Holocaust
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Sonja would have been 80 today. But as the title suggests she was murdered when she was only 5 months old. She was the product of love between two people. Her parents were, Mother, Frederika van Amerongen-Veffer and her Father, Philip van Amerongen. Sonja’s Mother was a seamstress and her Father a butcher. Just regular…
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Sophie is the girl on the left in the above picture. Today would have been her 90th birthday. She was born on 16 March 1932 in Amersfoort. She was transferred via Kamp Vught to Camp Westerbork on 23 May 1943. There were 1172 people on that transport. 1171 Jewish Dutch citizens and one other, possibly…
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Although Westerbork wasn’t an extermination camp but transit camp, it didn’t mean that no one was murdered there. It is often referred to as a ‘humane’ camp, but there was nothing humane about it. Only 751 people were murdered there, now some will say that some died and were not murdered, but I don’t subscribe…
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I am a member of several history websites receiving daily notifications about events that happened in history this day. Today, I received a notification of the anniversary of the 1945 death of Anne Frank at Bergen Belsen. I don’t know how they came to that conclusion, because the exact date of Anne and Margot Frank’s…
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I know that looking back on history with a retrospective view always comes with a 20/20 vision, nevertheless it is important to understand that it was widely know what was happening to the Jewish population in Europe throughout World War 2. Too often I have heard the argument that no one knew until after the…
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There are times when I am so eager to tell the story of one of the Holocaust victims. But then there are times. like today, where I am happy that I don’t know anything more then just the name of a child. Because I know it would have broken my heart in millions of pieces.…
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Following is the transcript of the report from the World Jewish Congress on the annihilation of Jews in Europe which was issued on December 1,1942. I just want to make it clear that these are not my word. Bizarrely we live in a time where I feel compelled I have to mention this, because despite…
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Theresienstadt, also known as Terezín, was a town in northern Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), it was used from 1941 to 1945 by the Nazis as a walled ghetto and concentration camp and was also used as a transit camp for western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In 1943, the…
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It is often believed that the Allied Forces were not aware of the mass killings. The fact is, they were aware but chose to ignore it. Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance fighter, and diplomat during World War II. In late 1942, Karski was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and Izbica,…
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In 1943, 19 trains left Westerbork for Sobibor. Over 34.000 men, women, and children from The Netherlands made this journey. Not knowing where they would go, thinking they would be resettled. Most of these people were all murdered within a five months of arriving in Sobibor. Only 18 people out of all these Dutch transports…
History of Sorts 