Major Crimes and True Crime

An American officer supports a Holocaust survivor from Budapest at the Penig concentration camp, April 1945. Penig Camp, located south of Leipzig, was a forced labor camp where Jewish women from Budapest were employed in the production of aircraft parts. When soldiers of the U.S. Army’s Third Army liberated the camp, they found 68 Jewish women, all in a state of extreme starvation. The American army ordered staff from a nearby German hospital to care for them.  The photograph was taken by a U.S. Army Signal Corps soldier and distributed by the American military.  Yad Vashem Photo Archives.

Michał Klepfisz was born in Warsaw on April 17, 1913. His mother was a school teacher. His family was Jewish, but not particularly religious. He went to university in Warsaw, where he studied polytechnics. In 1939, after the war started, he lived in Lviv and later in Donetsk. Eventually, Michał heard the rumors of what was happening to his friends in family in Warsaw and came back to the city. He lived outside of the ghetto under a false name: Tadeusz Mecner.  Eventually, Michał became connected with the ŻOB- the Jewish fighting organization in the ghetto. Due to his knowledge in polytechnics, Michał was able to help the resistance produce explosives. He was later caught and arrested. He was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp, but jumped off the train, therefore escaping almost certain death. He was injured from his jump, but made his way back to Warsaw to continue helping the resistance.  When he returned home, Michał helped sneak food and weapons into the ghetto. On Ap...

Women and children on their way to Gas Chamber 4 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944. The photographs are taken from the Auschwitz Album — a unique collection of images captured by SS photographers at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the spring and summer of 1944, documenting the arrival, selection, and looting of Hungarian Jewish deportees. The Auschwitz Album was discovered after the war by Holocaust survivor Lili Jacob in an abandoned house in Nordhausen, Germany. In the 1960s, she made the album available to the prosecution at the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt, and in 1983 she donated it to Yad Vashem. In 1994, the album was transferred to Yad Vashem’s conservation laboratory, and in 1999 it was fully digitized using advanced digital technology. The information accompanying the photographs was integrated into the Yad Vashem Archives database.

Joseph von Hoppen Waldhorn was the French-Jewish son of Rosa (neé Israel) Waldhorn and Michael von Hoppen Waldhorn. He was born in Paris on the 14th of November 1930. He had two sisters: Zalie (1927) and Helene (1922).  His father was a Polish Jew and his mother a Hungarian Jew. Joseph and Zalie were born in Paris while their sister was born in Czechoslovakia, in her mother's birthplace after it was annexed to Czechoslovakia from Hungary. After the German invasion of France, foreign-born Jews were deported first. In 1941, Michael was imprisoned in Drancy where he remained for 6 months. In 1942, not long after he was released, he was once again arrested and sent back to Drancy. 6 days later, he was put on a cattle train to Auschwitz where was murdered on arrival on the 24th of July 1942.  After Michael was deported, Rosa went into hiding in an attic in Paris. She was denounced by an informant and deported to Auschwitz on the 2nd of September 1943. She did not return. Helene man...