Since 1844, millions of photographs have probably been taken of Jerusalem. But these blurry snaps are the very first.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-first-photographs-ever-taken-jerusalem-180949473/
Hessy Taft's baby photograph was selected by Nazi party as the ideal Aryan infant, but Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine never discovered that she was in fact Jewish.
On 23-24 August 1929, over 60 Jews were murdered in what became known as the Hebron Massacre, which would go down in history as one of the bloodiest slaughters of Jewish civilians during British rule of Mandatory Palestine.
Hebron is one of the most ancient cities in the Land of Israel and is the resting place of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. Jews had been living peacefully in Hebron among their Muslim and Christian neighbors for hundreds of years prior to the massacre. A steady flow of religious students traveled to Hebron from the around the world to attend its yeshivot (religious seminaries) in the city.
In August 1929, violent rioters brutally attacked the Hebron Jewish community after the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, a notorious antisemite, claimed that Jews were endangering Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount.
The massacre began on 23 August when local Arabs began staging small-scale attacks. American Jewish immigrant Aharon Reuven Bernzweig, who was visiting Hebron with his wife at the time, later wrote to his family, “We had forebodings that something terrible was about to happen—but what, exactly, we did not know.” He added, “I was fearful and kept questioning the local people, who had lived there for generations. They assured me that in Hebron there could never be a pogrom, because as many times as there had been trouble elsewhere in Eretz Israel, Hebron had remained quiet. The local population had always lived very peacefully with the Arabs.”
By the next day, the violence had escalated, and mobs went door to door screaming, "Kill the Jews." The angry crowd broke into Jewish houses and castrated, raped, and murdered the inhabitants. Many Jews went into hiding, and some were saved by Arab neighbors who hid Jewish friends until the violence had ended.
In his letter, Bernzweig described an Arab family who had protected him and dozens of other Jews: “Five times the Arabs stormed our house with axes, and all the while those wild murderers kept screaming at the Arabs who were standing guard to hand over the Jews. They, in turn, shouted back that they had not hidden any Jews and knew nothing.”
British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor later wrote of the massacre: “The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood.”
The massacre marked the end of the Hebron Jewish community’s continuous presence in the city. While a few Jews returned to Hebron two years later, they were eventually evacuated by British authorities, who did not want to risk the outbreak of another massacre. Jews would eventually return to live in Hebron after the Six-Day War, but the dynamic coexistence that had prevailed up until 1929 would never be restored.
“The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous…” — Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki (pronounced Vitold Piletski) is a celebrated hero in Poland. Yet his incredible story and the extent of his sacrifice remained buried for over 40 years after his execution. Pilecki is the only inmate known to be voluntarily imprisoned at Auschwitz, the notorious concentration and death camp. After his escape, he wrote a 100-page report on camp life.
Pilecki was born on 13 May 1901 to patriotic Polish Catholic parents in Olonets – a small town in what was then the Russian Empire. After serving in the Polish Army, he settled in Lida (then in Poland, now in Belarus). He married a local school teacher Maria Ostrowska in 1931 and had two children, Andrzej and Zofia. Pilecki ran the family farm and enjoyed painting and writing poetry.
In August 1939, Pilecki was called up to defend Poland against the Nazi invasion. Following the defeat, Pilecki made his way to Warsaw to fight with the Polish underground resistance (the Home Army) against Nazi occupation.
In August 1940, a group of Polish political opponents were imprisoned in Auschwitz. Soon after, telegrams arrived to inform inmates’ families of their deaths. This sparked the suspicion of the Polish underground and Pilecki volunteered to investigate.
On 19 September 1940, Pilecki intentionally allowed himself to be arrested by the Nazis. He was detained nearby for two days with an estimated 1,800 Polish political prisoners before being transported to Auschwitz. He remained there for the next two and a half years as prisoner 4859.
Pilecki’s mission was to raise the morale of Polish political prisoners by bringing news from outside the camp, as well as to report on camp conditions to the Home Army in Warsaw. In October 1940, Pilecki successfully sent out his first report with a released inmate. It reached the Polish Government-in-exile in March 1941, who passed it onto the Allies.
