On May 3, 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, Belgium, a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote his now-famous poem after seeing poppies growing in battle-scarred fields.
Alexis Helmer, a close friend, was killed during the battle on May 2. McCrae performed the burial service himself, where he noticed how poppies quickly grew around the graves of those who died at Ypres. The next day, he composed the poem while sitting in the back of an ambulance at an Advanced Dressing Station outside Ypres.
In Flanders fields, the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you, from failing hands, we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Just two names of people who should have never been murdered. Micheal van West was a florist. There is no records of his wife, Saartje van West-Goldsmit’s profession, but I will presume she was a stay at home mother. They were no threat to anyone–just two people trying to get by.
Michael van West was the sixth of the nine children of Salomon van West (1859-1931) and Betje Lelie (1853-1935) and born in Amsterdam on 31 October 1887. Like all his brothers and his father, Michel was also a flower dealer. He married Saartje Goudsmit on 31 July 1912 in Amsterdam, a daughter of Levie Goudsmit and Hanna Vos, she was born on 6 October 1887 there. At the same time as Michael, his brother Jacob, married Saartje’s sister, Raatje Goudsmit.
Michael had five brothers and four sisters, all born in Amsterdam. On 1 December 1910, the still unmarried Michael van West left for Belgium and was registered there at the address Krijtstraat 8 in Berchem. According to the statement that Michael made to the Antwerp officials, he planned to stay there for more than six months.
After the marriage of Michael and his brother Jacob van West to Saartje and Raatje Goudsmit respectively, at the end of July 1912, the four of them left for Brussels on 6 August 1912, where they came to live at 31, Rue de L’Ascension.
Nothing is known about the period from August 1912 to 1944 about Michael and his wife Saartje, as well about Jacob and his wife Raatje. However, it is certain that Michael van West and Saartje Goudsmit were arrested in the early spring of 1944 and transferred to the transit camp in Mechelen, Kazerne Dossin. In March of that year, by order of the Central Bureau for National Security, an instruction was issued to urgently proceed to the arrest of Jews.
Michael and Saartje were deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz on 4 April 1944 with convoy 24, which arrived there on 7 April 1944 with 625 victims in total. Of these, 270 were murdered immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau; 355 people were registered in the camp, of which 147 were still alive when Auschwitz was liberated.
It is not known whether Michael and Saartje belonged to the group of 270 victims, or to the group of 355 people who were registered. However, it is clear that they did not belong to the 147 people who were liberated ,but were murdered in Auschwitz after 7 April 1944, or died due to exhaustion, abuse or diseases.
The 24th Convoy of 4 April 1944, was one of the many tragic transports during the Holocaust. It departed from Mechelen, Belgium, which was a major transit point for deportations of Jews during World War II. The destination of this convoy was Auschwitz.
The convoy consisted of Jewish men, women, and children who were rounded up by the Nazis and their collaborators as part of their systematic genocide of European Jews. The journey from Mechelen to Auschwitz was harrowing, with cramped conditions, lack of food and water, and the constant fear of the unknown awaiting them at their destination.
Michael and Saartje had two sons. Edouard Elias van West was murdered somewhere in Germany in February 1945. aged 17. The eldest son, Leo van West, was also murdered in February 1945 in Mauthausen. He was 31 years old.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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I was reluctant to use the title, From Zero to 102 as the title, I didn’t want it to look like a review for a car. However, I couldn’t think of a more suitable title either. The 0 and the 102 are the ages of two victims of the Holocaust.
This is how evil the Nazi regime really was. It is also why their industrialized way of murder was so effective. It is in human nature to always find the good in our fellow human beings, even animals. No one could really fathom the level of cruelty by the Nazis. It was unprecedented.
Suzanne Kaminski was born on 11 March 1943, in Brussels, Belgium. On 19 April 1943, she was deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival on 22 April, she was murdered by the Nazis that same day. She was only 45 days old and considered the youngest Jewish child to be deported from Belgium.
Klara Engelsman was born on 30 April 1842 in Amsterdam as the daughter of Salomon “Samuel” Abraham Engelsman and Saartje Hartog Cosman. Klara Engelsman married Daniel Brush on 24 May 1865. As far as we know, the couple had no children. Daniel Brush died at 76 years old on 9 July 1918 in Amsterdam.
At the time of her 100th birthday, Mrs. Klara Brush-Engelsman lived at the home of the Morpurgo family. Later she stayed in the Jewish care home. In March 1944 she arrived in Camp Westerbork, where she was nursed in the camp hospital. There she still experienced her 102th birthday. She was taken on a stretcher to the train on 4 September 1944, which went to Theresienstadt, where she was murdered on 12 October 1944.
The murder of a 45 days old baby and a 102-year-old lady, is the clearest indication that the Nazis’ ideology was based on hate and hate only. Anyone who condoned this or still condones it, subscribes to that same ideology.
