normblog: Figures from a dark time XI

Some people have had enough of hearing about the Holocaust. Maybe they didn't come across the stories below.

34. The parents of Hans Keilson:

Originally published in Germany in 1933, the Jewish author's work was banned by the Nazi government the following year. Keilson left for the Netherlands two years later. He persuaded his parents to join him there, but could not convince them to live in hiding, as he did, once the German occupation began. They died in Auschwitz.

35. Eva Olsson:

On a spring day in 1944, Olsson, her family and hundreds of other Hungarian Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and shipped to concentration camps. She and her sister, who spent the next year as slave labourers, were the only members of her family to survive.

36. Antoni Dobrowolski and the figure 1.1 million:

The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp - a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland's Nazi occupiers - has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday.

Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
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"Auschwitz was worse than Dante's hell," he recalled in a video made when he was 103.
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At least 1.1 million people were killed by the Germans at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Most of the victims were Jews, but many non-Jewish Poles, Roma and others also were killed there.

37. Roman Halter:

Roman Halter was on one of the first transports into Lodz in 1940, and was on one of the last transports out.

The youngest of seven children, he arrived there from his hometown in north-west Poland in 1940 with his grandfather, father, mother, sister and two of her children. By 1942, the others were all dead.
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"I worked in a metal factory, making spades, buckets and food containers, and our reward was a soup. When you got your soup, you counted how many pieces of potato there were. People who could not work and get the soup were condemned to a slow death, or were deported and died.

"We worked eight hours a day, and you came out of work and you found people lying on the pavement dying or dead. You could not share any bit of your food because it would weaken you and you would have no chance of survival yourself," he said.

38. Knud and Karen Christiansens:

Karen Christiansen, the daughter of Denmark's chief naval physician, Dr Holger Rasmussen, went to Berlin to study at a prestigious cooking school in the 1930s. There, she lived with a Jewish family where she came face-to-face with the horrors of [the] Nazis' brutality. She documented the rise to power in letters to her fianc?, Knud Marstrand Christiansen, a member of the Danish rowing team at the 1936 Olympics.

[Because of] the turmoil in the region, Karen left her studies midway through and returned home - she would go on to join the Danish resistance movement. Meanwhile Knud, then 21, travelled to Berlin for the Olympics and closely witnessed the Nazi-led horrors that Karen had mentioned in her letters. On his return, he joined an anti-fascist group that was quickly becoming popular among his fellow Danes. And there began the heroic saga [detailed in the rest of the article under the link] of a couple who would go on to endanger their lives to rescue Jews from certain death.

39. Wilhelm Brasse:

Wilhelm Brasse, the man responsible for innumerable photographs of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp, died on Tuesday at the age of 95 in his hometown of Zywiec in Southern Poland. As a prisoner of the Nazis himself, Brasse took pictures of fellow inmates at the death camp as well as portraits of SS officers stationed at the infamous facility. He once estimated that he photographed between 40,000 [and] 50,000 prisoners.
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In January 1945, Brasse, together with 60,000 other prisoners, was forced to take part in a westward death march to flee the approaching front. He was held at concentration camp Mauthausen and managed to survive until the camp was liberated by US troops in May 1945.

After the war he returned to Poland, married and had two children. He tried to resume work as a photographer but was too haunted by his experience in Auschwitz. "Those poor Jewish children were always before my eyes," Brasse told AFP in 2009. "There are things you can never forget."

(Previous instalments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Source: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2012/10/figures-from-a-dark-time-xi.html

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