Major Crimes and True Crime

Elie Wiesel was forced on a death march out of Auschwitz 80 years ago #OTD. He and his father, Shlomo, were made to walk miles on foot in the freezing cold. "I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much," Elie wrote in his book "Night." "If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities—my body and me. I hated it." With Soviet forces approaching and the German army in retreat, SS guards sent more than 60,000 prisoners away from Auschwitz, westward into Germany in mid-January 1945. A smaller number of prisoners, most of whom were too sick to move, remained behind.  Elie and Shlomo were later placed in open freight cars, which rolled through German towns and past German civilians. “They would stop and look at us without surprise,” Elie wrote. “One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out o...

As families hugged goodbye and people hastily wrote letters to loved ones, photographer Mendel Grossman captured their final moments in the Łódź ghetto. In January 1942, German authorities began deporting Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chełmno killing center. By the end of September 1942, they had deported approximately 70,000 Jews from Łódź to Chełmno. Though personal photography was banned in the ghetto, Mendel secretly documented these scenes. Mendel did not survive the Holocaust. After the ghetto's final liquidation in 1944, he was deported to Königs Wusterhausen, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Mendel likely died on a death march during the camp's evacuation in 1945. Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Leopold Page Photographic Collection #Holocaust #History less

Hannah Szenes risked her life to return to Nazi-occupied Europe and try to aid her fellow Jews.  Hannah had left her home in Budapest in 1939, but, during World War II, she refused to stay safely on the sidelines.  Hannah joined the British Army along with a group of young Jews and parachuted into German-occupied Europe in March 1944. Their mission was to organize resistance against the Nazis and help rescue Allied personnel.  Hannah landed in Yugoslavia and later crossed into Hungary, where she was captured with a radio transmitter. She was held and tortured for nearly five months but refused to give up the transmitter's code. Hannah was eventually executed 80 years ago #OTD.  Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Beit Hannah Senesh less

Fred Flatow was just ten years old when Nazis burned down his synagogue in Königsberg, Germany, during the violent riot known as Kristallnacht—the "Night of Broken Glass”—in November 1938. Kristallnacht was the culmination of anti-Jewish harassment and violence that followed Fred throughout his childhood. Just a few years before, Fred had been subjected to antisemitic bullying by his non-Jewish classmates at a German public school. The synagogue became a refuge for Fred after he transferred to a Jewish school there. After Kristallnacht, Fred squeezed through a hole in the fence next to the destroyed synagogue and visited the ruins.  “Why I went [back], I cannot recall,” Fred reflected. “It was maybe to say goodbye to the synagogue that had been such a home to us … . One day when I was in there, I found a small children's Torah.” In the summer of 1939, Fred’s father, Erich, had a close call: one of his employees framed and denounced him to Gestapo. The Gestapo officer gave Eric...

When the Benninga family fled the German-occupied Netherlands in 1940, they thought they were leaving the horrors of World War II behind. They were among just a couple hundred European Jews who managed to escape to the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony comprising present-day Indonesia. Chana Arnon Benninga was less than two years old when her family arrived in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).  The war, however, caught up to them when Japan (Nazi Germany's ally) occupied the Dutch East Indies in March 1942. The Japanese occupation was harsh. In addition to their mistreatment of Indonesians, the Japanese interned Europeans. Eventually, Chana’s father was arrested and imprisoned. Chana, her mother, and her grandmother spent the remainder of the war in a number of internment camps. The camps were overcrowded, water and food were scarce, and disease was rampant due to poor nutrition and lack of sanitation. During her time in the camps, Chana found comfort in children’s books. Her mother r...

OnThisDay in 1945, top Nazi officials were led into a courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) was in session. "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been ... so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," declared US Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in his opening statement. The 24 defendants were charged with crimes against peace; war crimes; crimes against humanity; and conspiracy to commit these crimes. They were to answer for these crimes in front of a panel of judges from each of the four major Allied countries—France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.  Nineteen defendants would be convicted.  In the following years and with the support of the IMT, US military courts conducted 12 more trials in Nuremberg. Hundreds of other trials were carried out in the Allied zones of occupation and in nations that fought in World War II. Howe...

"That was second nature with me—singing, dancing, clowning around. And that helped me tremendously when I was deported." Before starring in the 1960s TV hit "Hogan’s Heroes," playing a French POW, Robert Clary survived several concentration camps.  In 1942, Robert, born to a Jewish family in France, was deported to the east along with his parents. He was just 16. In Nazi forced labor camps, Robert’s singing talent became a means of survival. He remembered performing for inmates at one camp he was sent to and having the SS come to watch at another. Robert concluded that maybe “they had such a terrible life hitting us and killing us that they wanted to be entertained too." Following a days-long death march, Robert was eventually evacuated by train to the Buchenwald concentration camp.  After liberation in April 1945, Robert reunited with some of his siblings. He later learned that his parents had not survived. In 1949, he immigrated to the United States. In 1965,...

