were subjected to forced labor. These were the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann’s department IV B4 (the Jewish office) within the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On March 30, the first RSHA transport from…
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Heroes don’t always wear capes or dressed in uniforms. Sometimes, they are just ordinary people. I say ordinary, but they are often anything but ordinary, as with Fredy Hirsch. I first heard of Fredy a few years ago. As a birthday gift, I recently received the book The Librarian of Auschwitz. While the story centres…
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The term ‘work extension’ was a euphemistic term for the actual goal of the deportations: to work to death those who were healthy enough to work and to murder all others. At least 102,000 Jewish Dutch people were murdered or died from exhaustion and diseases. Auschwitz-BirkenauIt is not exactly known when the Nazis decided to…
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The title is a translation of a line from the Dutch song Blauw (“Blue”). I was listening to it in my car today, and this particular line stayed with me. That line perfectly captures what I experience every time I write about the youngest victims of the Holocaust. Seeing their faces—just a fleeting moment captured…
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and while that may be true, a photograph never tells the whole story. Although photographic evidence of the Holocaust is invaluable, I believe that reading or hearing the firsthand accounts of survivors is just as important—if not more so, Premysl Dobias was born in June 1913…
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There are no monsters under my bed who want to hurt me or do me harm There are no monsters under my bed, but I wish there were for I know they aren’t real. There are no monsters under my bed, but there are monsters everywhere else. The monsters can be a stranger, a teacher,…
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Rutka Laskier’s Teenage Account of the Holocaust Rutka Laskier was just 14 years old when she was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In the months leading up to her death, much like Anne Frank in Amsterdam, Rutka kept a diary documenting her deepest thoughts, fears, and the horrors she witnessed. When the Nazis…
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This blog contains 2 pictures of 2 baby boys both aged 10 months. With these pictures I will be attempting to explain the Holocaust in a way that most anyone can understand it. Having that said no one will really ever understand how it was possible to massacre so many innocent lives on such an…
History of Sorts 
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