Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, has recognized 2,673 Ukrainians as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor conferred on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Nataliia Mariichyn’s great grandparents, Grigoriy and Mariya Palivoda, were among the recipients. They saved Eliezer (Leizer) Buchwald, his sister Shloma and their mother, Berta Leiblich. Their story […]
The French resistance movement battling the pro-German Vichy regime and its ally, Nazi Germany, was a source of hope to persecuted Jews in France. The resistance condemned Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and Germany’s genocidal policy toward Jews, yet the whiff of antisemitism persisted in its ranks. This, in essence, is the overarching theme of Renee Poznanski’s […]
Germans of mixed race ancestry fared badly in Nazi Germany. Thomas Paul Bernstein was one of them, a half-Jew who barely survived the brutalities of the Third Reich. He and his sister, Barbara, tell their story in Holocaust: German History And Our Half-Jewish Family (Cherry Orchard Books/Academic Studies Press), a book of distinction in terms […]
Richard J. Evans, in Hitler’s People: The Faces Of The Third Reich (Penguin Press), focuses on a rogue’s gallery of Nazis who created a fascist dictatorship and drove Germany into war, genocide and defeat in World War II. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality […]
Ilse Koch, a symbol of barbarism in the Third Reich, spent almost 24 years in prison, even as Nazi perpetrators who committed far greater crimes during the Holocaust received relatively light sentences or often escaped prosecution altogether. The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she acquired notoriety for allegedly having […]
To Lithuanian historian Algimantas Kasparavicius, the greatest tragedy of 20th century Lithuania occurred not when it lost its statehood following the Soviet Union’s invasion in June 1940, but a year later, when Nazi Germany stormed into the country and proceeded to murder nearly all of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust. It goes without saying […]
Wolfgang Gerhard, 67, drowned off a beach in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979. His real name was Josef Mengele, a German physician known as the Angel of Death. Mengele was a war criminal who conducted gruesome medical experiments on inmates in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and who funnelled thousands of civilians to oblivion. He carried out […]
During the Third Reich, 3,000 out of 65 million Germans were imprisoned for speaking out against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, a post-war investigator concluded. Which means, of course, that the vast majority of Germans subserviently fell into line with Hitler’s cruel and evil policies. Among the dissenters were a number of men and women from […]
Philip Roth, the late Jewish American novelist and short story writer, was consumed by four related topics — the Jewish community, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitism. His interlocking preoccupations were reflected in his breakout novella, Goodbye, Columbus And Five Short Stories and in intense novels such as The Counterlife, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against […]
At the ripe old age of 84, the political war horse Bernie Sanders is still going strong. The longest serving independent in U.S. congressional history, he has been fixture in American politics since the early 1980s. He was mayor of Burlington, the biggest city in the state of Vermont, from 1981 to 1989. He was […]