Personal Stories

Five years on since I was invited to participate in the NS Beratung conference on historico-political education and the role of descendants of Holocaust refugees and survivors, my connection with…

May 3, 2023 marks the 78th anniversary of the bombing of the prisoner ships in the Bay of Lübeck. For this occasion, we interviewed Bernard Jeune. His father was among…

In 1985, the last two letters from the imprisonment of Elisabeth Sztwiertnia, my great-aunt, from 1944, fell into my hands for the first time. She was the big sister of my grandmother Maria Zabrzynski. Before that it was always said that she had died in Berlin in a bombing raid.

In 1939 the German-Jewish Birnbaum family ended up at Camp Westerbork in the East of the Netherlands, near the German border. Father and Mother Birnbaum cared for German-Jewish children who…

In 2016 Maryse Kluck wrote a letter to her great-grandfather Anton van der Lugt who she never met because he had died in a German concentration camp.

One of the goals of the Stichting Oktober 44 is staying in touch with the relatives of the victims of the Putten raid that took place on the 1st and…

Maria Grazia Gori Casati grew up without getting to know her father Italico. He died in a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp in April 1945. In 2017, 73 years…

Jörg Watzinger has already been dealing with the history of his family during National Socialism for a long time. His father Dr. Karl Otto Watzinger survived the Dachau concentration camp.…

The son of a former prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp reports My father, Dr. Karl Otto Watzinger, was born in 1913. He grew up with two siblings in an…

His parents, Herta and Carlheinz, already joined resistance groups against National Socialism as teenagers. Because of their political activities, they were first imprisoned already at a young age. In his…