Art

  • Numbers on the Skin

    A needle hums, its bite inscribes,More than ink, it brands their lives.A sequence carved, devoid of name,A silent scream in numeric shame. The ink sinks deep, a cruel decree,A name erased—humanity’s plea.Flesh becomes a ledger’s page,Etched in despair, grief, and rage. Not a mark of pride but pain,A scar that whispers what remains.The calloused hand,…

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  • This Isn’t About a Western Film: It’s About a Remarkable WWII Story When I first picked up a guitar, it was because of two towering inspirations: Django Reinhardt and Jim Croce. Django, with his captivating melodies and revolutionary style, made the strings sing in ways I could only dream of. Born in 1910 in Belgium…

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  • Art is a powerful tool for narrating events, and in the context of the Holocaust, it tells a profoundly moving story. For many artists, it was a means of expressing the horrors they endured daily. Though their suffering often ended in death, their art remains a lasting testimony to their pain and resilience. Pictured above:…

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  • One of the most iconic pictures of women during WWII is the picture of Lee Miller sitting in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub, in his Munich apartment in 1945. “I was living in Hitler’s private apartment in Munich when his death was announced.” she said afterwards. Lee Miller however wasn’t just a lady in a bathtub. Elizabeth…

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  • It is a sensitive and often overlooked subject. I’m not certain whether suicides were completely included in the Holocaust statistics. In this blog, I focus specifically on the situation in the Netherlands, but I believe this was likely the case in all occupied territories—and possibly beyond. Suicide emerged as a tragic yet significant response to…

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  • A Present for Millie

    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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  • Auschwitz Through Art

    On January 27 in 1945, Soviet troops walked through the gates of the Auschwitz complex, and I say complex—because Auschwitz was more than one camp. What they saw, they could not believe. Rather than going through all the horrors on this UN-designated Holocaust Remembrance Day, I have opted to show some art of those who…

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  • Margard (Marga) Kaufmann, born in Gronau, Germany 10 November 1928. Murdered in Auschwitz on 3 September 1943, reached the age of 14 years. Marga’s parents were married in 1923 in Gronau, where her mother, Adele, had taken over her grandmother’s grocery store in 1918. Marga never knew her grandparents, Zilversmit. Her mother had four brothers,…

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  • Jews in the NSB

    Many European countries had an equivalent of the NSDAP(Nazi) party, the Dutch National Socialist party was the NSB. It may be hard to believe nowadays but not every National Socialist party started off as an anti-Semitic party, as was the case with the NSB. The NSB even had Jewish members, and the party leader ,Anton…

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  • As the saying goes “all is fair in love and war” In the autumn of 1944, an almost twenty-nine-year old English soldier named Jim fell head-over-heels for nineteen-year-old Emelia Sluys. Emelia was staying with relatives on Groesbeekseweg in the city of Nijmegen,the Netherlands, because her home had been destroyed during the Battle of Arnhem. To…

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