January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. In Israel, the day is also known as Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Memorial Day. Today, we remember the stories that shed light on one of … Read the article
When Hartmut Topf was a small boy, he was captivated by puppets. On a warm summer’s day in 1930s Berlin, he would sit with his sisters under the blossom of the fruit tree in the family’s back … Read the article
Since the summer of 1941, the Nazis had been mulling over how to implement Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ and in August of that year, they discovered a horrible possibility. When testing a delousing agent, … Read the article
It was March 1941. Nearly a year had passed since I had been born, and despite my parents’ continued optimism, conditions were getting worse, not better.
Still, Żarki remained an open ghetto and, … Read the article
Until the mass eviction of German Jews to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp had a predominantly Czech Jewish character. At the end of 1941 it accommodated 7,545 Jews from Prague and Brno. Over the next six months 26,524 Jews … Read the article
If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those that deal with … Read the article
The House of Dreams has been maturing for twenty years. A book that took three to finally research and write. It is inspired by the story of Varian Fry, … Read the article
The mass migrations of European peoples to this country in the late 19th and 20th centuries have become such clichéd events in American history that we often forget that the United States was not the only refuge … Read the article