At the time of Pilecki’s internment, Auschwitz was a concentration camp intended to hold predominantly political prisoners from Poland. He witnessed the changing demographic and horrifying treatment of each persecuted group. His reports described the early experiments conducted on Soviet prisoners of war, who were murdered with poisonous gas. This laid the foundations for the mass-murder of many Jews in the purpose-built gas chambers and crematoria. Pilecki describes the pain suffered by the Roma and Sinti prisoners undergoing sterilisation experiments against their will; many died from their injuries.
Pilecki quickly found fellow members of the Polish underground and began to create a secret organization within Auschwitz. The organisation ran at great risk. They built a radio transmitter from smuggled parts. Through this transmitter, Pilecki reported on camp conditions and the number of deaths until the risk of discovery became too high.
Pilecki’s bravery and will-power cannot be overstated. In his report he describes the hunger as ‘the hardest battle of [his] life’. He harboured doubts during stays in the lice-ridden hospital ward suffering from Pneumonia and Typhus. He was overwhelmed by his mission at times, but refused to admit it to his colleagues in case it damaged their morale.
Initially, Pilecki’s organisation took a strong stance against escape attempts, owing to the group punishment inflicted on the inmates left behind. However, once group punishment was abandoned, the organisation actively assisted escapees. On one occasion, Pilecki gave up his own planned escape route through the sewers to an inmate in more imminent danger.
Pilecki eventually escaped in April 1943. Key members of his organisation had been shipped to other camps and Pilecki’s transfer was imminent. Pilecki and his two companions had only one night to carry out the complicated plan they had designed together. Failure would result in a public execution by hanging. They successfully removed the bolts from a heavy door whilst the guards’ backs were turned. The three escapees journeyed for 100km on foot before they could rest in relative safety. It took them a week.
Pilecki rested at a colleague’s parents’ home before visiting the nearest member of the Home Army. After three and a half months, and still no action taken by the Home Army to liberate Auschwitz, Pilecki returned to Warsaw.
He fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 but their defeat led to Pilecki’s imprisonment in POW camps in Germany. Here, he earned the nickname ‘Daddy’ from younger inmates, who he looked after.
When the camps were liberated at the end of the war, Pilecki was sent to Italy where he joined the Polish Armed Forces. Whilst here he wrote his comprehensive report on his time in Auschwitz, now known as Witold’s Report. Despite his relative safety in Italy, Pilecki returned once again to Warsaw to gather intelligence on the newly established Polish Communist government. The Nazis had been overthrown, but so had the Polish Government-in-exile. To Pilecki and the Home Army, Poland was still not free, but subservient to their Soviet liberators.
Pilecki was captured by the Communist Polish authorities on 8 May 1947. Accused of spying and of planning to assassinate key figures in the Polish police, he was coerced and tortured to sign his ‘confession’.
Pilecki stood an unfair trial where he was not permitted to testify, nor were there any defending witnesses. The trial was a sham – a deterrent to any other would-be opposition to the Communist regime. He was subsequently found guilty and executed on 25 May 1948 in Mokotow prison with a shot to the back of his head.
In 1990, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regime in Poland, Pilecki was finally exonerated posthumously and recognised for his actions during World War Two.
Before the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Yehudit and Lea were surrounded by a religious Jewish family. This photo was likely taken in March 1943 for the holiday of Purim and sent as a postcard to their father, Zvi, who was serving in a Hungarian forced labor battalion.
Purim, is a lively Jewish holiday that celebrates the survival of fifth-century Jews who were marked for death. Those who celebrate often dress up in costumes and festive clothing.
Two months after the German invasion of Hungary, Yehudit, Lea, and their mother, Rosie, were taken to a transit ghetto. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz. When they arrived, the infamous SS doctor Josef Mengele selected the seven-year-old twins for medical experimentation.
"We had seen that most twins were not coming back together," Yehudit said in an interview with Haaretz newspaper, "so we held hands."
Rosie managed to stay close to her daughters during their time in Auschwitz. Once, according to her daughters, she even tried to stop a medical experiment and was punished with a meningitis injection.
The twins credit their mother for their survival in Auschwitz, "We are alive only because of her," Yehudit reflected. "She combed our hair, bathed us in the snow, and sneaked into our barracks to bring us some bread."
Yehudit, Lea, and Rosie were liberated in January 1945 and were later reunited with Zvi. The family immigrated to Israel in 1960.
Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was a Nazi collaborator during the Holocaust. He met with Hitler, recruited for the Nazis’ Waffen-SS and toured a concentration camp, spread antisemitic propaganda advocating for genocide of Jews, incited violent uprisings targeting Jews resulting in murder of Jews, and acted to block the escape of Jews from the Holocaust:
On November 28, 1941, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni met with Adolf Hitler at a widely covered meeting in Berlin**.**
Throughout the war, in collaboration with the Nazis, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni broadcast antisemitic, Nazi propaganda and anti-Allied propaganda by radio to the Arab world and to Muslim communities under German control or influence. He compared Jews to “infectious disease”, “bacilli”, “microbes” and said that Arabs should kill Jews wherever Arabs found Jews.
In 1942 Al-Hussayni was hosted by the Reich Central Office for Security for an elaborate tour of the Oranienburg concentration camp. At this tour the “educational” value of the camp was discussed, and Al-Hussayni and his entourage inspected household appliances and equipment that the prisoners produced in forced labor in the concentration camp. While there they expressed interest in the Jewish prisoners.
Al-Husayni recruited Arabs to Waffen-SS divisions. Al-Hussayni hoped these units would augment uprisings he planned to foment and become the core of the army of a future pan-Arab state. In 1943, the SS decided to recruit among Bosnian Muslims for a new division of the Waffen-SS. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was enlisted in a recruitment drive. SS Office Main Chief Berger reported that 24,000-27,000 recruits signed up, crediting Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni, stating that the "visit of the Grand Mufti…had had an extraordinarily successful impact.” Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni spoke to the 13th Waffen SS Mountain Division he recruited to, instructing them that Germans and Muslims had a common enemy: World Jewry, England and its Allies and Bolshevism. During the unit’s deployment in Bosnia, the possibility that the unit participated in capture or murder of individual Jews found in hiding or captured cannot be excluded, although such crimes have yet to be documented..
Nazi Germany provided al-Husayni with a lavish villa in Berlin for his office and residence, as well as a generous monthly stipend.
Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni hoped to create a Panarab state, an idea that was for him and his followers inextricably linked to ending Jewish immigration to the land of Israel. After listening to Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni’s speeches, Arab civilians initiated violent riots in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1920 which included the murder of 5 Jews and the wounding of 211 Jews. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was convicted by the British for inciting this violence. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni told Arabs to kill Jews wherever Arabs found Jews. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni advocated removing Jews from the land of Israel and driving every Jew out of Arab lands.
Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni acted to prevent the rescue of Jews fleeing the Holocaust. When Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni learned of efforts to allow Jews to flee to the land of Israel, he demanded that the rescue operations be halted, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni explicitly stated that he preferred that Jewish children be murdered in Poland than rescued from the Holocaust.
Images courtesy of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
References
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-wartime-propagandist
[2] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-key-dates?parent=en%2F11099
[3] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/hajj-amin-al-husayni-meets-hitler-for-the-first-time
Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish doctor and author. Goldszmit first gained fame in the early 1900s writing storybooks for children and childcare books for adults. Born into a highly assimilated Polish Jewish family in Warsaw in the late 1870s, Goldszmit trained as a pediatrician. He developed groundbreaking views on raising children, urging adults to treat them with both love and respect. As his reputation as an author grew, Goldszmit became known throughout Poland as Janusz Korczak.
In 1911, Korczak took a position leading a new Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. For decades, he and his close colleague, Stefania "Stefa" Wilczyńska, operated the children’s home according to Korczak’s philosophies on raising children. Every child in the home had duties and rights, and everyone was responsible for their actions. The home itself was run as a “children’s republic.” The young residents regularly convened a court to hear grievances and dispense justice.
Korczak also gave the children of the home central roles in the production of Mały Przegląd (The Little Journal). Mały Przegląd was a regular supplement published in the Polish-language Zionist newspaper, Nasz Przegląd (Our Journal). Unlike many other children’s periodicals at the time, the children themselves chose the topics they wrote about and determined what would appear in the pages of their newspaper.
Korczak’s national profile grew as he began making radio broadcasts as “the Old Doctor.” He read stories, interviewed children, and lectured in a casual style that made his weekly show popular with both children and adults. Rising antisemitism in Poland in the mid-1930s caused Korczak to lose this position. However, he briefly made regular broadcasts again during the weeks following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Korczak tried to encourage and reassure his listeners until the partition of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union later that month.
