The Holocaust

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Bella Miller shows the number tattooed on her arm as a survivor of Auschwitz. (Viorel Florescu/Staff Photographer)

Holocaust survivor in Wanaque urges compassion as lasting memorial of WWII genocide
By Jeff Green, NorthJersey.com
11 April 2013

WANAQUE — Bella Miller still remembers the day the tattoo was engraved on her arm.

She was inside a barracks at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp in Poland, weeks after she arrived with her family in August 1944. Another inmate dipped a long needle in ink and punched the number into her arm. There were about three minutes of excruciating pain.

“You were not anymore a human being, you were a number and believe me that number will never leave my mind,” Miller said. “A24977: That’s what I was.” (read more)

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Israeli motorists stand still next to their cars on a freeway as a two-minute siren sounds in memory of victims of the Holocaust in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, April 8, 2013. Holocaust remembrance day is one of the most solemn on Israel’s calendar with restaurants and places of entertainment shut down, and radio and TV programming focused on Holocaust documentaries and interviews with survivors. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Israel Honors 6 Million Victims of Nazi Holocaust
By Aron Heller, contributions by Josh Lederman, Associated Press
8 April 2013

JERUSALEM (AP) — Among the crowds marking Israel’s annual Holocaust remembrance day at the Yad Vashem memorial Monday was a retired American Air Force colonel from San Francisco who came to honor a family he never knew.

Bertrand Huchberger was too young to remember his parents, who sent him and his older sister from Paris into the French countryside to escape the Nazi roundups during World War II. For three years he was hidden by Christian rescuers, including a prostitute, before he was put into an orphanage and adopted by American Jews when he was 11 and taken to New York.

Now 75, Huchberger took part in a rite that has become a centerpiece of the Israel’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the genocide by reading the names of his dead relatives: his parents, Alexander and Elenora Noz, and his brother, Albert, who stayed behind in Paris. All were killed. (read more)

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SS guard Schmiller walks past the barn of the Lipa farm labor camp where Jewish workers pitch hay. Photograph courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Oldrich Stransky

Creating a New Map of the Holocaust
By Marc Silver, National Geographic News
8 April 2013

The map of the Third Reich is being dramatically redrawn.

Thirteen years ago, when he started digging into the past to document the number and nature of Nazi-era ghettos and camps, scholar Geoffrey Megargee expected to identify perhaps 7,000 sites. He vastly underestimated his task. More than 42,200 sites will be named in the planned seven-volume encyclopedia that he is editing: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945.

This week is Holocaust remembrance week in the United States, with an official ceremony at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on April 11 at 11 a.m. For the latest insights into the Nazi era, we spoke with Megargee and Martin Dean, editor of volume two of the encyclopedia: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. (read more)

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For earlier articles, please see the “Archived Updates” section.

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