the Netherlands

  • Desecrating Synagogues

    The Holocaust wasn’t only the mass murder of the European Jews and other groups, it was also desecrating places of worships, especially synagogues,. It was showing total contempt and disrespect for holy places. The above picture was taken on September 16,1944. It shows American and Canadian Jewish soldiers clear the synagogue in Maastricht , which

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  • I probably could do a whole essay on how Guus van der Wijk and Mina de Vries met, and at some stage I probably will, but for now it suffices to say they were extremely brave people, in fact in my eyes they are heroes. Despite the knowledge that there was a great chance they

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  • Statistics often make me uneasy. Stripped of context, they can be twisted to tell a misleading story—and it frequently is. Yet, there are moments when numbers, stark and raw, help us grasp the scale of events too vast for words alone. It is one of those moments. Between July 15, 1942, and September 13, 1944,

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  • The UN designated this day January 27 as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, although Auschwitz (which consisted out of about 40 camps) was the biggest death camp. There were other camps, though smaller in scale but equally as evil. I know it is hard for

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  • Amsterdam City Bioscoop (cinema) is probably one of the finest film houses in the Netherlands if not Europe. In 1995, the Pathé Cinema Group bought it, and since then, its called Pathé City. But it has one black page in its long history. The Nazi regime in the Netherlands had passed legislation that the Jewish

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  • 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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  • 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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  • Rechtzaak voor een verrader

    Ik weet niet welke straf Mevrouw C. uit Amsterdam kreeg, ik ga er vanuit dat ze de doodstraf kreeg. Het gaat ook over een van de zovele zelfmoorden tijdens de Shoah, waar zo weinig over gesprokem word. -Aanklacht, Beschuldiging en Veroordeling van Mevrouw C. uit de Blasiusstraat in Amsterdam, die zich met anderen bezig hield

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  • Transport List Westerbork

    Westerbork had opened by the Dutch authorities during the summer of 1939 to shelter and house the Jewish refugees coming from Germany. The first refugees arrived in Westerbork on 9 October 1939. After Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands, Westerbork became the main concentration camp in the Netherlands. From 1942 to 1944, the majority

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  • It would be easy for me to say that Dutch Jews, and those who fled Germany and Austria, were badly treated by the Germans in the Netherlands during World War II. To a great extent that would be true, but the Germans were helped by a great number of Dutch. One thing I have often

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