In fall 1940, German authorities created the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish community was forced to pay for the construction of a wall that separated the area from the rest of the city. Conditions in the overcrowded and undersupplied ghetto were extraordinarily difficult. Starvation and disease caused dozens of thousands of deaths, leaving many children orphaned and unattended.
Korczak’s ghetto diary records his constant struggles to provide food and medicine for the growing number of children under his care. Although he was beginning to struggle with his own health, Korczak spent much of his time seeking donations and carrying food back to the children’s home. His diary also describes how he tried to preserve the children’s mental and emotional well-being. The small staff did their best to maintain some semblance of the home’s normal, daily routine even in the miserable conditions of the ghetto. They kept the children focused on their studies and organized lectures, concerts, and theatrical performances.
In late July 1942, German authorities began the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to their deaths at the Treblinka killing center. Korczak’s Polish friends outside of the ghetto offered to help him escape the deportations by hiding him or providing him with false identity documents. Korczak would not consider leaving, however. He and his staff decided they would not attempt to save themselves. Rather, they would continue taking care of the children for as long as they possibly could.
In early August 1942, German authorities deported the residents of all children’s homes within the Warsaw ghetto. On the morning of August 5 or 6, German police suddenly arrived and ordered Korczak’s staff to evacuate their building. Korczak, Wilczyńska, and the rest of the small staff quickly assembled the children outside. With their dedicated caretakers assisting them, nearly two hundred children walked through the crowded streets of the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz (deportation site). Korczak and the staff tried to keep the children from panicking. Witness accounts describe the group’s march through the ghetto as orderly and dignified.
After they arrived at the Umschlagplatz, Korczak and his staff boarded train cars along with the children. These trains carried deportees to the Treblinka killing center, which was located roughly sixty miles northeast of Warsaw. Conditions in these hot and overcrowded cattle boxcars were extremely dangerous for the malnourished and ill people packed tightly inside. Many individuals died on these deportation trains. Virtually all of the Jews who survived the deadly journey from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 were murdered shortly after their arrival. The children and their caretakers were almost certainly all killed the day they arrived at Treblinka.
Janusz Korczak’s career as an author, a doctor, and a champion of children’s rights continues to inspire educators and childcare experts today. Korczak was equally proud of his Polish nationality and his Jewish identity. He is celebrated by Polish and Jewish communities alike for his life’s work and the sacrifices he made for the children in his care.
Source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/janusz-korczak-1
President Bush's Chief of Staff Andy Card whispers into the ear of the president to give him word of the plane crashes into the World Trade Center, during a visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida.
What is the Tiananmen crackdown?
On 4 June 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on students and workers who had been peacefully protesting for political reforms in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of people were killed, including children and older persons. Tens of thousands more were arrested across China in the suppression that followed.
What were the protests about?
In April 1989, university students in Beijing gathered in Tiananmen Square to draw up a list of demands broadly centred on political and economic reforms, but also including calls for an end to corruption, censorship and limits on basic rights. In the weeks that followed, their demands drew wide public support, from pensioners to veterans to farmers. Millions joined peaceful demonstrations that took place across China.
The Chinese authorities failed to persuade the demonstrators to return home. As tensions escalated in Beijing, martial law was declared on 20 May 1989. On the night of 3 June 1989, heavily armed troops and hundreds of armoured vehicles moved into the city centre to ‘clear’ the pro-democracy demonstrators from Tiananmen Square.
How many people were killed?
An official report issued by the Chinese authorities at the end of June 1989 claimed that “more than 3,000 civilians were wounded and over 200, including 36 college students, died during the riot”. The report also stated that several dozen soldiers died. While the exact figures remain unknown, the official figure for deaths is likely a serious under-reporting.
Relatives of victims, survivors and human rights defenders who have come together as the Tiananmen Mothers have, despite severe threats and intimidation, collected their own tally of fatalities and call every year for the government to provide a full account and acknowledgement.
How has the Chinese government responded?
Immediately after the military crackdown, the authorities began to hunt down those involved in the demonstrations. Many civilians were detained, tortured, or imprisoned after unfair trials. Many were charged with ‘counter-revolutionary’ crimes.