Ten days before Auschwitz was liberated—the SS was instructed to evacuate the camps. Between January 17th and 21st,1945 the SS began marching an estimated 56,000 prisoners out of the Auschwitz camps, most of them 63 km) west to the train depot at Wodzisław Śląski (Loslau), while others marched 55 km (34 mi) northwest to Gliwice (Gleiwitz), with some marched to other locations. Temperatures of −20 °C (−4 °F) and lower, were recorded at the time of these marches. Some residents of Upper Silesia tried to help the marching prisoners. Some of the prisoners themselves managed to escape the death marches to freedom. However, many died during the marches.
Lilly Appelbaum Malnik. was one of the survivors. In 1940, The Nazis invaded Belgium. In 1942, Lilly was in hospital with tonsillitis. While she was in the hospital, her sister was arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Soon after, her mother and brother were discovered, and taken away. The Nazis killed all three relatives during the Holocaust in Belgium. Upon being released from the hospital, Lilly went into hiding with the help of non-Jewish neighbors. She began working in a factory and at a beauty salon to support herself. While working at the salon, she had to give a Nazi officer a manicure and massage.
In 1944, while visiting her aunt and uncle in the suburbs of Brussels, she was woken up by two Nazi soldiers—armed with rifles, banging on the door. Lilly and her family were rounded up and sent to the Mechelen transit camp for six weeks. On the sixth week in Mechelen, she was placed in a cattle car with other Jews as part of the second-to-last transport of Jews out of the country before the Liberation of Belgium. She arrived, with her aunt and uncle, at Auschwitz.
In 1945, the Soviet Union’s Red Army was approaching—Lilly and other inmates were evacuated and sent on a death march to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Throughout the march, she witnessed German soldiers shooting at prisoners. Lilly’s friend, Christiane, contracted typhus at Bergen-Belsen and died there, and Lilly later caught the disease.
The following is Lilly’s account of the Death March “Word came to us that we were going to evacuate Auschwitz. Why were we evacuating Auschwitz? It is because the Russians were coming close by. And so we…we all walked out Auschwitz and we started walking. And we started walking, we walked for days. I’ll never forget it. I don’t know how many days we walked. We walked and then we took cattle cars and then we walked again. And as we walked we heard gun shots and they told us to keep on marching. We heard gun shots and they were shooting people in the back who couldn’t keep up with the walking. It ended up being called the death march because the ravines and the gutters, they were all red from blood. From people, some people who spoke Polish, we were walking through Poland, and some people who thought they could escape would try and escape. Some people who couldn’t keep up with the walking anymore, they got weak, they threw all their bundles away and they walked until they couldn’t keep up anymore, they fell behind and the Germans just shot them. We saw people being shot in the front in their chests, in their back. They were laying all over, on top of hills, behind trees. It was really like a war zone. And this is how we finally arrived in a camp called Bergen-Belsen.”
In April 1945, Lilly was one of 60,000 prisoners liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British Army. She was emaciated and weighed only 70 pounds. She had to be carried out by a stretcher and spent the first few weeks of her freedom in a makeshift field hospital. After two months of hospitalization, she was taken back to Belgium by the Red Cross.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
I was going to write a post about the 100th Anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, was an initially failed coup d’état by the Nazi Party. We all know that eventually, they did seize control of Germany.
Instead of writing about Hitler and his cronies, I decided to talk about one of their many victims. I have three reasons for doing this. First, I believe that every victim of the Holocaust should be remembered individually; second, Hanna Salomons was born on 8 November 1923, the very same day as the Beerhall Putsch took place; and third, Hanna was murdered on 13 August in Auschwitz, aged 18—my daughter turned 18 this year on August 13. Arnold Salomons, Hanna’s father, was murdered in Auschwitz on 18 October 1944.
I believe—the best way of telling a Holocaust story is to make it relatable and personal.
Arnold Salomons and his daughter Hanna lived in Frankfurt at the outbreak of the war. At some point, they fled to the Netherlands and first lived in The Hague. Hanna moved to Maartensdijk (now part of Utrecht) and thought she could move to Switzerland via Belgium to be safe there.
Unfortunately, she was arrested in Belgium and deported to Auschwitz via Kazerne Dossin with Transport II on 11-8-1942. This transport consisted of 999 people, 3 of whom survived the war.
What I found frightening about this—is that if I had been born a few decades earlier, that easily could have been my daughter and me. What I still find scary is there is no guarantee this will not happen to us.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
Henri Kichka was 16 when he was deported to Auschwitz. He was born in Brussels, Belgium 14 April 1926, into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland. Below is a transcript of his interview with the BBC, where he describes that he no longer had a name but a number.
“Henri Kichka: 1-7-7-7-8-9.
My name? No name. My address? No address. No school, no family. All my family died there.
