#holocaustremembrance

Did you know Black Germans were also persecuted during the Holocaust?

Gert Schramm was just 15 years old when the Nazis arrested him and imprisoned him in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Born in Germany in 1928 to a Black American father and a white German mother, Schramm was targeted under Nazi racial ideology that labeled Afro-Germans as “non-Aryan” and racially inferior.

Although Afro-Germans were a small community, they were still subjected to discrimination, harassment, and state violence. Black children were pushed out of schools, families lost jobs, and hundreds of Afro-German youth were forcibly sterilized as part of the Nazi effort to erase so-called “undesirable” populations.

Unlike the genocide carried out against Europe’s Jewish population, the Nazis did not implement a single, systematic extermination program specifically targeting Black Germans, and because of that, there is no exact historical record of how many Black people were killed in camps. But historians confirm Afro-Germans were imprisoned, abused, and in some cases murdered under the Nazi regime.

And although Black people still face widespread racism across the world today, the number of researchers and historians who have explored the persecution of Black people under the Nazis in any meaningful depth remains relatively small.

Schramm survived Buchenwald..and after the war, he refused silence. In his memoir, My Father Was a Negro: Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann, he documented what it meant to be a Black teenager living under Nazi rule, ensuring Afro-German voices would not be erased from Holocaust remembrance.

His story is a reminder: Black history is global. Holocaust history is broader than many are taught. And remembrance must include every life they tried to erase.

It was not just a diplomatic gesture — it was a moment of shared humanity. A tribute to the millions of innocent Jewish lives lost in one of history’s darkest chapters. In honoring the victims of the Holocaust, India reaffirmed a timeless truth: that hatred can never define our future, and that remembrance is a sacred duty.

Standing at Yad Vashem, the silence spoke louder than words — a silence filled with grief, reflection, and a promise. A promise that such horrors must never be allowed to rise again.

India’s homage was a message to the world: we remember, we stand against hatred, and we choose compassion over cruelty.

“The Children of Lidice — 82 Voices Silenced, A World Still Listening”

They were 105 children — torn from their mothers, taken into the darkness, and never returned. The world must never forget Lidice.

On June 10, 1942, the small Czech village of Lidice was erased from the earth.

It was a brutal retaliation for the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich — but the punishment fell on the innocent.

And among the most heartbreaking victims were the 105 children of Lidice.

First separated from their mothers, they were told they were being relocated.

What awaited them instead was one of the darkest decisions of the Nazi regime.

The children were transported to a school in Kladno, then to a camp in Łódź, Poland.

There, they lived in hunger, sickness, and fear.

Then came the final deception:

They were told they would soon rejoin their mothers.

82 of them were taken instead to the Chełmno extermination camp — and murdered in gas vans.

Only a small handful were selected as “racially suitable” and taken to Germany for forced Germanization.

Those children survived — and decades later, two even met Pope Francis in 2017, carrying the weight of the memories few could imagine.

Today, the world remembers them.

A haunting bronze memorial — 82 children cast in cold metal, forever still — stands in Lidice as a tribute.

Cities around the world adopted the name “Lidice” so the village would never be forgotten.

And in the Czech Republic, an international children’s art exhibition continues each year, keeping their memory alive through creativity, not silence.

Lidice is gone — but the children’s voices remain.

And as long as they’re remembered, history cannot erase them again.

Ottla Kafka, the younger sister of famed writer Franz Kafka, made an unthinkable choice on October 7, 1943. Imprisoned in the Terezin ghetto during the Holocaust, she volunteered to accompany a group of orphaned children being sent to Auschwitz. She knew what that meant.

She could have tried to survive. But instead, she chose to be with them—to comfort them, protect them, and give them even a flicker of peace on their final journey.

When the train arrived at Auschwitz, Ottla was murdered in the gas chambers, along with the children she refused to abandon.

She was not famous. She didn’t write books. But in the face of monstrous cruelty, she showed us what it means to be human.

Ottla Kafka’s name may be a footnote in history—but her courage was unforgettable.