Poland
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Graphic photos of the Holocaust often tell such harrowing stories, but sometimes it takes just an inventory list of everyday items that are more shocking because it tells the story of people like you and me. They ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and used identical cups and plates. It was only because…
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A picture tells a thousand words, and in this case, they truly do. The drawings and cartoons are made by Emile Franken. I am not sure what happened to Emile. I do know he was born on 15 April 1921 somewhere in the Netherlands and he survived the war. I also know he spent time…
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Renia Spiegel was born on 18 June 1924, in Uhryńkowce, then in Poland and now in Western Ukraine, to Polish-Jewish parents Bernard Spiegel and Róża Maria Leszczyńska. Like many other teenage girls, Renia kept a diary. She started hers at age 15, on 31 January 1939, nine months before German and Slovak troops invaded Poland.…
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The Netherlands is the country with the relatively highest number of Jewish victims in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews, 107,000 were deported. Five thousand people returned from the camps, and approximately 20,000 survived in other ways, most of them in hiding. The persecution and murder of the Jews during the Second World War is…
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One of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust is the “wholesale murder” approach the Nazis took, the industrialization of death. The gassing already started in 1939 as part of the T4 program, the murder of the disabled. What is really sickening is the fact that the first of such killings was at the request…
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On June 20, 1942, the SS guard at the Auschwitz exit was visibly shaken. In front of him idled the car of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the notorious concentration camp. Inside were four armed SS men. One of them—a second lieutenant, or Untersturmführer—was shouting and cursing furiously. “Wake up, you buggers!” he bellowed in German.…
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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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Bizarrely enough diaries were not always used or recognized as evidence or as study material for the Holocaust. researchers tended to dismiss Jewish diaries as subjective and unreliable. Only in the last few decades the value of diaries have been acknowledged. To me there is nothing more powerful of the words of those who lived…
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Before sharing the story of Frits Philips, I’d like to first touch on his family’s background The patriarch of the Philips family is Philip Philips, a Jewish merchant from North Rhine-Westphalia who came to the Netherlands. Little is known about him. He was married to Rebecca van Crefelt. Lion Philips (Zaltbommel, October 29, 1794 –…
History of Sorts 