the Netherlands
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In the corner, worn and scuffed, it lay,A silent witness to a world gone gray.Its leather cracked, its latches weak,It held the echoes no voice could speak. Ingrid de Vries, a child so small,Born in Amsterdam, one crisp fall.Her laughter danced in the autumn air,A fleeting joy—beyond despair. Her suitcase—packed with careful hands,By those who…
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It is a sensitive and often overlooked subject. I’m not certain whether suicides were completely included in the Holocaust statistics. In this blog, I focus specifically on the situation in the Netherlands, but I believe this was likely the case in all occupied territories—and possibly beyond. Suicide emerged as a tragic yet significant response to…
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While Jewish identity was traditionally defined by religious beliefs and cultural heritage, the Nazi regime considered Jewishness a racial characteristic, making conversion to Christianity irrelevant in terms of escaping persecution. Many Jews sought refuge in Catholicism, hoping that baptism would provide protection from Nazi oppression. However, in most cases, conversion did not shield them from…
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Nowadays, people often complain when a train is running late, me included, by the way. However, recently, I have changed my way of thinking about that. Throughout Europe during World War II, the military used the railways to accommodate an industrialized scale of murder. It could only work if the trains ran on time. The…
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Maurice Blik is a British sculptor and a former President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He is known for his figurative male sculpture. He was born in Amsterdam on 21 April 1939. Many pieces of his art were influenced by his experiences in Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp as a young child. His father…
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The picture above is of an Opel Bliz troops transporter, Opel is one of the companies that provided the Nazi regime with equipment but also with funding. But Opel was not the only company. Funding the Nazis already started early 1930s. Nineteen representatives of industry, finance, and agriculture signed a petition on November 19, 1932…
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Earlier this week I had one question and one statement about concentration camps. The question was “What are the differences between a concentration camp and an extermination camp?” This question I will try to address as much as possible in this blog. But before I do that I want to mention the statement which was…
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Sometimes I struggle with finding a suitable title for a post. As it was for this post, but then he thought using just the raw data as the title is probably the best tribute for this family. The Family is the Chaim family Julius Chaim moved to Nijmegen on 15 October 1940, from Amsterdam. He…
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On this day in 1953, flooding in the North Sea killed more than 1,500 people in the Netherlands and destroyed one million acres of farmland. The storm also caused death and destruction in Great Britain and Belgium. A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm over the North Sea caused a…
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It’s interesting how research can lead you to unexpected discoveries. While looking into one topic, I stumbled upon something even more compelling: the photograph above. It’s an identification photo from the Herzogenbusch Concentration Camp, aka Vught concentration camp, in the Netherlands, depicting prisoner Martinus T. Barbier taken by the camp photographer on January 20, 1944.…
History of Sorts 