Post WWII
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“Le Dernier Métro” (The Last Metro) is a 1980 French film directed by François Truffaut. It is a poignant drama set in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II. The film captures the struggles of a Jewish theater owner and his wife as they attempt to keep their theater running amidst the horrors of occupation and…
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In the summer of 1947, a battered, repurposed American pleasure steamer groaned under the weight of 4,515 Holocaust survivors. Its official destination on paper was Colombia, but everyone on board—and the British intelligence services tracking it—knew the truth. The ship was headed for Mandatory Palestine. It was originally named the President Warfield, but midway across…
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++++++++ Warning: Contains Graphic Images+++++++++ One could be forgiven to think that the photos in this blog are photos of a famine in a 3rd world country, as we have seen so often before. However, these photos are from one of the richest countries in the world, the Netherlands. Towards the end of World War…
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Ruth Westheimer (June 4, 1928 – July 12, 2024), widely known as Dr. Ruth, was an American sex therapist, media personality, and author. The New York Times described her as a “Sorbonne-trained psychologist who became a cultural icon in the 1980s,” noting that she “ushered in a new age of freer, franker talk about sex…
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The title is The 4 from Breda, but there are only 3 men pictured. There is a reason for that which I shall explain a bit later. After the Second World War, 241 Germans were tried in the Netherlands for war crimes. Among them, the quartet Willi Lages, Ferdinand aus der Fünten, Franz Fischer and Joseph Kotälla,…
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History rarely writes scripts as pure or as devastating as the life and death of Captain Witold Pilecki. In the grand, tragic theater of twentieth-century Europe, his name stands as a solitary monument to human courage—and an indictment of totalitarian cruelty. Pilecki is famously remembered as the Polish cavalry officer who intentionally got himself captured…
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Primo Levi is one of the most famous Holocaust survivors. He wrote in 1986, “It happened, and thus it can happen again.” For some survivors, this was a reality soon after being liberated. Howard Cwick was an American Jewish soldier who liberated Buchenwald.The shame he and other liberators felt came from not liberating the camp…
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I know some Polish people will vehemently deny that this ever happened, but it did. It is a shame some people still insist on whitewashing history because it serves no one, and the truth always comes out. We can only stop these crimes from happening again when we learn from the past. It is not…
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(re-post from May 31 2018) On May 31st 1962 Adolf Eichmann was executed for his crimes by hanging. I have read a lot about Eichmann and have seen a lot of documentaries. He was a particularly evil man, he never showed any remorse for all the crimes he committed or ordered to be carried out.…
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I have to be honest, the title is a bit deceiving. This blog is not about his nephew, the famous Rockstar , but it is about Leonard M. Kravitz (technically Lenny is short for Leonard). Leonard Martin Kravitz was an American soldier in the United States Army who served in the Korean War. He is…
History of Sorts 