Holocaust

  • Music soothes the savage beast—that is what Eric Vogel must have thought when he sent a petition to the Commander of the Theresienstadt camp on 8 January 1943. It was to start a jazz band named the Ghetto Swingers. The band would include the following members: Dr Brammer (piano), Dr Kurt Bauer (percussion), Fr. Goldschmidt…

    Read more →

  • When you look up information on Anne Frank, the first thing you will see is that she is described as a German born or Dutch Diarist, as if she was a well established author or Journalist, but she wasn’t. She was just a teenage girl who happened to write a diary, like so many other…

    Read more →

  • Letter to Henio

    The “Letters to Henio” project began in the city of Lublin in 2005 as part of an activity to preserve and reconstruct the city’s Jewish heritage. A local cultural center, Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre, organizes this educational activity. According to the center’s director, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, the main idea of the project is as follows:…

    Read more →

  • BOAC Flight 777

    On June 1,1943 the BOAC Flight 777,a scheduled British Overseas Airways Corporation civilian airline flight from Portela Airport in Lisbon, Portugal to Whitchurch Airport near Bristol, England.The Douglas DC-3 serving the flight was attacked by eight German Junkers Ju 88 fighter planes and crashed into the Bay of Biscay, killing all 17 on board. BOAC…

    Read more →

  • One lesson that many people haven’t learned from the Nazi era is that scientist don’t always have the best interest of humanity at heart. They often are driven by their own curiosity rather then what’s best for their fellow man. Yet people often follow their advise blindly, without questioning motives or who funds the research…

    Read more →

  • I remember as a kid , my neighbor and I made our own bows and arrows, We used it to target practice on a spare door we had in the storage rooms in the basement of our apartment block. We bought the materials for these ‘weapons’  in a shop in the center of our town,Geleen,…

    Read more →

  • I was in two minds on how to do this blog. Initially I was considering adding graphic pictures to accompany the text , but then I thought that the pictures may just be too horrific and it would turn people away from reading the text. Additionally there would be a chance that this blog would…

    Read more →

  • Around this time of year, many 17-year-old kids are getting ready for school exams. Although they may think it is unfair that they have to sit for hours and hours to do their exams(I know I thought it was unfair), they don’t actually realize how lucky they are. Education, although a basic human right, is…

    Read more →

  • “Evil, I think, is the Absence of Empathy,” the title of this blog is a quote from Captain G. M. Gilbert after the Nuremberg trials. His appointment was as the prison psychologist of German prisoners. During the process of the Nuremberg trials, he became a confidant to several of the defendants, including Hermann Göring. Empathy…

    Read more →

  • I was struggling with the title but to be honest I can’t think of another way of describing it. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million children were killed during the Holocaust. How many were killed in Auschwitz is not clear but if you consider that for example on October 10,1944 800 gypsy children were gassed,…

    Read more →