Diary

  • Philip Mechanicus was born, three days before Adolph Hitler, in Amsterdam on 17 April 1889 to a Jewish family. After he left school, he started to work for the social-democratic daily newspaper Het Volk in the shipping and records department. He worked his way up to become a journalist. After finishing his military service, he worked in…

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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…

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  • 75 years ago today Anne Frank’s diary was published. It became one of the biggest selling books of all times. These are just some of the entries of her diary. October 9th 1942: “Today I have nothing but dismal and depressing news to report. Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in…

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  • Like Anne Frank ,Etty (Esther) Hillesum, also kept a diary during World War 2,describing her experiences of the Holocaust. She was born in the city of Middelburg in the southwest of the Netherlands, on January 15,1914. She was the daughter of Levie Hillesum and Riva Bernstein. In 1932 she moved to Amsterdam to study law…

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  • The Siege of Leningrad

    Today marks the 81st anniversary of the start of the siege of Leningrad. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the deadliest and most destructive sieges in the history of the world – quite possibly the deadliest ever. It would last for 872 days, and there would be more than a million Soviet civilian casualties,…

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  • Late in the morning of 4 August 1944, Dutch police entered the Secret Annexe and arrested the Frank family, the van Pels family, Fritz Pfeffer, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler (who worked at Opetka). Otto Frank was the managing director of Opetka, and they had helped to hide the residents. On 8 August 1944, after several days…

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  • Dear Anne, today you would have turned 93, but we all know the history why that didn’t happen. Some of that history is written in the diary you received on your 13th birthday, June 12 1942.So many people have read that diary, your private thoughts laid bare for the world to see. But I am…

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  • Education is often seen as a human right and it really should be, but so often it is a privilege taken away from many. Moshe Flinker was a teenager born in the Hague, in the Netherlands on October 9, 1926. He had a particular talent for language,he studied eight languages including Hebrew. The language he…

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  • “Three shots! Three lives lost! All I can hear are shots, shots.” This line is the final entry of Renia Spiegel’s diary. It is the final entry but it was not written by her but by her boyfriend. Renia had left her diary with her boyfriend ,Zygmunt Schwarzer,  for safekeeping. You see Renia could not…

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  • On August 4,1944 a tip from a Dutch informer led the Gestapo to the now so well known secret annex in Amsterdam. Anne Frank, her family and all the other occupants would be arrested. Via her diary Anne Frank became one of the  symbols  of the Holocaust. I often read people describing her diary and her…

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