World War 2
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Henio Zytomirski was a 9-year-old boy who was gassed at Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland on November 9, 1942. In 2005, a project called “Letters to Henio” was started in Lubin, Poland. Each year on April 19, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland, pupils and citizens of Lublin are asked to send letters addressed to Henio…
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Moffenmeid is a designation for women who had relationships with German soldiers during the occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, or there was suspicion of their doing so. The word mof is a swear word for German—the English equivalent is Kraut. The women in question were sometimes pro-German or prostitutes, but often, they…
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Art can be a powerful medium when expressing emotions or illustrating life as experienced. Artist Bedřich Fritta who was born Fritz Taussig expressed his experiences of the Holocaust via art. Fritta was captured and deported on 4 December 1941 to the Theresienstadt ghetto. His wife and son followed in 1942. Fritta and other illustrators in…
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Adolf Eichmann was executed on midnight 31 May 1962, in Tel Aviv. He was one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Dr Martin Földi was one of the witnesses during the trial. There are a few lines in his testimony that describe the horrors of the Holocaust, from the perspective of a parent, better…
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As World War II drew to a close in the spring of 1945, the Axis powers were in full retreat, and the Allied forces had made significant advances across Europe. Yet, even in the final days of the conflict, the Atlantic and surrounding waters remained dangerous for Allied shipping. One of the last naval actions…
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The average book contains around 110,000 words. It’s estimated that approximately 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust. If each victim’s name were listed—just their names, without any stories or details—it would take about 100 books to include them all. But most victims had three names: a first, middle, and last. That triples the…
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Theodoor van Gogh Although Theodoor van Gogh was not an artist himself, he was the great-nephew of one of the most renowned painters in history—Vincent van Gogh. Theodoor, known as Theo, was born in Amsterdam and was the uncle of filmmaker, columnist, and public intellectual Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004. In 1941,…
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On April 29, 1942, the Nazis announced a new humiliation for Jewish Dutch citizens. Starting on May 3, they were required to wear an identifying mark: a six-pointed yellow Star of David with the word “Jew” in the center. This star made it possible to recognize Jews in public. The German occupiers intended this to…
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s Allied forces closed in on Germany in early 1945, the SS began evacuating inmates from camps like Dachau in a series of forced marches, hoping to hide evidence of atrocities and prevent liberation by the Allies. Prisoners, already debilitated by starvation and disease, were forced to march dozens of miles in the brutal cold…
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(Update from the November 2016 blog) One aspect of history I find particularly difficult to grasp is the collaboration of some Jews with the Nazis. On the one hand, I understand that self-preservation is a powerful human instinct—survival at any cost can drive people to make unimaginable choices. Yet, conversely, it’s hard to reconcile how…
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