All posts tagged: Holocaust

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Published by José Betancourt

In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then to England and finally to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I didn’t immediately look at the fifty or so typescript pages he produced for family consumption only. But, in 2019, after my partner and I had bought an apartment in Berlin and I’d applied for German citizenship, I fished out his reminiscences and read them, newly curious about the life into which he had been born. The memoirs were more engaging than I’d expected. Though he had been dead for fifteen years, my father’s bleak, anachronistic worldview—a mix of old haute European class consciousness, bitterness, and civic-mindedness—became vivid again. One section left an especially strong impression on me. He devoted several …

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, remember the rescuers and allies

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, remember the rescuers and allies

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — I was 10 years old when I first learned about the Holocaust. My family gathered in our den to watch a television documentary, “Let My People Go,” a history of the Jewish people. It featured footage from the ghettos and death camps. My family watched in silence, until my mother broke the silence by saying: “And now you know why we will never own a German car.” That was my first lesson on the depth of evil. But some months later, there was a second lesson, on the heights of goodness.  I had a friend whom I will call Ira. An old woman, Anya, lived in his house and spoke little or no English. I assumed she was my friend’s grandmother. “No,” he corrected me, “she’s the lady who hid my mother in a closet during the war. My mother was so grateful to her that she brought her to the United States with her.” Right after Ira became bar mitzvah, his family made aliyah (moved to Israel), and we lost touch. Ten …

Ex-Staffers Say Holocaust Museum Canceled Programming to Appease Trump

Ex-Staffers Say Holocaust Museum Canceled Programming to Appease Trump

Published by José Betancourt

Two former employees say the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., altered content on its website and canceled long-planned programming preemptively to avoid angering the Trump administration. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one ex-staffer told Politico that museum administrators appeared to be “trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change.” The changes come amid a broader effort by President Donald Trump and his administration to control museums through executive orders, singling out institutions within the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, which he accuses of indulging in “anti-American ideology.” In a social media post last August, he said museums nationwide are “essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” USHMM is an independent museum with no connection to the Smithsonian. Related Articles A USHMM web page titled “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed at some time after August 29, 2025, the last time it was saved on the Internet Archive, Politico reports. The page included lesson plans and resources drawing connections between legalized racism in the US …

Holocaust survivors in France came home to stolen apartments, looted furniture and bureaucratic hurdles

Holocaust survivors in France came home to stolen apartments, looted furniture and bureaucratic hurdles

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — In 1945, an angry mob confronted Aba Mizreh and four of his sons outside their former home in Paris. The Jewish family had hidden in Lyon during World War II, only to learn that their apartment had been looted and rented in their absence. Despite an eviction notice, the new tenants refused to leave, leading to a street fight. Following the violent confrontation, Mizreh wrote to the French government. “Don’t I have the right, after having suffered so much, to get my property back?” he asked. “Haven’t I really paid enough for this war?” Mizreh, then 68, was just one of the 160,000 Holocaust survivors from Paris who struggled to rebuild their lives after the devastation of the Nazi occupation. Of his 11 children, five sons had fought for France and six of his children had been deported; at least two were murdered at Auschwitz. Now he simply wanted to return to the two-bedroom apartment that served as his home and furrier workshop in order to support his wife and orphaned grandchildren. …

Congress Expands Holocaust Art Recovery Law, Targeting Museum Defenses

Congress Expands Holocaust Art Recovery Law, Targeting Museum Defenses

Published by José Betancourt

Congress has moved to give new life to a law meant to help families recover art stolen during the Holocaust, while at the same time reopening a long-running battle between heirs and the institutions that still hold those works. The US House of Representatives on Monday approved an extension of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, a 2016 law designed to make it easier for victims’ descendants to bring restitution claims decades after the fact. The measure, according to the New York Times, which had already passed the Senate unanimously, now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk. Related Articles At its core, the change is about time. The original law gave heirs up to six years to file a claim after identifying a looted work, sidestepping the usual statute-of-limitations arguments that museums have often used to block cases. But courts have still, at times, leaned on the passage of decades to dismiss claims, arguing that it leaves current owners unable to mount a fair defense. The new bill tries to close that door. It would limit …

Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won

Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — On the cold evening of Feb. 27, 1943, Charlotte Israel gathered with a small crowd of women on the Rosenstrasse, a narrow street in central Berlin. They were not Jewish, but their husbands were, and the men had just been arrested in a sweeping roundup of more than 9,000 Berlin Jews. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust’s murder of 6 million Jews, called this arrest a “de-judaization of the Reich.” Nearly 2,000 of those arrested had non-Jewish wives and were crammed together in a building on the Rosenstrasse. Israel and the other women who had gathered outside resolved to return the next day. Early the next morning, as she approached Rosenstrasse in search of her husband, Annie Radlauer heard a chorus of voices growing louder as she drew nearer: “Give us our husbands back!” The vigil, which sometimes grew into collective protests, continued off and on until March 6. This protest still raises questions about how Hitler ruled and about attempts to rescue German Jews. Families …

The populist right’s ‘worst enemy’: Itself – POLITICO

The populist right’s ‘worst enemy’: Itself – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

“You can win an election, but if you’re not prepared for its consequences, then you become your worst enemy,” he said during a two-hour conversation in his paper-strewn office. “You basically risk being doomed forever.” Across Europe, the movements Furedi is talking about are already testing the political mainstream. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is surging in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has a real shot at the French presidency, and the Alternative for Germany is consistently at or near the top of polls. In Italy and Hungary, Giorgia Meloni and Orbán have already shown what populists in power can look like. Inside his house in Faversham, the conversation turned from Europe’s populist surge to the ideas that might shape what comes next. As Furedi led the way up the stairs, a yapping cockerpoo was hauled away into some back room. At the top of the staircase was a framed poster of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who understood the attraction of radical political movements for the disenfranchised and alienated — and the potential for those …

US Holocaust Museum Acquires Rare World War II Captain America Comics

US Holocaust Museum Acquires Rare World War II Captain America Comics

Published by Jenni Sidey

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has acquired a prized copy of Captain America Comics No. 1, famous for its cover depicting the titular hero punching Adolf Hitler in the face, the museum announced Tuesday. The issue was published in December 1940, nearly a year before the United States entered World War II, and entered the museum’s holdings courtesy of Riot Games cofounder Brandon Beck. Jack Kirby—who, with Joe Simon, created a host of iconic Marvel superheroes—was the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants and later served in the US Army during the war. Related Articles According to the museum, Kirby conceived the now-famous Captain America cover as a not-so-veiled rebuke of the nation’s isolationist stance amid the mounting Nazi threat. The effort proved influential: the widely circulated comic has been credited with helping raise public awareness in the United States of the escalating conflict in Europe. “This comic book holds enormous cultural and historical importance,” Zachary Levine, director of the museum’s Curatorial Affairs Division, said in a statement. Beck also donated an original copy of Captain America Comics No. 46, another …

Georg Kolbe Museum to Return Work to Holocaust Victim’s Family

Georg Kolbe Museum to Return Work to Holocaust Victim’s Family

Published by Jenni Sidey

A landmark sculpture by renowned German artist Georg Kolbe will be removed from public display in Berlin and returned to the heirs of the Jewish family who lost it under Nazi persecution. The 1922 work, Tänzerinnen-Brunnen (Dancers’ Fountain), stood for nearly five decades in the garden of the Georg Kolbe Museum and had become one of its most recognizable pieces. After an extensive provenance investigation, the museum concluded that the sculpture must be restituted because it is regarded as “cultural property looted as a result of Nazi persecution,” museum director Kathrin Reinhardt said. The fountain was commissioned in 1922 by a wealthy Jewish insurance executive and art collector, Stahl, who later served as head of Berlin’s Jewish community. He installed the bronze sculpture in the garden of his villa in the leafy Dahlem district, where it became a centerpiece of the property. Related Articles Kolbe, one of Germany’s most prominent early 20th-century sculptors, was celebrated for his dynamic bronze figures of dancers and athletes. Created during the vibrant cultural years of the Weimar Republic, the …