the Netherlands
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Nowadays, people often complain when a train is running late, me included, by the way. However, recently, I have changed my way of thinking about that. Throughout Europe during World War II, the military used the railways to accommodate an industrialized scale of murder. It could only work if the trains ran on time. The…
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Just a young girl standing outside her school in Amsterdam with a sign that reads, “Memory of my school time, 1936.” The whole future was still ahead of her. The possibilities were endless. Her dream was to become a midwife, a noble profession to help deliver new life and witness the joy of young mothers,…
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Maurice Blik is a British sculptor and a former President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He is known for his figurative male sculpture. He was born in Amsterdam on 21 April 1939. Many pieces of his art were influenced by his experiences in Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp as a young child. His father…
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Earlier this week I had one question and one statement about concentration camps. The question was “What are the differences between a concentration camp and an extermination camp?” This question I will try to address as much as possible in this blog. But before I do that I want to mention the statement which was…
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Sometimes I struggle with finding a suitable title for a post. As it was for this post, but then he thought using just the raw data as the title is probably the best tribute for this family. The Family is the Chaim family Julius Chaim moved to Nijmegen on 15 October 1940, from Amsterdam. He…
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On this day in 1953, flooding in the North Sea killed more than 1,500 people in the Netherlands and destroyed one million acres of farmland. The storm also caused death and destruction in Great Britain and Belgium. A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm over the North Sea caused a…
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It’s interesting how research can lead you to unexpected discoveries. While looking into one topic, I stumbled upon something even more compelling: the photograph above. It’s an identification photo from the Herzogenbusch Concentration Camp, aka Vught concentration camp, in the Netherlands, depicting prisoner Martinus T. Barbier taken by the camp photographer on January 20, 1944.…
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According to the Joods Monument-Jewish Monument, seven Dutch Jews were tragically murdered at Bergen-Belsen on this day, 81 years ago. Today, I am remembering one of them: Naatje Morpurgo-van Wijnbergen. Naatje was born in The Hague on March 11, 1874, and was murdered in Bergen-Belsen on January 30, 1945, at the age of 70. She…
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The number 12 is significant in religious, mythological and magical symbolism, generally representing perfection, entirety, or cosmic order in traditions since antiquity. It is also the number of full lunations in a solar year, thus the number of months in a solar calendar, as well as the number of signs in the Western and the…
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We all know the story of Anne Frank but unfortunately Anne wasn’t the only teenage who died in the camps. Helga Deen another teenage girl who lived in the Netherlands also died as result of the Nazi ideology and she also wrote a diary. Helga Deen (6 April 1925 – 16 July 1943) was the…
History of Sorts 