Westerbork
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I am Dutch, and I always will be proud to be Dutch, but there are some things in my country’s history that really trouble me, even to the extent that it nearly sickens me. The Dutch bureaucracy is well known to be very efficient, which can be very beneficial, but it can also be destructive
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Dutch Christmas is slightly different from other Christmas celebrations. On the 5th of December, the Dutch celebrate “Sinterklaas” Saint Nicholas, although it is the same figure as Santa Claus or Father Christmas. There are subtle differences in the “configuration” Sinterklaas doesn’t come from Lapland but from Spain and arrives on a steamboat and a white
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Max Ehrlich (1892-1944) was one of the most celebrated actors and directors on the German comedy and cabaret scene of the 1930s. But his brilliant career was brutally interrupted by the rise of Nazism and his resulting deportation in 1942 to Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands. Amazingly, there behind the walls and barbed wire,
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At first, I was reluctant to use the word beauty in the title because we now live in an era where some people might find that offensive, and they will scream about it. I pity them because they lose out on so much. Etty Hillesum was a beauty in every sense of the word. It
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Compared to other concentration camps ,Westerbork was ‘reasonably’ safe and life was less harsh there, But that is also what made it a more sinister place. From 1942 to 1945, Westerbork was a transit camp (Durchgangslager) located in the Netherlands. As a transit camp, Westerbork served as a temporary collection point for Jews in the
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The biggest group of Holocaust victims were the Jews, an estimated six million were murdered between 1933 and 1945. The second biggest group were the Gipsies (Roma and Sinti). During World War II, it is estimated that more than 500,000 Sinti and Roma from all over Europe were murdered by the Nazis in what has
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I’ve written about Eddy Hamel before, but I wanted to revisit his story as we’re in the middle of the FIFA World Cup qualifying campaign, with the finals set to take place in the United States — in East Rutherford, New Jersey in 2026. I hope his memory will be honored then. Eddy Hamel was
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The one thing that always baffled me is the vehement hate the Nazis had for Jazz music. It was considered “Entartete Musik”—degenerate music, a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazis to Jazz and also other forms of music. I wrote a piece about Johnny & Jones before, this is not so much a
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I was going to write an article about Ursula Gerson, who was murdered in Auschwitz on September 6, 1944, at the age of 8. But then I saw there were more Dutch Jewish children and Jewish refugees, who fled Germany and Austria with their parents, who were murdered that day. Duifje Gans was murdered in
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On 3 September 1944, Anne Frank and the seven others living in hiding at the Secret Annex were put on the last transport to Auschwitz, along with over a thousand other Jewish prisoners. One of the cruellest jokes (for lack of a better word) the Nazis played was to pretend these journeys were return trips
History of Sorts 