History

  • At the De Zorg farm, on the Oude Sloterweg in Nieuw-Vennep,the Netherlands, the Boogaard family, led by the 75-year-old Johannes Boogaard, showed remarkable compassion. They helped hundreds of—mainly Jewish—people in hiding, providing refuge in every corner of the yard: an air raid shelter, on the haystack, and in a car. Their compassionate actions during the…

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  • (originally posted on 10 July 2020) I have done a few hundred of these blogs now, blogs about children where I tried to bring them back to live a small bit, But when I saw the picture of Franciska Weisz something inside me broke, I know thst she is just one of 1.5 million children…

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  • Mengele

    There are few people that intrigue and disgust me simultaneously in similar measures, but Mengele is one of them. I deliberately am not calling him Doctor because he failed to honor or even pledge to the Hippocratic Oath. One line of that oath states the following “I will use treatment to help the sick according…

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  • The biggest group of people who were murdered during the Holocaust were the Jews. An estimated 6 million were killed. The number of 6 million should have really been zero, because none of these people had done anything wrong, They were only killed because they were Jewish or had been Jewish, there was no other…

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  • We are in awe if we stand in front of a garden filled with flowers of all colours. Our mind wanders how such a beauty came to fruition. After a heavy shower ,we look up and see the colours of the rainbow in the sky, Secretly we hope that one day we will find the…

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  • A picture tells a thousand words, and in this case, they truly do. The drawings and cartoons are made by Emile Franken. I am not sure what happened to Emile. I do know he was born on 15 April 1921 somewhere in the Netherlands and he survived the war. I also know he spent time…

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  • Renia Spiegel was born on 18 June 1924, in Uhryńkowce, then in Poland and now in Western Ukraine, to Polish-Jewish parents Bernard Spiegel and Róża Maria Leszczyńska. Like many other teenage girls, Renia kept a diary. She started hers at age 15, on 31 January 1939, nine months before German and Slovak troops invaded Poland.…

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  • In the summer of 1943, Suze Arts, a young unmarried mother, got a job as an SS Aufseherin (female guard) at Camp Vught. She followed a six-week ‘training course’ at the notorious Ravensbrück women’s camp and became one of the most notorious female guards of Camp Vught. Susanne (Suze) Arts was born as the middle…

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  • An often underappreciated phenomenon of the Second World War is the so-called medical resistance (artsenverzet): a rare and remarkably successful example of organized, effective, non-violent, and sustained resistance against Nazi occupation carried out by nearly an entire professional group. Within the broader context of the predominantly non-violent Dutch resistance movement, Medisch Contact (Medical Contact) emerged…

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  • Concentration camp Vught, also known as concentration camp Herzogenbusch , was the only purpose built concentration camp in the Netherland. The other 2 major camps, Westerbork and Amersfoort, were already built before the war as a refugee center and army barracks. The construction of Camp Vught began in May 1942. The camp consisted of 36…

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