Sobibor

  • Sweet angel Rudolf, you would have had 85 candles on your birthday cake today. How I wish I could have helped you blow them out. That would have been 85 candles—one for each year of your life. You weren’t given the opportunity to see five candles on your cake all those years ago. Rudolf de…

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  • A Murdered Family

    The photograph above is of Gezina de Leeuwe-de Jong with her four children. I presume the photo was taken by her husband and the father of the children, Louis de Leeuw. I reckon that’s why he is not in the picture. He was a son of Barend de Leeuwe and Sientje van Minden. He married…

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  • Nelly Vega was a Dutch from Amsterdam minding her own business. She was a little girl doing her homework in front of a painting with some cows, a bridge and a field. A little Dutch girl. Little did she know she would become an enemy of the state. There were men, and perhaps women, who…

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  • When I do posts on the Holocaust, I always try to do them with as little emotion as possible. I try to be objective as humanly possible. The reasoning I use to write without emotions is if I didn’t, I think I would get mental problems down the line. However, sometimes, I let my emotions…

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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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  • “As long as a name is mentioned, someone is not forgotten,” meaning if you mention the name of one person, that person is remembered. I know it sounds quite obvious, but when you think about it for a minute, it is the essential first step to ensure that the Holocaust will not happen again. I…

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  • David Eduard Izaks would have celebrated his 90th birthday today. He was born on 14 April 1933 in Woerden, the Netherlands. He was the youngest son of Eliazar Izaks and Henriëtte Izaks-Glaser. He had two brothers, Gerson and Salomon Albert, and a sister, Saartje Henriëtte. The family lived at 83 Voorstraat in Woerden. In 1941,…

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  • Rosette Levie was deported to Sobibor in June 1943 from Vught via Westerbork on the so-called children’s transport She was born in Amsterdam on 24 February 1938. She was murdered in Sobibor on 11 June 1943 at age five. Dear Rosette, you never made it to your first school day. You were denied your first…

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  • Below is a press cutting from the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. “Everything was taken care of down to the last detail. Nice practice material—not too heavy—logically composed, neatly executed in class, wonderful order and leadership, in one word sublime. …The jury was also enthusiastic and awarded the Kleerekoper corps a total score of 316.75 points,…

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  • We now live in an era when we consider 73 years a young age to die. Isaac Michel Max Rosenbaum lived for only 73 days. He was born in Amsterdam on 19 January 1943. The Nazis murdered him at Sobibor on 2 April 1943. His father was Ephraim Izak Levie Rosenbaum, who lived with his…

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