Auschwitz
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People sometimes ask me if I am Jewish and are surprised when I say I am not. There are even a few who complain to me for writing about the Holocaust as a non-Jewish person. Although the Jews were the largest sect of victims during the Holocaust, the Nazis also specifically targeted other groups. I…
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On this day in 1919, Primo Levi was born. He was an Italian-Jewish chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He has written many books and essays. He died on 11 April 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was initially ruled a suicide, but after some careful consideration,…
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Levie Peper was a son of Abraham Peper and Margaretha Rood. He was born in Amsterdam on 24 June 1874, and he earned his money as a hawker. On 30 March 1905, he married Johanna (Naatje) Vos in Amsterdam, who was born there on 22 April 1871 to her parents Joseph Vos and Marianna Aron…
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I have always been fascinated by aerial shots taken during World War II. These are just some of them. The photograph above:A reconnaissance photo taken after bomb smoke lifted over the three ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt shows the damage inflicted by the The Mighty Eighth US Air Force during a concentrated attack on 21 July…
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This post will contain some thoughts and testimonies of people who lived through the Holocaust, journalists and politicians of the time. Starting with a speech from Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill on Hitler declared Führer (1934)“After all my friends, only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly 70 million of the…
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(Updated May 13, 2024) I have written about Settela before. She was also known as Anna Maria Steinbach. One of the reasons I want to highlight the sad story of Settela is because there is a chance she may be related to me, be it via marriage or one of my cousins. Yet, there is…
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On 7 July 1942, Heinrich Himmler, in cooperation with three others, including a physician, inaugurated experimenting on women in Auschwitz and investigated extending this experimentation on men. Himmler convened a conference in Berlin to discuss the prospects for using concentration camp prisoners as objects of medical experiments. The other attendees were the head of the…
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A small boy named Jacques Maurice Duizend was just a baby—a toddler. His last name is also a number, Thousand. That is the number of years the failed Austrian artist had envisaged his ‘Reich’ to last. To achieve that two-year-old children like Jacques Maurice Duizend had to be murdered. Jacques Maurice Duizend was born in…
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I came across an excerpt from the book Wiswassebeesjes by author Dieta Kalk. I can’t think of a proper translation for the word, but that doesn’t really matter. In the book the writer, recalls the removal of the Wallage family from Aprikozenweg 21 in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, a day after seeing the Star of David.…
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Ruth Maier is often referred to as Norway’s Anne Frank, I don’t agree with that. I think it takes away the value of the words of both women. Their circumstances and lifestyles were completely different. Even the way they were murdered was different. The only thing they had in common was that they were both…
History of Sorts 