They were arrested by Hitler with me. I was one year in Auschwitz. It was horrible. It was not a life. It was dead. Only dead. My father, my mother, both sisters. They died in Auschwitz. They were gassed and burned.
The worst of all—was the march of death. The death march. La marche de la mort. With the feet to march.
Reporter: No shoes?
Henri Kichka: It was horrible. All my feet are kaput!
I was 90% dead. After the war, I was in a hospital because I was very, very… a skeleton. I was a skeleton. I was in a sanitarium for [my] lungs and in a hospital, and two years later I was married and I built a big family.
Antisemitism is an idea from crazy people. What for [the] enemy is a Jew? He has no gun. He has no arms. They don’t do the war. And I don’t never understand why they hate so much the Jews. We are innocent.
The first days where I had to go in the school to tell my history, my horrible history, it was very difficult for me. I am crazy when I have to tell something [about] what happened in the concentration camps.
But I know—I knew—that I had to tell it. And I told 10,000 people what I suffered there.”
Henri Kichka died at age 94-years-old on 25 April 2020, eleven days after his birthday, in Brussels, the result of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium.
A U.S. military policeman prepares the firing squad for German spies: Corporal Wilhelm Schmidt, 24, Officer-Cadet Guenther Billing, 21, and Sergeant Manfred Pernass, 23, after a court-martial by American authorities in Belgium during the Ardennes offensives. Three Germans were captured wearing American uniforms, armed with American weapons and driving an American jeep during the ill-fated enemy offensive in December 1944. They failed to give the password of any proper identification when stopped. They admitted their mission was to locate and sabotage communications and reconnoitre (survey) bridges and roads over the Meuse. Specially trained for espionage, the men had familiarized themselves with the American accent by mingling with U.S. prisoners of war in Germany.
An American soldier pins pieces of white linen over the hearts of three German spies about to be executed.
In August 1942, a group of refugees from the Netherlands was arrested in Belgium. The men were placed in Breendonk, and the women and children were placed in the Jewish orphanage.
They were all very young children.
In the end they were all deported to Auschwitz and murdered there on August 28,1942.
Below are the names of the women and their children, who were placed in the Jewish orphanage.
Edith Essinger-Morpurgo and her daughter Eveline Franziska-Aged 2
Hanni Couzijn-Hoffman and her daughter Mirjam-Aged 1
Cato Chelem-Goudeket and her daughter son Iwan-Aged 1
Anna Poons-Hamburg and her son Hijman-Aged 5
Alice Essinger-Rosengarten and her son Robert (no further details)
Golda Barber-Lewinson and her son Alfred-Aged 7 months
Frederika van Amerongen-Veffer with her daughter Sonja-Aged 9 months, pictured above.
“Let them eat cake” is the most famous quote credited to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. Legend has it, it was the queen’s response after being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread.
“Let them eat cake” is the traditional translation of the French phrase “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, said to have been spoken in the 17th or 18th century by “a great princess” The French phrase mentions brioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, considered a luxury food. The quote is taken to reflect either the princess’s frivolous disregard for the starving peasants or her poor understanding of their plight.
While the phrase is commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, there are references to it prior to the French Revolution, meaning that it is impossible for the quote to have originated from Antoinette, and it is unlikely it was ever spoken by her.
The “Let them eat cake” story had been floating around for years before 1789. It was first told in a slightly different form about Marie-Thérèse, the Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660. She allegedly suggested that the French people eat “la croûte de pâté” (or the crust of the pâté). Over the next century, several other 18th-century royals were also blamed for the remark, including two aunts of Louis XVI. Most famously, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau included the pâté story in his “Confessions” in 1766, attributing the words to “a great princess” (probably Marie-Thérèse). Whoever uttered those unforgettable words, it was almost certainly not Marie-Antoinette, who at the time Rousseau was writing was only 10 years old—three years away from marrying the French prince and eight years from becoming queen.
Amazingly, the earliest known source connecting the quote with the queen was published more than 50 years after the French Revolution. In an 1843 issue of the journal Les Guêpes, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr reported having found the quote in a “book dated 1760,” which he said proved that the rumor about Marie-Antoinette was false. Rumor? Like so many of us, he was probably just repeating something he had heard.
Nowadays something like that would be called “the Mandela Effect”
The Mandela effect got its name when Fiona Broome, a self-identified “paranormal consultant,” detailed how she remembered former South African President Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s in prison (although Mandela lived until 2013).
Broome could describe remembering news coverage of his death and even a speech from his widow about his death. Yet none of it happened.
If Broome’s thoughts occurred in isolation, that would be one factor. However, Broome found that other people thought the exact same as her.
Even though the event never happened, she wasn’t the only one who felt like it did. As a result, the Mandela effect concept was “born.”
Either way. I like cake and that is not a false memory. The picture is courtesy of “Art and Cake” a specialty cake shop workshop in Tongeren, Belgium. Just over the Dutch border.
History of Sorts 
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