And that’s the worst part for me: nobody went “crazy.” The people of Germany didn’t have a collective psychological episode where they blacked out and woke up to find that, with the connivance of large segments of almost every other European country, they’d somehow slaughtered millions of innocent people.

She and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year.

Unbelievable, I have never thought about that math. My grandmother turns 90 this year, my partner’s Jewish grandmother will be turning 86, exactly how old Anne Frank would be. That past is, as you have illustrated, incredibly recent.

Patrick Desbois! He published a book about his work; I’ve had students read excerpts of it. It’s crazy how long it took for these stories to reach a global audience, though. 

Cohn died at Sobibor, whereas Frank died in 1945 at a camp in northern Germany, Bergen-Belsen. Having uncovered the second pendant, researchers are seeking out relatives of both Cohn and Frank to discern if there is any relation between the families.

These are all excellent points. To add to it— I worked at a Holocaust museum where we had an exhibit on the Einsatzgrüppen (actually titled “Holocaust by Bullets”). A French priest was working on identifying and excavating archaeological sites to find mass graves and also relics of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. And…

The irony is, most of the deception at the time was to prevent victims from realizing what was about to happen to them. From a description of the arrival site at Treblinka:

Nazi Germany did kill others including- from wiki and including documented proof 

Yup, the usual Holocaust number for Jews is 6 million.

The Nazis’ insistence on meticulous records is what dooms them to eternal blame and incontrovertible evidence as to the extent of their crimes. They wanted to show how completely they had saved humanity from the ravages of genetic types like Jews, Roma, the disabled, Slavs, etc. So when I read any kind of…

It’s also very important to remember it, because the amount of effort the Nazis put into concealing the deathcamps is why Holocaust deniers have been able to sound legitimate :/

The preferred term is “Killing Center.” We [Holocaust scholars] try not to call the the 5 Killing Centers (denoted because they had gas chambers) “Death camps” anymore because death occurred at all of the concentration camps, over 40,000 of them. Also, it puts the agency on the killers, and the choices they made to…

It’s those personal items that made the Holocaust museum so powerful to me. The wedding rings. The shoes. Suitcases. All of these little pieces of people’s lives, personal items that meant something to them - had a story behind it. My mind is completely boggled by people that deny that it ever happened, that it could…

The 11 million is a number plucked from the air, intended to de-Judaize the Holocaust. The overwhelming majority of people murdered in camps (both death camps and other camps) were Jews, and the total number of Jews murdered in camps was about 4 million. (Plus about 2 million Jews slaughtered in the fields and…

This is living history. Anne Frank might have lived to be an aunt or grandmother had not people gone crazy. She would be 86 in a better world.

Oh god Treblinka. Smithsonian channel had a show about a woman doing archeology there sometime last year. She uncovered the gas chamber’s foundation and bits of the decorations (apparently deliberately designed to look like a Jewish bathhouse to further lull their victims) but had to stop when she discovered the cache…

Especially because “Mazel Tov” means “Good luck” or “Congratulations” in Hebrew. Why did they get that? Was it a birthday present? A good luck charm? A reward for good grades? A bat mitzvah present? These little heartbreaking leftovers from a person’s life.

This is, uh, a timely discovery.

These little heart-rending human touches do us a service in remembrance. It’s hard to encompass the idea of 11 million people murdered in death camps; it cuts us closer to reality to see the life of one or two of the victims and try to understand what they went through, and then realize that everyone murdered in those…

They also tried to eradicate all traces of Treblinka after an uprising there. But bones and ash and little bits of people’s possessions were still bubbling up from the ground when it rained as long as 60 years later.