In 1941, Ester Bachar’s parents, Yaffa and Blagoye, placed their infant with her grandparents in Kosovo for safety while they joined the partisans. Ester's life was about to change completely.  In early March 1942, when Ester was less than two years old, the German forces arrested all the Jews in their town. Ester and her grandparents were interned in a transit camp. While they were in the transit camp, Ester’s grandparents asked Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljic, a Roma woman who had worked in their household for many years, to take Ester. Hajrija smuggled her out of the camp and changed Ester’s name to Miradija. Ester lived with the family for several years, speaking only the Roma language. After the war, Hajrija was told that Ester’s family had all died. Hajrija planned to raise Ester as one of her own children, though she had told Ester about her true name and history. When local police discovered that the Imeri-Mihaljic family was sheltering a Jewish child, representatives from the Jewis...

Established #OTD in 1941, the Theresienstadt ghetto was described as a "spa town" by Nazi propaganda. In reality, conditions there were horrific.  Uri Hanauer was one of the few child survivors of Theresienstadt. Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1940, Uri was initially somewhat protected from Nazi persecution, as both of his parents, Hans and Ursula, had Jewish fathers and Christian mothers. In 1941, Hans was arrested for anti-Nazi activities. Uri and Ursula went to live with Uri's Christian grandmother for the next few years. Just days after she died in 1944, Uri, his mother, and his grandfather were deported to Theresienstadt.  Uri and his family spent nine months in the ghetto. Starvation and disease were rampant, and the fear of further deportation was constant. Tens of thousands were sent from Theresienstadt to ghettos, killing sites, and killing centers in German-occupied eastern Europe.  Uri, Ursula, and Uri's grandfather were liberated at Theresienstadt in 1945. Ha...

 "We arrived in Riga ... You could hardly move because of the cold," remembered Susan Taube about her deportation to the Riga ghetto. "They pushed us in apartments and no light, no heat, nothing." In mid-October 1941, Nazi authorities began deportations of Jews from the German Reich to ghettos in occupied eastern Europe. In late November, the first trains from Berlin arrived in Riga. Many never arrived in the ghetto—instead they were taken to the nearby Rumbula Forest and shot.  In January 1942, Susan—along with her mother, grandmother, and sister—was forced onto a train car in Berlin that would take her to Riga. Shortly after arriving, Susan's grandmother, Jettchen, was taken away, never to be seen again.  Susan recalled that the Nazis took away children, the sick, and the elderly. "People they figured could work, they kept them alive for a while." Jettchen was murdered in the forest outside Riga.  Susan, her sister, and her mother would spend nearly ...

Barbara Marton Farkas never forgot the moment she realized the Soviet army was closing in on Weisswasser, the subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp where she was imprisoned. "During the night we start to hear all kind of noises: airplane and shooting, and they said that the Russia are starting ... to get closer and closer.” 80 years ago #OnThisDay, Soviet forces liberated Gross-Rosen, but they found only a few prisoners still there. As the Soviets approached, Barbara and tens of thousands of other prisoners were evacuated from the camp and many of its subcamps. “They evacuate the barracks, and they put us on feet to walk.” Despite being so close to liberation, it would be months before Barbara would finally be free.  Barbara had been deported to Auschwitz along with her family and others from her Jewish community in Hungary more than six months earlier, in mid-1944. After a few months, Barbara was transferred to Weisswasser. A registered laboratory technician before the wa...

"Men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms," reported journalist Edward R. Murrow, about his experience at Buchenwald concentration camp following its liberation. "Death had already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes." At the start of the war in Europe, Murrow was a rising broadcast journalist. Reporting in London during the Blitz, Germany's air assault on Great Britain, he risked his life to bring the sounds of war into American homes. These reports cemented Murrow's reputation as a trusted source.  In 1942, Murrow reported on mass murder by the Nazis. "What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered." More than two years later on April 15, 1945, while reporting on the liberation of Buchenwald, Murrow witnessed the aftermath of Nazi atrocity firsthand.  Murrow's account was the first testimo...

Marta Peková's life would be changed forever when Nazi Germany invaded the Czech lands and occupied her hometown of Prague #OnThisDay in 1939. Marta, her husband, Karel, and their young daughter, Alena, pictured here together circa 1939–1940, quickly realized they were trapped in Nazi-controlled Prague with no means or opportunity to emigrate. Along with the rest of the Jewish community in Prague, the family was subjected to numerous antisemitic laws and policies.  In December 1941, Karel was forcibly relocated to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Less than two weeks later, Marta and Alena were also sent there.  After several weeks, Marta and Karel found each other. Conditions in the ghetto were horrible—Marta and Karel were required to carry out forced labor assignments and had to live separately. Marta remembered meeting up with her husband after a long day of work, each of them bringing a small piece of food and combining them to make “dinner.” The family remained in Theresienstad...

