When I visited Berlin a number of years ago, I was surprised by the number of plaques embedded in the city’s streets that contain the name of Jews sent to their death by the Nazi regime. I was equally impressed by the myriad neighborhood memorials that many visitors might easily miss: a wall at a…
I recently purchased at auction an important document consisting of an original draft order to expedite Nazi Germany’s slave labor program, with editing changes in Adolf Hitler’s handwriting. The document clearly demonstrates Hitler’s personal interest and involvement in this murderous program, an important aspect of the Holocaust, and presumably other war crimes as well. It…
There is a crescent stretch of beach and the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. There is a two-hour wait at customs to get in, and swarms of mosquitos that move into the house you’ve rented at dusk. God help you if you tarry too long on that beach, admiring that sunset, if you’ve forgotten the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. January 1945 – Czestochowa Ghetto, Nazi-Occupied Poland With the Soviet Army fast approaching, German soldiers have begun liquidating the ghetto’s last surviving residents in advance of a hasty retreat. Knowing that capture means nearly certain death, a man desperately searches for a place to hide. Around his…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The Dutch tax authority is seeking payment from an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor for a pension stipend that she is receiving from Germany for her employment as a child in forced labor. The Tax and Customs Administration demanded in summer that Inge Prenzlau pay a portion of her $156 monthly compensation stipend from…
If you think of slavery as a thing of the past, limited to the antebellum South and the Haggadah, you’d be well advised to read Alex Tizon’s Atlantic cover story, “My Family’s Slave.” It’s the story, kind of, of Eudocia Tomas Pulido – Lola to Tizon and his relatives. But more than that, it’s the…
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
We’ve had a lot of bad presidents. But David Frum thinks the one we inaugurated on Friday is the worst — ever. And he’s making very clear that his characterization includes all the men who’ve led the country. The worst human being ever to enter the presidency, and I include all the slaveholders. — David…
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