World War 2

  • October 5th,1942, was one of the darkest if not the darkest days of WWII for my hometown of Geleen, at the time it was a small mining town in the south east of the Netherlands, in the province of Limburg. Shortly after 21.30 the alarms sounded,warning the population of an imminent attack. The bombing  did…

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  • Reached the age of 3

    Reached the age of 3 it says in some places. Reached the age of 3, that is me .Reached the age of 3, but that is not only me. For I am so much more them just the age of 3. I am a child whose only ambition it was to become 4. If I…

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  • Although there were many Dutch who with disregard of their own safety and lives were willing to help their Jewish fellow men and women, however there were  also those who ceased the opportunity to fulfill their own evil ambitions and joined the SS. I know there will be some who say that some of these…

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  • This must be one of the most amazing events I came across, but amidst all the killing, torture, deportations and other horrors in Camp Westerbork, they actually found time to set up a football competition. Initiated in the Spring of 1943, the competition had several teams of Jewish inmates and was a welcome distraction. It…

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  • Like lambs to the slaughter they were led.But with one significant difference, lambs were treated more humanely. They were not tortured before death. I recently saw the movie “The Resistance Banker” it has one subtle but yet powerful scene, no words were spoken. A regular passenger train is stopped to facilitate a transport train to…

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  • Excursion to Dachau

    One might be forgiven that the title implies a current school trip to Dachau, but the title refers to another kind of trip to the notorious death camp. The Dutch Nazis, the NSB. did not have the same level of hatred against, Jews,Roma and disabled people as their German counterpart. Himmler was aware of this…

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  • Holocaust in words

    It is said that a picture paints a thousand words , and it does, but that also means that sometimes a picture is just to horrible to look at it, for just a glimpse can evoke a thousand emotions. There are so many images of the Holocaust which are just to gruesome to view, However…

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  • I had planned to do a blog on the horrors of Babi Yar, but I decided against it. Firstly because there is not one word I could write which best describes the depravities committed by the Nazis,both German and Ukrainian. (Notice dated September 28, 1941 in Russian, Ukrainian with German translation ordering all Kievan Jews…

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  • When the world turned color.

    I remember one of my sons , when he was a toddler, asking when the world turned color. I had to laugh at the innocent question, for he thought that prior to color movies and TV, the world had been black and white. To answer his question, well at least from a TV perspective, it…

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  • The killing of innocent lives is despicable enough, but trying to make a profit out of it in the most deceitful way is beyond evil. Giving people hope that somehow they will survive, where there really was no intention of sparing their lives, sickens me to the core. Shortly after the armistice between Italy and…

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