“Do You Remember, When” - An Online Exhibition
What was it like to live as a young Jew in Berlin during the Nazi deportations? This exhibition details the life of Manfred Lewin, a young Jew who was active in one of Berlin’s Zionist youth groups until his deportation to and murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Manfred recorded these turbulent times in a small, hand-made book that he gave to his Jewish friend and gay companion, Gad Beck. Mr. Beck, a Holocaust survivor who again lives in Berlin, donated the booklet to the Museum in December 1999. The exhibition centers around the 17-page artifact, which illustrates the daily life of the two friends, their youth group, and the culture in which they lived.
(via ushmm)
During WWII, an unlikely alliance between a German, a Jew and a Japanese official helped saved the lives of thousands. Moses Zupnic and Wolfgang Gudze helped Chiune Sugihara as defied protocol to write transit visas for over 2,000 Jewish refugees.
Moses would join other Jewish survivors after the war. Wolfgang was reluctantly forced to join the Nazi army and was never heard from again.
After being captured and held in Soviet internment camps, Chiune Sugihara lost his position with the Foreign Ministry and lived unknown an unappreciated in Japan until a year before his death in 1986.
Holocaust Memorial Day
The president of the German parliament called on Germans to actively stand up to all forms of right-wing extremism, speaking on the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“It is these people who set an example and demonstrate courage,” Bundestag President Norbert Lammert said in remarks commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Memorial Day falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.
Norway on Friday also offered for the first time a long-delayed apology for the country’s complicity in the deportation and deaths of Jews during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
In a moving speech in the Bundestag, the prominent Polish-born German literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, reminded parliament of the systematic torture and organized mass murder of European Jews launched by Germany under Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
Reich-Ranicki, who is 91 and frail, grew up in a Jewish family and later survived the Nazi purge of the Warsaw ghetto.
“They had only one goal; they had only one purpose - death,” he said referring to Nazi claims at the time that they were simply resettling Jews.
The Germans set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into the district under appalling conditions. Most of those who survived that fate soon found themselves confronted with another: the transportation to death camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Nazis finally burned the Warsaw ghetto to the ground in April 1943.
Prior to his appearance in the Bundestag, Reich-Ranicki told the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper that he had mixed feeling about his speech.
“I don’t know if I can do it, if I am up to the task to talk about the fate of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. A day never goes by without thinking about it,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews and others were deported and put to death in Auschwitz
Poland also marked the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with a Catholic Mass for the victims at a church in Oswiecim, the town where the concentration camp was located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Some 30 survivors attended the mass.
City officials paid tribute to the victims by laying wreaths and flowers at the site of the former death camp, which now serves as a memorial and museum.
“Auschwitz is a warning against hate in the private and public sphere, against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” said Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski.
“Auschwitz will remain a wound on the soul of Europe and the world,” he said.
Author: Gregg Benzow (dpa, AP, AFP)
Editor: Nancy Isenson
Source: DW
German president says remembering Holocaust a ‘national duty’
Dignitaries from around the world gathered on Friday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nazi conference that planned the systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II.
Friday’s ceremony was held at the villa on the Wannsee lake on the outskirts of Berlin, which is now a Holocaust memorial. It was there that 15 senior Nazi officials adopted the “Final Solution” on January 20, 1942 - a plan approving the organizational details of how to register and transport Jews from across Europe to be killed in concentration camps.
President Christian Wulff referred to the plan as the “darkest chapter of German history” and called the memorial site, which opened as a museum in 1992, “a place of German shame.” He assured visiting dignitaries, including Israeli minister without portfolio Yossi Peled, that modern Germany would come to the aid of Jews worldwide if they were facing persecution.
Referring to the recent discovery of xenophobic crimes in Germany, Wulff promised that hatred towards foreigners would not be allowed to take root.
In November it emerged that a neo-Nazi gang may have been behind the unsolved murders of 10 people, mainly shopkeepers of Turkish origin, between 2000 and 2007.
The president called for those who supported and helped the group to be found and brought to justice, and promised the victims’ families that German authorities would “do everything so that terror and murderous hatred for foreigners and the unknown never again have a place in Germany.”
LGBTQ* Memorials, Plaques and History
Gay Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany
Above is the short film footage played on a loop inside the Gay Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Opened in 2008 - the memorial recognizes the 55,000 men held in concentration camps for “crimes against the state” and “crimes against nature” (as stated in Germany’s Paragraph 175). It is approximated that 15,000 of these men were executed in the concentration camps.
This is a very interesting question and thoughtt if you haven’t seen this yet, you should.
