Opening of UN files on Holocaust will 'rewrite chapters of history' | Monday 17 April 2017

Holocaust | Archives | Jewish history | War crimes

Survivors visit the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland on the anniversary of its liberation. Photograph: Kuba Ociepa/Agencja Gazeta/Reuters

 Archive used in prosecution of Nazis reveals detailed evidence of death camps and genocide previously unseen by public

by Owen Bowcott

War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week.

The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online.

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Anne Frank Who? Museums Combat Ignorance About the Holocaust | MARCH 21, 2017

Museums | Holocaust | Exhibitions

By NINA SIEGAL

Anne Frank in 1939, six years before her death. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

 

 

AMSTERDAM — “She hid Jews?”

Aleatha Hinds, 17, ventured a guess about Anne Frank’s identity as she waited in line for two hours recently to enter the museum devoted to that world-famous diarist, who hid with her family in a secret annex for 25 months during World War II.

“No, no, no!” replied several friends, all 11th and 12th graders from the St. Charles College high school in Ontario. “She was Jewish!” they corrected her, in unison.

“She was hiding in her father’s factory,” said Eric LeBreton, 16. “The Nazis were looking for all the Jewish people because Hitler was trying to do genocide.”

With attendance swelling to 1.3 million annually, from one million in 2010, the Anne Frank House has begun reckoning with a striking dimension of its popularity: Many of the younger and foreign visitors who flock here nonetheless have little knowledge of the Holocaust — and sometimes none about Frank. The museum and some others dedicated to Jewish life are seeking new ways to address a declining understanding of World War II and the genocide that took the lives of six million Jews in Europe, efforts that have increasing relevance as anti-Semitic incidents intensify across parts of Europe and the United States. Read more...

 

 

During the internment, Japanese American teens created this heartbreaking scrapbook about camp life: Hope and hardship in the desert

Japanese internment | Racism | Immigrants 

February 17, 2017

Stephanie Busk | timeline

The cover of “Out of the Desert.” (San Francisco State University)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Masako was curled in a cozy ball listening to the radio when the news bulletin aired. The U.S. government would be forcing Japanese Americans from their homes.

Soon, her friends in Los Angeles began to disappear. First No-bu, then Aiko, then Chiyeko. They were each sent to different camps. Masako wondered, Will I be next?

Then the announcement came. Her family had mere weeks to sell or store their belongings. As Masako walked through her beloved neighborhood, she was close to tears. When she visited her best friend Irene, an Irish girl, she burst with sorrow.

The day finally came. Masako boarded the train that would carry her family away. She reached out the window and clasped Irene’s hand one last time. As they departed, Masako watched her friend become a tiny dot in the distance.

Masako was an autobiographical character invented in 1942 by Nancy Karakane, a high school junior interned at the Poston Concentration Camp. Karakane’s short story appears in Out of the Desert, a scrapbook made by teenagers that depicted life behind barbed wire. Read more...

Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals Subject of Traveling Exhibit | At Your Library

Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals Subject of Traveling Exhibit | At Your Library

Thousands of homosexuals, primarily gay men, perished at the hands of the Nazis in concentration camps by the Nazis along with millions of Jews and other victims including, Roma (Gypsies), Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the handicapped during World War II and the Holocaust.
The story of what happened to homosexuals in Nazi Germany is the subject of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945.” The exhibition has been circulating to cities across the country. More than two years in development, it is the first major exhibition on the subject for English-speaking audiences and draws on materials from more than 40 archives and other repositories in eight countries. Read more...

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