the Netherlands
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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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In early April 1945, as the Second World War approached its harrowing conclusion, the Nazi regime intensified its efforts to relocate concentration camp prisoners in a desperate attempt to obscure the full extent of their crimes. Among these efforts was the transportation of prisoners from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt in three trains—each a grim convoy of…
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On April 15,1945 the 63rd Anti-tank Regiment and the 11th Armoured Division of the British army liberated about 60,000 prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. One of the soldiers, 21 year old Corporal Ian Forsyth, called it “A place of darkness and death.” What the British troops encountered was described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby,…
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On April 12, 1943, the Dutch steam merchant ship Ulysses was sunk by German submarine U-563 while part of convoy HX-232 in the North Atlantic. The attack occurred between 04:38 and 04:46 hours, approximately 550 miles east-southeast of Cape Farewell, Greenland. U-563 fired five torpedoes, resulting in the sinking of Ulysses and another ship, Pacific…
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I came across this death notification of Jacob Rosenboom. The reason why it drew my attention was the date. Jacob died on 10 April 1968, the very day I was born. Then when I did more research, I discovered that Jacob had lived in my hometown of Geleen in the Netherlands. The Rosenboom-Wolf family lived…
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I was reluctant to use the title, From Zero to 102 as the title, I didn’t want it to look like a review for a car. However, I couldn’t think of a more suitable title either. The 0 and the 102 are the ages of two victims of the Holocaust. This is how evil the…
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These are students and teachers of the Jewish Lyceum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, July 1942. More than 75% of the Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. There are about 60+ people in this photograph of which most or all were murdered. Most of them are young people. Girls who never again received a Valentine’s card. Boys…
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Max Hirsch was one of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, the cruise ship that left the port of Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with Cuba as its final destination. The vast majority of the passengers were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Across the Atlantic Ocean, they hoped to find a safe haven. However,…
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Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where…
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Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is one of World War II’s most famous personal accounts, providing a powerful and intimate look into the life of a Jewish teenager in hiding. However, many readers are unaware that the original version of Anne’s diary contained passages about her developing sexuality, curiosity about the human…
History of Sorts 