We are all familiar with the Holocaust, known as the Shoah or the Hebrew word for calamity, and the unspeakable tragedies that occurred at concentration camps. Unfortunately, there were other places filled with sorrow and grief that served as temporary deportation stations; Drancy is one.
The Jews had lived quietly and unobtrusively in [...]

Read the rest of this entry

From 1940 to 1945, a concentration camp located in Mauthausen, Austria was a place of torture and murder for hundreds of thousands of people during World War II.   Prisoners consisted of men, women and children from various races and creeds.  By 1945, more than 15,000 or over 19% of the total prison population were children [...]

Read the rest of this entry

Auschwitz, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, Poland, was a complex of three concentration camps, Auschwitz I for death, II for slave labor, and III for transport.  It was the scene of one of the world’s greatest tragedies, the mass genocide of over one million Poles, European Jews, and Roma people (the gypsies) in the darkest [...]

Read the rest of this entry

The Anne Frank Museum officially opened in 1960 to visitors from around the world, the curious, the incredulous, and the sorrowful.  In early 1942, Otto Frank and Herman Van Pels began preparing their office building in a nondescript old part of Amsterdam in the hopes of avoiding detection and capture by the German Nazis.  Their [...]

Read the rest of this entry