Family
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Martin Haas was born Martijn Haas, at the end of 1936 in Breda, a small city in the south of the Netherlands. Just before the war started, about two hundred Jews lived in Breda. Martin survived because his parents kept him safe in hiding. His parents and 2 of his siblings did not survive. His…
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This story is both heartbreaking and uplifting — heartbreaking because it tells of a mother who knew she was going to die, and uplifting because her final words revealed remarkable courage and hope in the face of certain death. Olga Bancic was born on May 10, 1912, into a large Jewish family in Bessarabia, then…
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World War II officially ended in 1945, but for many who lived through it, the war never truly ended. The fear it instilled often turned into paranoia and secrecy, rippling across generations and affecting even those born decades later. This is the story of my connection to World War II. Both my parents were born…
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When you think of psychiatry one of the names you think of first is Sigmund Freud. A controversial but a successful Austrian Jewish neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. Although his work will have saved many from mental health issues, he was…
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World War II officially ended in 1945, but for many who lived through it, the war never truly ended. The fear it instilled often turned into paranoia and secrecy, rippling across generations and affecting even those born decades later. This is the story of my connection to World War II. Both my parents were born…
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It was a few weeks before Christmas 2011. We went to see “Arthur Christmas” in the cinema in 3D. Afterwards my family were saying how impressive the 3D had been, where I hadn’t noticed it at all. I had some problem with my eye though, but hadn’t thought anything of it. I thought it was…
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I love to sing and I don’t care where I am or what I am doing, if I feel the urge to sing I just do it. However there is one song I can never sing along to, It is not that I don’t like the song, the opposite is true it is one of…
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Today, Father’s Day, I felt compelled to write something about all the Fathers who lived and were murdered during the Holocaust, but there were too many to mention, So I decided to honor them all via a poem. So many were murdered, only a few survived, but they all had something in common, none of…
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Many will spend this Christmas without their best friend, wife, husband, father, mother, son, daughter, girlfriend, boyfriend, or other family members for the first time. It’s hard, especially the first Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty when you want to celebrate because that is what they would like you to do. This…
History of Sorts 