Bergen Belsen

  • We all know the story of Anne Frank, and there is no denying that her diary was essential to get an insight into how life was for those who had to hide from the evil Nazi regime. However, people do sometimes forget about the other women and men who hid in the annexe in Amsterdam.

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  • Anne & Kitty

    If there is one thing that Anne Frank’s diary teaches us ,it’s the importance of context. If you take her diary out of context it probably is quite a boring book. But if you leave it in the context and the time it was written in it becomes a powerful story of daily life and

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  • Holocaust in Colour

    Generally, I don’t care for colourized photographs, especially not those from the Holocaust. However, I did come across a few striking depictions of that dark era. A former prisoner holds a human bone from a large pile of other bones from the Buchenwald concentration camp’s crematory. 1945. An emaciated 18-year-old female Russian prisoner stares into

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  • Viewing images of the death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust can be deeply gut-wrenching. While it’s often said that a photograph speaks a thousand words, it’s equally valid that it can never tell the whole story. A photo captures only a single moment in time. This is one of the reasons I rarely share

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  • Red Sector A

    “All that we can do is just survive. All that we can do to help ourselves Is stay alive…” These are the opening lines of the song “Red Sector A” by the Canadian Rock band Rush. I am not exactly a fan of the band; there are only a few of their songs I like,

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  • Music in Westerbork.

    Compared to other concentration camps ,Westerbork was ‘reasonably’ safe and life was less harsh there, But that is also what made it a more sinister place. From 1942 to 1945, Westerbork was a transit camp (Durchgangslager) located in the Netherlands. As a transit camp, Westerbork served as a temporary collection point for Jews in the

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  • The one thing that always baffled me is the vehement hate the Nazis had for Jazz music. It was considered “Entartete Musik”—degenerate music, a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazis to Jazz and also other forms of music. I wrote a piece about Johnny & Jones before, this is not so much a

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  • Imagining Anne Frank writing Instagram or Facebook posts can be a powerful way to reflect on her experiences and words in a contemporary format. These posts would still carry the weight of her thoughts during her time in hiding but adapted to a modern-day audience and platform. As I stated in the title, it 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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  • Daughters of Silence

    For Anne and Margot Frank In secret rooms where daylight thinned,Two sisters lived, two hearts were pinnedTo dreams too vast for walls to bind—They wrote, they watched, they stayed behind. Margot, firstborn, quiet flame,A scholar’s grace, a whispered name.With pages neat and eyes downcast,She traced her prayers, she held them fast.A life of duty, still

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