Auschwitz
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Music is not just a series of notes strung together, it is also a tool that can be used for good and bad. Music evokes deep emotions, a bit of music often remains with you in your mind for the rest of your life. The Nazis used music in the concentration camps, not to make…
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Max Hirsch was one of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, the cruise ship that left the port of Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with Cuba as its final destination. The vast majority of the passengers were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Across the Atlantic Ocean, they hoped to find a safe haven. However,…
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Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where…
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The eagle flies high in the sky on a warm, sunny day. He wonders if he can fly to the sun. Because he is the ruler in the skies, no one can stop him. He can go wherever he wants to go—free to roam, not restricted by anyone or anything. During his flight, a strange…
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On March 26 and 28, two transports of Slovakian Jews were registered as prisoners in the women’s camp, where they were subjected to forced labor. These were the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann’s department IV B4 (the Jewish office) within the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On March 30, the first RSHA transport from…
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Heroes don’t always wear capes or dressed in uniforms. Sometimes, they are just ordinary people. I say ordinary, but they are often anything but ordinary, as with Fredy Hirsch. I first heard of Fredy a few years ago. As a birthday gift, I recently received the book The Librarian of Auschwitz. While the story centres…
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The term ‘work extension’ was a euphemistic term for the actual goal of the deportations: to work to death those who were healthy enough to work and to murder all others. At least 102,000 Jewish Dutch people were murdered or died from exhaustion and diseases. Auschwitz-BirkenauIt is not exactly known when the Nazis decided to…
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Flossenbürg concentration camp was one of the many Nazi concentration camps established during World War II. Located in Bavaria, Germany, near the Czech border, Flossenbürg was built in May 1938 and primarily functioned as a forced labor camp. Over its seven years of operation, the camp housed thousands of prisoners, many of whom perished due…
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The title is a translation of a line from the Dutch song Blauw (“Blue”). I was listening to it in my car today, and this particular line stayed with me. That line perfectly captures what I experience every time I write about the youngest victims of the Holocaust. Seeing their faces—just a fleeting moment captured…
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More than 80 years later, researchers still regularly uncover more or less new findings about World War II, including the atrocities committed in concentration camps. A study by Robert Sommer reveals that between 1942 and 1945, the SS established ten brothels in various concentration camps, where a total of 200 women were “put to work.”…
History of Sorts 