“Schindler’s List” is considered to be the best Holocaust movie. Steven Spielberg based it on Thomas Kenneally’s novel “Schindler’s Ark”. The book is historical fiction, but features several real persons including Oskar Schindler and Amon Goth. Ralph Fiennes gained 28 pounds to play Goth. When asked what it was Read more…
The only mass escape from a concentration camp occurred on Oct. 14, 1943. Sobibor was an extermination camp located in eastern Poland. As part of Operation Reinhard, trains full of Polish Jews were taken to the camp starting in May, 1942. In the next 18 months, 170.000-250,000 Jews were Read more…
The most serious concentration camp uprising occurred on Oct. 7, 1944 at Auschwitz-Bergen. The mutiny was by the Sonderkommandos. These Jewish men were forced to help with the gas chambers. Some of them worked the “changing room” where the victims had to disrobe and turn over possessions. Others had Read more…
In May, 1940 Heinrich Himmler issued a decree entitled “The Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East”. It outlined the Nazi plan to eliminate the Polish people by the gradual process of slave laboring them to death. However, why waste all the children who had Aryan potential? Boys and Read more…
Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest, Hungary during WWII. Although Sweden was neutral, Wallenberg was not. He refused to stand by and watch the Holocaust occur in Hungary. It is estimated that he saved as many as 100,000 Jews from death from July to December, 1944. He Read more…
After three days without food or water (or bathroom facilities), the two men emerged from the wood pile and began their journey to freedom. Rudolf Vrba (19 years old) and Alfred Wetzler (26 years old) were inmates in Auschwitz. Both men were obsessed with bringing the true story of Read more…
Irma Grese was the blonde, blue-eyed daughter of a German farmer. Her mother committed suicide as age 13 and she was raised by a strict, violent father. Indoctrinated in the greatness of Nazism at school, she joined the League of German Girls when she left home at age 14. Read more…