Forgotten History.

On 9th July 1942, nine members of the resistance group De Oranjewacht, [The Orange Guard], (Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands and the name of the Royal family) were shot in the Fort near Rijnauwen, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Two trials were conducted against the resistance group, and nine members were sentenced to death. On the same day, two so-called Engelandvaarders, (England…

I am not going to say if I believe in extra terrestrial life or not ,however I do think we would be quite arrogant to assume that among all the millions of planets and solar system around us, there is no other life. It doesn’t have to be funny looking green men, but I do believe we will have to keep an open mind on this. It all started on June 25th, 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold…

I know that most people will know what the Holocaust is, but for some groups, it had a different name. In this blog, I try to explain some of the complexities. The Holocaust stands as one of the most horrific and systematic genocides in human history. Occurring during World War II, from 1933 to 1945, the Holocaust was the Nazi regime’s deliberate and calculated extermination of six million Jews,…

I don’t want to tell your story, but I have to. It is my duty as a father and as a human being to ensure that no child will ever get treated, they way you were. My heart breaks each time when I see a photograph of innocence—knowing the war destroyed that innocence. What makes the story of Eva and Liane Münzer even more sad and poignant is that they were betrayed, not by their enemies but by the…

(Originally posted on July 7 2022) Tuam is an idyllic town in Ireland. It is the second-largest settlement in County Galway. Unfortunately, since 2014, it has become known for all the wrong reasons. The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (also known as St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home or simply The Home) in Tuam, operated between 1925 and 1961. It was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and…

I can’t think of any place on Earth that was more evil than Auschwitz—although other camps had perhaps more cruelty, it is the scale of the cruelty, torture and murder that makes Auschwitz pure evil, a literal hell on Earth. The photograph above is of Yisrael and Zelig Jacob, the younger brothers of Lili Jacob. They were both murdered in Auschwitz. Below is a photograph of Jewish women and…

Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where I was born, along with a boy called Philibert Steinbach. Most of us will have seen…

When we think of Nazi concentration camps, our minds often conjure images of mass extermination, terror, and starvation. The haunting images of piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen and the crematoriums of Auschwitz are etched into our collective memory. However, in the final years of the Third Reich’s vast concentration-camp system, the Nazis introduced a disturbing addition: brothels exclusively…

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball second baseman who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers, by signing Robinson, heralded the end of racial segregation in…

On 6 July 1942, Otto Frank took his family into hiding in the now-so-well-known secret annex where Anne wrote her diary. Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942. However, Margot received a call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) on 5 July, ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp.…

(Originally posted 1 August 2018) It is safe to say that the Olympic Games is the biggest sporting event.Every 4 years the event attracts the attentions of hundreds of millions sports enthusiasts and also people who have very little interest in sports. for aside from the sports it is also entertainment and especially the opening ceremony. But above the sports and entertainment the Olympic games…

he Netherlands remained neutral during the First World War. However, that did not mean the country was unaffected by the conflict. In the course of 1916, for instance, food shortages began to emerge. In Amsterdam, this led to the so-called Potato Riot in the summer of 1917. Potatoes were the staple food of the common people at the time. During the First World War, their consumption increased…

Recently I heard this bizarre debate on how humane the killing with Zyklon B was. It was so much better then being executed. Fortunately the site where this was debated on was taken down ,unfortunately I didn’t take note of the names. In case if any one is wondering if the killing with Zyklon B gas was humane, let me please destroy that notion. Firstly it wasn’t an instant death, there were some…

(Originally posted on July 25, 2023 on Dr Helmy’s 122 birthday) When you opened your Google page today, you would have seen a doodle celebrating the 122nd birthday of the birthday of Dr Mohamed Helmy. Before I go into the important story of this great man, I want to highlight a disturbing trend that is becoming more and more of a problem. Warnings are now given about the Holocaust. When I opened…

++++++++ Warning: Contains Graphic Images+++++++++ One could be forgiven to think that the photos in this blog are photos of a famine in a 3rd world country, as we have seen so often before. However, these photos are from one of the richest countries in the world, the Netherlands. Towards the end of World War II, food supplies became increasingly scarce in the Netherlands. After the landing of…

On this day, July 5, 1937, Hormel Foods Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, USA, first introduced the product SPAM, a square can of pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch, and sodium nitrite that rolled off the assembly lines 82 years ago during the late Depression era. Hormel created SPAM to capitalize on the previously unprofitable pork shoulder. According to Hormel, SPAM stands…

A picture tells a thousand words, but never the full story. There is nothing more powerful then the words of those who survived the darkest era of mankind. Stimler was born in Poland, in the town of Aleksandrow Kujawski, close to the German border. She was 12 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland , the only daughter of Sarah and Jakob, who owned a small textile shop. She was, she says, “the…