Eva Lavi remembers the showers in Auschwitz (1.43 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRzGE2WWq9c
A Holocaust Survivor Recalls The Day He Was Liberated (3.29 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3TYsR3oDZU
How I escaped the Holocaust (6.48 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcc8xCZ35KI
Those who stood firm
In a time when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party was engulfing Europe in hatred and fear, everyday heroes emerged to stand up to the terror. They made the choice to stand by their values and stand up against the Nazis. Some of these heroes survive the war, others weren’t as fortunate. All of them, however, demonstrated an admirable quality even in the darkest of times.
Let us read more about these individuals and their remarkable stories.
Janusz Korczak
Korczak with friends and children
Picture taken from: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/korczak.html
A short video biography of Janusz Korczak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGwnMgEx6b8 (4.35 mins)
From the very beginning of the war, Korczak took up activities among the Jews and Jewish children. At first, he refused to acknowledge the German occupation and heed its rules. He refused to wear the Jewish yellow badge, and as a consequence spent some time in jail. However, when the economic situation took a sharp turn for the worse and the Jews of Warsaw were imprisoned in the ghetto, Korczak concentrated his efforts on the orphanage, seeking to provide the children there with food and the basic conditions to survive. Polish friends of Dr Korczak reported that they went to see him in the ghetto and offered him asylum on the Polish side, but he refused to abandon the children to save himself. Nothing is known about their last journey to Treblinka, where they were all murdered by the Nazis. After the war, associations bearing Korczak’s name were formed in Poland, Israel, Germany and other countries, to commemorate his courageous work.
Freddie and Truus Oversteegen
Forced to live under the dangerous rule of the Nazi Party, these Dutch teenage siblings worked to resist Nazi authority in the Netherlands by distributing illegal newspapers, harboring fugitives, helping Jewish people escape detention facilities and concentration camps, and smuggling Jewish people to safety. Both girls received arms training to shoot occupying soldiers. They also helped to set explosives to railroads and bridges, and fearlessly engaged themselves in any way they could to undermine Nazi control. They lured, ambushed and killed German Nazis and their Dutch collaborators. On these missions, Freddie was 14 and Truus was 16. They were exceptionally good at following a target or keeping a lookout during missions since they looked so young and unsuspecting. Both sisters shot to kill but never revealed how many Nazis they assassinated.
The teenage Dutch girls who seduced and killed Nazis – BBC REEL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuT_Wd7-kq4 (4.57 mins)
Virginia Hall
General William Donovan presenting Virginia Hall with the Distinguished Service Cross, September 1945.
Image taken from: https://www.history.com/news/female-allied-spy-world-war-2-wooden-leg
Virginia Hall signed up with the U.S. Office of Strategic Service (OSS), a precursor to the CIA. During World War II, Nazi officials were constantly hunting down resistance fighters and the allied spies who aided them. But there was one foreign operative the Third Reich held special contempt for—a woman responsible for more jailbreaks, sabotage missions and leaks of Nazi troop movements than any spy in France. She was an American, Virginia Hall, but the Nazis knew her only as “the limping lady”.
In 1944, months before the D-Day invasion at Normandy, Hall rode a British torpedo ship to France, and disguised as a 60-year-old peasant woman, she criss-crossed the French countryside organising sabotage missions against the German army. In one U.S. Office of Strategic Service (OSS) report, Hall’s team was credited with derailing freight trains, blowing up four bridges, killing 150 Nazis and capturing 500 more.
After the war, Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest U.S. military honors for bravery in combat. She was the only woman to receive the award during World War II. Back home, she continued to work for the CIA until her mandatory retirement at age 60.
These stories reveal the importance of standing up selflessly and courageously against injustice and cruelty.
After the experiences of World War I and World War II, it is imperative that the world does not go into another armed conflict. War is disastrous and has devastating consequences. Other than physical destructions to countries and the loss of innocent lives, those who are affected by war would most definitely suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Lest we forget, the impact of war will always be long-term and devastating, even to those who are on the ‘good side’ or to those who are ‘victorious’.
Would you stand your ground to assert what is morally right despite facing objections from others?
Explain your answer.
Historical Fiction:
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
- Once by Morris Gleitzman
- Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust by Victor E. Frankl
- The Choice by Edith Eger
- Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Historical Non-fiction:
- Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich
- Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley
- D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose
- The Ghost Army of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived the Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and Other Audacious Fakery by Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles
Sources:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/korczak.html
https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen
https://www.history.com/news/female-allied-spy-world-war-2-wooden-leg
https://www.history.com/news/heroes-resisted-nazis-world-war-ii
https://www.readitforward.com/essay/article/best-wwii-nonfiction-books/
https://historycollection.co/the-gutsy-teenage-oversteegen-sisters-killed-nazis-during-wwii/3/
