On April 29, 1945, the
Dachau concentration camp was liberated. Today, on Reddit, with the help of his grandson, one of the
men who liberated the camp did an
IAmA.
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Apr 29, 2013 -
20 comments
In 1974, Leon Leyson was one of a group of Jews who greeted Oskar Schindler when he visited Los Angeles. It was the first time the two had seen each other since the war. He began to introduce himself, but Schindler interrupted: "I know who you are," Schindler said, grinning at the middle-aged man before him. "You're Little Leyson."
On Sunday, the youngest name on Schindler's List passed away at the age of 83. "The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust," he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. "I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jan 14, 2013 -
35 comments
The
International Tracing Service was established following the Second World War to help repatriate forced laborers and survivors of the concentration camps as well as to trace the missing. 67 years after the end of the war, ITS receives about 1,080 requests for information a month, some of which still result in
reuniting relatives.
[more inside]
posted by hoyland
on Nov 27, 2012 -
5 comments
"A farming town hid a Jewish-born teacher during the Holocaust. I went to dig up what it had buried." Though I grew up in America, I have been visiting my family in Poland since I was a child. But it is only recently, since the great debate began two years ago between [Jan] Gross and [Timothy] Snyder over the causes and extent of Polish co-operation with the Nazis during the Holocaust, that I thought to ask the old people of my family village about what happened during the war. My grandparents mentioned bits and pieces of our family’s World War II history over the years, but it often seemed too painful for them to recall, or as though they wanted the memories to simply be forgotten. When I finally decided to broach the topic with them, my grandmother repeated that she didn’t understand why I cared to dig so deep into the past, why I cared so much about Wladyslaw and his story.
[more inside]
posted by nonmerci
on Aug 21, 2012 -
15 comments
Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Apr 16, 2012 -
6 comments
"One thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own."
For Sophia Goldberg (98), Holocaust survivor, change has meant the end of a way of life.
posted by zarq
on Dec 1, 2011 -
34 comments
A Holocaust survivor raised a fist to death. 'Leon Weinstein survived the Warsaw Ghetto. But it is the story of the little girl that he wants to tell.' 'He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us. Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein's note. He puzzled over the baby. Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Aug 5, 2011 -
29 comments
802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
Last year, the unofficial Dean of the White House Press Corps,
Helen Thomas, spoke about the State of Israel on camera.
(Previously) Her
replies:
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jews
"can go home" to
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," sparked media
outrage, prompted her to issue an apology and
retire. After months of being out of the the public spotlight, she has now given
her first long-form interview, which will appear in the April issue of Playboy Magazine. In it, she explains what she meant, tells us how she would like to be remembered and expands upon her positions regarding Israel, Jewish political influence, Presidents Bush and Obama, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
posted by zarq
on Mar 22, 2011 -
224 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
“I am not a hero...I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness.”
Miep Gies, protector of Anne Frank and her family,
passes away at age 100.
posted by dnash
on Jan 11, 2010 -
142 comments
In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims.
They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor
Jan T
Gross published
the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at
Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed
but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the
Kielce pogrom in his new book, "
Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year
after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 25, 2006 -
107 comments
Rudolf Vrba-RIP --he escaped from Auschwitz with another guy, Wetzler, in April 1944 and got to Slovakia and Hungary, telling the world of the atrocities in the Auschwitz Protocol. Some Hungarian community leaders, however (Hungary was the only country that hadn't had its Jewish population deported yet),
were busy making deals with Eichmann for safe passage away.
In any case, the result was that about 1,700 Hungarian Jewish leaders, with their families and friends, ended up in Switzerland, while almost half a million unsuspecting Hungarian Jews ended up dead in Auschwitz. Vrba's report first alerted the world (including the Vatican, Red Cross, and US and British authorities) to exactly what was going on, and helped prosecute some who were tried later.
...Knowing perfectly well that it was the secrecy surrounding their actions that allowed the Nazis to herd unsuspecting Jews and transport them like sheep to slaughter, Vrba and Wetzler — as soon as they got in touch with Jewish community representatives in their native Slovakia — compiled a detailed report. They wrote about Auschwitz and what awaited Hungarian Jews once they arrived: immediate death by gassing.
posted by amberglow
on Apr 11, 2006 -
17 comments
Munich Bans Memorial Plaques Munich has decided to ban memorial plaques to Jewish, Sinti and German citizens deported and murdered during World War Two. Jewish leaders, fearful that the plaques would stir up anti-Semitic fervor, supported the ban.
These plaques are the work of a German artist,
Gunter Demnig.
”He first had the idea in the early 1990s when he was unveiling a memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust.
“An elderly woman approached him and insisted that "no Gypsies ever lived here". "It is so easy for people to deny something. I wanted to ensure that this would not happen," he says. (BBC).”
This reminder of the holocaust brought to mind the
Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, as well as the
Viet Nam Memorial
and the
AIDS quilt -- monuments that really changed me.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk
on Aug 14, 2004 -
22 comments
Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge dead at 81. She just published her book and a documentary of her life premiered hours before her death. She was in his bunker when he committed suicide in 1945 and she took his last will and testament. She died still maintaining that she knew nothing of the holocaust or the depths of the Nazi horror.
posted by Dean_Paxton
on Feb 14, 2002 -
7 comments
The Last Expression project is a forum to explore the roles, functions, meanings and making of art in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, focusing on the notorious site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. ... It is neither widely recognized in the realm of Holocaust history, nor in the discipline of art history, that concentration camp prisoners -- victims of the Nazis -- produced works of art during their incarceration.
[from the Introduction.]
posted by tranquileye
on Feb 12, 2001 -
2 comments
And you thought Microsoft was evil. There appears to be pretty significant evidence that
IBM was involved in automating the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Read more about it
here,
here and
here.
And since we haven't even settled the question of when a nation has atoned for its sins, what exactly
is the statute of limitations for a company's sins?
posted by anildash
on Feb 11, 2001 -
20 comments
