Holocaust

  • The murder of children during the Holocaust is what haunts me the most. Sometimes I try to be poetic and philosophical when I try to memorialize them, but often seeing the raw cold data is the most effective way to remember these young innocent lives. So many futures were destroyed. The picture above is from…

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  • Although its official name is Gurs Internment Camp, let’s call it what it really was, a concentration camp. It is also probably one, if not the only time, the Nazis sent Jews westward. At first, it served as a camp for Spanish Republicans and German refugees who fled from Nazism. The Gurs Camp was among…

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  • In The End Love Prevailed

    I planned to do this blog about Elisabeth Flesschedrager-Appelboom. She was born in Amsterdam, on 2 February 1921 . Murdered in Auschwitz, 18 January 1945. She reached the age of 23, and was a seamstress. She was married to Philip Flesschedrager, who was born in Amsterdam on 8 July 1920. Murdered in Auschwitz, 26 December…

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  • I could post thousands of photographs of victims every day or share disturbing and graphic images—some so horrific that we instinctively turn away. We avert our eyes because we cannot fathom the depth of the evil displayed before us. It seems impossible to comprehend how any human being could commit such atrocities against another. And…

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  • It is well known that the Nazis made no distinction in age when deporting Jews in the Netherlands. The result was that even venerable elderly people were murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibor, and other camps. Among the victims listed on the Joods Monument(Jewish Monument) site, Klara Borstel-Engelsman is the oldest, at the remarkable age of…

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  • Evil Games

    Over the past few days, I’ve been watching the second season of Squid Game. For those unfamiliar with the series, Squid Game is a South Korean thriller where financially desperate individuals are invited to compete in deadly childhood games for a massive cash prize. As the games progress, contestants face moral dilemmas, form alliances, and…

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  • Joanne D. Gilbert, M.Ed., is an acclaimed author, sought-after educator, and captivating public speaker. Raised in the close-knit community of Oak Park, Michigan—a predominantly Jewish suburb of Detroit—Joanne was surrounded by individuals whose lives bore witness to extraordinary resilience. Many of her neighbors were Holocaust survivors who had courageously defied the Nazis. Their poignant and…

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  • Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, in Buczacz, a town then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in western Ukraine). He was the eldest of four children in a Jewish family. His father was a teacher, and Wiesenthal grew up in an environment that valued education and community involvement. He pursued studies in…

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  • He was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France to a Jewish family. His parents were Ann Werzberg and Charles Mangel, a kosher butcher. When Marcel was four years old, the family moved to Lille, but they later returned to Strasbourg. When France entered World War II, Marcel, 16, fled with his family to Limoges. In 1944…

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  • I know many publish very graphic images of the Holocaust, which I can fully understand. Although I have posted them too, I have become more reluctant to do so. I believe in order to understand the horrors of the holocaust it is often much more effective to look at the eyes of one of the…

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