World War 2
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Renia Spiegel was born on 18 June 1924, in Uhryńkowce, then in Poland and now in Western Ukraine, to Polish-Jewish parents Bernard Spiegel and Róża Maria Leszczyńska. Like many other teenage girls, Renia kept a diary. She started hers at age 15, on 31 January 1939, nine months before German and Slovak troops invaded Poland.…
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Nearly every time I write a post about a ”forgotten hero,” I get comments like, ”I didn’t forget about her!” or ”How dare you imply she has been forgotten.” These people, unfortunately, miss the point of the post. For some reason, they feel it was a personal attack on them. The heroes I write about…
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Henri Kichka was 16 when he was deported to Auschwitz. He was born in Brussels, Belgium 14 April 1926, into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland. Below is a transcript of his interview with the BBC, where he describes that he no longer had a name but a number. “Henri Kichka: 1-7-7-7-8-9. My…
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German citizens benefited from Nazi policies by taking over jobs previously held by Jews, acquiring Jewish-owned businesses, and participating in furniture auctions held in the homes of Holocaust victims. Acknowledging the complicity of ordinary individuals in state-sponsored crimes is crucial, as it underscores the unsettling reality that no one is inherently immune to the allure…
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A member of Adolf Hitler’s extended family was among the victims of the Nazi regime’s campaign to exterminate the mentally ill, according to two historians. The woman, identified as “Aloisia V.”, was a great-grandchild of Hitler’s great-aunt, making her his second cousin once removed. She was related to him through the Schicklgruber side of his…
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The Netherlands is the country with the relatively highest number of Jewish victims in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews, 107,000 were deported. Five thousand people returned from the camps, and approximately 20,000 survived in other ways, most of them in hiding. The persecution and murder of the Jews during the Second World War is…
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Anne Frank and Peter van Pels’s first kiss is one of the most touching and human moments in Anne’s diary, The Diary of a Young Girl. This event unfolds during one of the most challenging periods of Anne’s life, and it provides a poignant glimpse into the emotional complexity of adolescence in the face of…
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Beneath the whispering coastal pine,Where sand and sorrow softly twine,They stood with courage, hearts held high,Though freedom’s cost was to defy. No trumpet sounded, no fanfare played,Just silent steps through dune and glade,Where tyrants feared the truth they bore,And stilled their voices evermore. But wind remembers, trees still weep,The dunes their vigil gently keep—And in…
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When we hear about the evil during World War 2, it is mostly about the evil committed by the Nazis, and it is important to be reminded of that. However, some acts of the Imperial Japanese Army were just as evil, if not more evil than that of the Nazis. In 1945, as a first-year…
History of Sorts 