In the 36 years since the crackdown, all discussion of the incident has been heavily censored in China, as authorities have effectively attempted to erase it from history. Public commemoration or mere mention, online or off, of the Tiananmen crackdown is banned.
Regularly since 1989, activists in mainland China have been detained and charged with “subversion” or “picking quarrels” if they commemorate those who were killed, call for the release of prisoners or criticize government actions during the Tiananmen crackdown.
The government has never accepted responsibility for the human rights violations during and after the military crackdown or held any perpetrator accountable. With each year that passes, justice becomes ever more elusive.
What happens on the Tiananmen anniversary?
Commemorating the Tiananmen crackdown has long been forbidden in mainland China. However, every year on 4 June from 1990 to 2019, up to hundreds of thousands of people joined a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to remember those killed. They called on the Chinese authorities to reveal the truth about what happened and accept accountability for the fatalities.
The vigil was banned in 2020 and 2021, ostensibly on Covid-19 grounds, and since then repressive new laws such as the 2020 National Security Law have effectively criminalized peaceful protest in the city.
Every year the vigil in Hong Kong featured a recorded message from the Tiananmen Mothers, who are still seeking a full government account of the deaths, lawful compensation and investigation of criminal responsibility.
What happened to people who commemorated Tiananmen in Hong Kong?
The Hong Kong Tiananmen vigil was organized for 30 years by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (Hong Kong Alliance).
Alliance vice-chairperson Chow Hang-tung and 25 activists were prosecuted in 2020 simply because they insisted on lighting candles in Victoria Park despite the government prohibiting the vigil that year, ostensibly on Covid-19 grounds. In 2021, after the police banned the vigil once again, Chow was arrested on 4 June after encouraging people on social media to commemorate the crackdown by lighting candles.
Ultimately, Chow was jailed for 22 months for taking part and inciting others to take part in an unauthorised assembly. She and fellow Hong Kong Alliance leaders Lee Cheuk Yan and Albert Ho have also been charged with “inciting subversion” under the National Security Law and all three face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker, employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality. After the German occupation, the department continued to take care of the great number of poor and dispossessed people in the city. Irena Sendler took advantage of her job in order to help the Jews, however this became practically impossible once the ghetto was sealed off in November 1940. Close to 400,000 people had been driven into the small area that had been allocated to the ghetto, and their situation soon deteriorated. The poor hygienic conditions in the crowded ghetto, the lack of food and medical supplies resulted in epidemics and high death rates. Irena Sendler, at great personal danger, devised means to get into the ghetto and help the dying Jews. She managed to obtain a permit from the municipality that enabled her to enter the ghetto to inspect the sanitary conditions. Once inside the ghetto, she established contact with activists of the Jewish welfare organization and began to help them. She helped smuggle Jews out of the ghetto to the Aryan side and helped set up hiding places for them.
When the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota) was established, Sendler became one of its main activists. The Council was created in fall 1942, after 280,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. When it began to function towards the end of the year, most of the Jews of Warsaw had been killed. But it played a crucial role in the rescue of a large number who had survived the massive deportations. The organization took care of thousands of Jews who were trying to survive in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care.
In September 1943, four months after the Warsaw ghetto was completely destroyed, Sendler was appointed director of Zegota’s Department for the Care of Jewish Children. Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, exploited her contacts with orphanages and institutes for abandoned children, to send Jewish children there. Many of the children were sent to the Rodzina Marii (Family of Mary) Orphanage in Warsaw, and to religious institutions run by nuns in nearby Chotomów, and in Turkowice, near Lublin. The exact number of children saved by Sendler and her partners is unknown.
On 20 October 1943, Sendler was arrested. She managed to stash away incriminating evidence such as the coded addresses of children in the care of Zegota and large sums of money to pay to those who helped Jews. She was sentenced to death and sent to the infamous Pawiak prison, but underground activists managed to bribe officials to release her. Her close encounter with death did not deter her from continuing her activity. After her release in February 1944, even though she knew that the authorities were keeping an eye on her, Sendler continued her underground activities. Because of the danger she had to go into hiding. The necessities of her clandestine life prevented her from attending her mother's funeral.
Source: https://wwv.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righteous-women/sendler.asp