 "The Jewish population was getting smaller and smaller." —Lublin ghetto survivor Lucine Horn #OnThisDay in 1942, German authorities started clearing out the Lublin ghetto. Within a month, they rounded up ghetto residents and sent most of them to the Belzec killing center, where the majority were murdered upon arrival. Because the Nazis forced Lucine and her family to complete work deemed essential, they were temporarily marked safe from the deadly transports. Lucine later managed to escape Lublin and traveled to Warsaw, where she survived the Holocaust by using a false identity.  By mid-April 1942, at least 25,000 Jews from the Lublin ghetto had been killed. Most had been sent to Belzec, while hundreds of others had been murdered on the spot in the ghetto or in mass shootings. Pictured here is a deportation from the ghetto. Photo: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research less

“I knew I was starring in a real-life drama, yet I felt almost nothing,” wrote Susan Rubin Suleiman in her memoir. “It was as if everything were happening to someone else.” After the Nazi occupation of Hungary #OnThisDay in 1944, Susan was hidden with Christian farmers. Being separated from her parents at age four was traumatic, and when her mother left her with strangers, Susan wiped her tears and promised herself the farmer’s family would never see her cry again. When her mother came back to get her a few weeks later, Susan barely said hello to her. Later, Susan came to understand the coping mechanism she developed during the Holocaust: “When confronted with a devastating loss, grit your teeth and move on.” After reuniting with her parents, Susan and her family survived the rest of the Holocaust under false identities. Yet most Hungarian Jews did not share Susan’s story of survival. In just over a year, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered 500,000 Jews in Hungary. Click the lin...

“How many homelands play cards in the air as the refugee passes through the mystery” —Nelly Sachs, “Flight and Metamorphosis,” 1959 Nelly Sachs had no idea that when she reached out to one of her favorite novelists the correspondence would change the course of her life.  As a young Jewish girl in Berlin, Nelly developed a love of literature that inspired her to write her own poetry and prose. She was especially fond of fairy tales and legends and drew inspiration from the works of Swedish novelist and Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlöf.  After Nelly wrote her first book in 1921, she sent a copy to Selma, who replied, "Many thanks for the lovely book! I couldn't have done it better myself.” Thus began a friendship that would span nearly 20 years. In November 1938, the night of antisemitic violence known as Kristallnacht convinced Nelly that she could no longer safely remain in Germany. She reached out to Selma for assistance, writing, “I would be grateful with every fiber of my ...

"Dear ma'am, please be mother to her and give her your heart."  In tender letters, Eda Kuenstler gave instructions to the Catholic woman who had agreed to care for her baby in February 1943. As Jews in German-occupied Poland, Eda and her husband, Salek, knew their daughter was at risk and desperately wanted to find shelter for her. Just weeks before the SS and police murdered 2,000 Jews and deported others, the couple smuggled baby Anita out of the Krakow ghetto.  They placed her with the family of Sophia Zendler, who had three children of her own. In her letters, Eda asked Sophia to dip a pacifier in sugar when Anita became fussy. She sent “kisses for the beloved baby” and wrote Sophia “begging you as a mother” to take care of little Anita. Eda survived two labor camps and imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She eventually reunited with Anita. Salek was killed in the Mauthausen camp. Click the link in our bio to see the letter. Photo 1: Anita with rescuer Sophia...

"There we were in that train, over a hundred people," Holocaust survivor Leo Schneiderman remembered about his deportation from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in August 1944.  "The only facility in the train was two buckets for over a hundred men, women, and children. ... It was unbearable hot. Lack of air." The Germans and their allies and collaborators used the European rail network to deport Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe to ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers.  #OnThisDay 34 years ago, the German railcar on our third floor became the first artifact to be installed in the Museum. Because of its immense size and weight, moving it into the Museum through any kind of door was impossible. So it had to be lowered in by crane during construction. Leo was liberated in May 1945. #Holocaust #OTD #History #WWII less

Ida Fensterszab was born on November 18, 1929. Ida was born in France to Jewish parents. Ida’s story is different from the ones I usually post, as she is given the rare chance to tell her own story. As Ida remembers it…  “I was detained at midnight on January 30, 1944, by two French gendarmes in the little village of Jeune Lie, in the Deux-Sevres. I was fourteen years old. My parents had hidden me with a French family beginning in June 1940. The night of my arrest, I was hoping to escape through the door-window of my room, but the woman who was taking care of me told me that the gendarmes had orders to take her husband if they didn’t find me. Many neighbors, including a member of the local council, tried to convince the gendarmes not to take me. In vain. So I left with my little bundle and a few provisions in the black Citroen that was supposed to take me to police headquarters in Melle. As we drove off, one of the two gendarmes wiped his forehead and said, “What a terrible job!” B...

Edith Meyer was born in 1920 in Saxony, Germany.  She was Jewish, the daughter of Rosa Rebekka and Max Meyer. She had two siblings, Alice and Ernst. She lived at Hauptstraße 133 in Langenfeld. She was twelve years old when Hitler came to power in January 1933. A few years later, the Nuremberg laws were passed, which severely restricted the rights of German Jews, including their right to marry non-Jews.  This was a problem for Edith, naturally, but especially because she was in a relationship with a Catholic man, Heinrich Heinen. Edith finished an apprenticeship in corset making and after that, she and Heinrich were engaged. They were very in love, even though all the circumstances of the time did not want them to be.  In 1941, Edith was arrested from her home and sent to the Riga Ghetto. Heinrich followed her, and willingly went into the ghetto to be with her. He saved her by helping her escape. Now, the two of them had to escape to somewhere safe. The two of them were on...