Holocaust

  • It is good to write detailed stories of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, to ensure they get remembered. But sometimes it is just as powerful when you keep it a brief description, not because their story is not worthy enough to be told, because it is, But just to illustrate that each one…

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  • If any one still has any doubts about the scale of murder during the Holocaust, you only have to look at the the 2 official documents below. They are both from the death register in Auschwitz. The first  page are the registered deaths of female prisoners. The document is dated December 11,1943 the heading says”…

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  • Majdanek-Zyklon B

    This picture was taken after the Death Camp Majdanek was liberated in July 1944.The Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin was liberated by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944; it was the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated by the Allies. In the foreground of the picture you can see a few dozen…

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  • The majority of the Jews in the Netherlands were killed during the Holocaust, The estimates vary from 100,000 to 104,000. It would be too easy to say that this was because the Dutch were willing participants in the Nazi ideology, because for the majority this wasn’t the case. The large number and percentage of Jewish…

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  • Stefan Baretzki was an Auschwitz guard of Bukovina-German origin. He was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and stationed at Auschwitz  from 1942 until 1945. Baretzki was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years in August 1965 at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Because he only finished primary education, the court described him as a “simpleton” and “less…

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  • My heart is broken

    I don’t know how often I have seen this picture but it is today it finally broke my heart. I sat down and looked at it for a few minutes. Where before I only saw an woman, probably an elderly woman and 3 children walking towards the gas chambers. What is so utterly disturbing about…

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  • The picture is of clothes that once belonged to prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp, it was taken shortly after the camp was liberated. When you look a it it looks like a launderette has dumped its load in a courtyard. But this picture tells so much more. Each of those pieces of material and…

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  • Rabbi Chaim Nussbaum was born in Lithuania but grew up in Scheveningen in the Netherlands. His story in World War 2 is remarkable, some people just have a very strong life force. After he got married he returned, together with his wife, to his country of origin, Lithuania. When the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941,…

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  • David Olère  was a  Jewish Polish-born French painter and sculptor best known for his explicit drawings and paintings based on his experiences as a Jewish Sonderkommando inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He began to draw at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the last days of the camp, when the SS became less attentive. His work has an invaluable…

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  • There is one certainty in life and that is that history repeats itself, no matter how hard we try. Does this mean we have to stop highlighting history? No, of course not. Organisations like BDS are actively urging people to boycott Jewish businesses and businesses associated to Jewish businesses. They are not very original in…

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