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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 14

https://twitter.com/yadvashemfr/status/1635612270871867393

Monique Bekergoun 1941, Paris
Born in 1939, the little girl will survive the Holocaust with her mother Ita and brother Robert, thanks to their neighbor Renée Lafleur, who will hide 7 Jews in her home in Paris, from 1942 to the Liberation.

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1/n

https://twitter.com/yadvashemfr/status/1635612270871867393

2/n Renée Lafleur was born on October 10, 1907.
She formed a “romantic relationship” with Maurice Abel. During the Second World War, in the summer of 1942, the six members of the Abel and Bekergoun families were warned that they were threatened with arrest, so they took refuge

3/n in the small two-room apartment of Renée Lafleur, who did not hesitate not to accommodate all six despite the risks and its few resources.
Renée Lafleur welcomed Ita Bekergoun and her two children, Robert and Monique, soon joined by Jacques, Pauline and Maurice Abel.

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 14

1/n Survival in Auschwitz - SHOES
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Shoes function as a minor symbol of one’s status in the camp’s social hierarchy. Jewish prisoners are only allowed wooden clogs, which are painful and cause dangerous sores that can lead to lethal infections. This reflects both the

2/n prisoners’ low station and the general disregard with which the Germans treat them. Contrarily, German officials and even German prisoners are given leather shoes, which are far more comfortable and less likely to cause dangerous infections. Near the end of the story, as the

3/n Russian army is approaching and Alberto is about to leave the camp and and take his first steps—he believes—towards his liberation, he acquires for himself a pair of leather shoes. These shoes symbolize his rising position within the hierarchy of the camp, since he will

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 14

Sweden during the war

Before World War II, there were 7,000 Jews in Sweden, mostly in Stockholm. However, when Jewish refugees wanted to enter the country, Swedish authorities limited immigration. Thousands of Jewish refugees asked to be allowed to enter on a temporary basis,

but most were refused. The Swedish Jewish community tried to help these Jewish refugees by establishing several refugee relief committees, some in conjunction with non-Jews.
As Sweden's attitude towards the Germans changed during the war, so did their attitude towards refugees.

Sweden took in tens of thousands of Norwegians and Finns, including 20,000 Finnish children. When the Nazis began to persecute Norwegian Jews in 1942, the Swedes were shocked into action. About 900 Norwegian Jews, more than half of Norway's Jewish community, fled Nazi deportation

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 13

Survival in Auschwitz - BREAD
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1/n
As the only possession technically allowed to the prisoners, bread represents a prisoner’s wealth, value, and wellbeing. In the illicit exchange market, bread functions as the base unit of value, measured in single rations. Thus, a

2/n prisoner who is a skilled organizer or investor will have a surplus of bread, while a prisoner who is not will only possess his single ration for as long as he can resist the temptation to eat it. Although it is a unit of wealth, bread is also the prisoner’s primary mode of

3/n sustenance, the only substantive food the prisoners are ever fed, along with a watery bowl of soup. The rations of bread are never enough to sate one’s hunger, meaning that if a prisoner is not enterprising enough to gather additional bread and thus wealth, they must choose

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 13

#OTD March 13, 1943, the Krakow ghetto was liquidated
1/n
On the eve of World War II, approximately 60,000 of Krakow’s 250,000 residents were Jewish. Krakow was occupied by the German army on 6 September 1939, and in October, the occupying authorities declared Krakow the capital

2/n of the Generalgouvernement (the political administrative entity established by the Nazis in parts of occupied Poland that had not been annexed to the Reich). In the period May 1940-March 1941, some 40,000 Jews were deported from Krakow, leaving only 11,000 Jews in the city.

3/n The Krakow Ghetto was established in March 1941, incarcerating some 18,000 Jews from Krakow itself and the surrounding areas. The deportation of the ghetto’s Jews to the Auschwitz and Belzec death camps began in March 1942.

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Mar 12

The Buna Orchestra
1/n
Buna-Monowitz )Auschwitz III) was the largest labour camp in the Auschwitz complex. Here, hundreds of thousands of prisoners spent weeks, even years working under murderous conditions. Thousands died in the camp from the results of forced labour and the

2/n inhospitable conditions; thousands more were sent to their deaths in Birkenau.
As of summer 1943, there was a camp orchestra in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, in which outstanding musicians from all over Europe played. It was led by Polish prisoner Stanislav Bronek.

3/n The orchestra was required to play when the prisoners left the camp in the morning and when they returned in the evening. Initially the musicians were freed from their work assignments and allowed to practise full days, but this soon ended and they were placed back in their

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