1/n On August 29, 1968, Yad Vashem recognized Henry Christian Thomsen and his wife Ellen as #RighteousAmongTheNations.
This Danish innkeeper, an active member of the resistance, saved the lives, at the risk of his own, of hundreds of Jews by helping them reach Sweden.
2/n Henry Christian Thomsen, active member of the Danish resistance and owner of an inn in the village of Snekkersten in the north of the island of Seeland in Denmark, will save the lives of hundreds of persecuted Jews by helping them reach Sweden, and pay with his life.
3/n Thomsen and his wife Ellen were involved in the resistance from its very beginnings, helping to transport illegal shipments to Sweden. When news leaked in October 1943 about the deportation of Jews from Denmark,
Ellen Margarethe & Henry Christen Thomsen
4/n Thomsen joined the Resistance's efforts to smuggle the Jews to Sweden. His inn quickly became the meeting point for local fishermen involved in the rescue operation. Soon the number of refugees was so large that it became
The Thomsen inn in Snekkersten
5/n difficult to organize their transfer. Thomsen decides to buy a small fishing boat and transport them himself to Sweden, but he was quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Luckily, due to lack of clear evidence, he was acquitted of the charges of illegal transport of Jews to Sweden
6/n brought against him. Despite the danger, he resumed rescue operations before being arrested by the Gestapo for the second time. He was then deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany, where he died on December 4, 1944.
7/7 On August 29, 1968, Yad Vashem would recognize Henry Christian Thomsen and his wife Ellen Margrethe as Righteous Among the Nations.
Memorial erected in memory of Henry Christen Thomsen in Denmark.
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The Lasi Pogrom - June 28, 1941 1/n On Saturday evening, June 28, 1941, Romanian and German soldiers, members of the Romanian Special Intelligence Service, police, and masses of residents murdered and plundered the Jews of Iasi. Thousands were killed in their homes and in the
2/n streets additional thousands were arrested by patrols of Romanian and German soldiers and taken to police headquarters.
Lazar Rozin, who was only fourteen years old in June 1941, describes:
The rabbi of the city carrying a Torah scroll on his way to a deportation train.
3/n “They entered our house, screaming and pillaging all of our belongings. They ordered us all out of the house, also my mother and sisters. We walked to the police station and on the way we saw how people were beaten and bodies of dead Jews were strewn in the streets.” The next
OTD, 23 June 1944
The International Red Cross sent a delegation to inspect Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (Terezin) 1/n The Nazis made temporary improvements to the camp to give the visitors a positive impression, and continued with deportations soon afterwards.
2/n The inspection was demanded by the King of Denmark, following the deportation of 466 Danish Jews to Terezin in 1943.
In preparation for the inspection, the Nazis deported 7,503 Jewish people to Auschwitz between 16 – 18 May 1944, to make the ghetto appear less overcrowded.
3/n This embellishment of the town meant creating a sufficiently convincing shiny facade that would hide the actual situation of the Terezín Jews. At the instigation of the German Foreign Ministry and the German Red Cross, the SS ordered the embellishment (Stadtverschönerung) at
Poland. 20-21 June 1940.
The Palmiry massacre 1/n
Between December 1939 and July 1941 close to 2000 Poles and Jews – mostly inmates of Warsaw's Pawiak prison – were executed by the SS (Schutzstaffel) and Ordnungspolizei in a forest glade near Palmiry.
2/n The best documented of these massacres took place on 20–21 June 1940, when 358 members of the Polish political, cultural, and social elite were murdered in a single operation.
From December 1939 up to the summer of 1941, the Germans carried out 21 executions near Palmiry
3/n during which Polish citizens, both Polish and Jewish were shot. The number of people murdered cannot be accurately determined, although almost 1,800 bodies have been found in the mass graves. From the perpetrators’ perspective the place was optimal: situated in a large forest
1945: War is over - Displaced Persons Camps 1/n Although liberation brought freedom to those persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazis, it was also a time of confusion and difficulty. Those who had survived the Holocaust had to come to terms with the loss of their family, home,
2/n friends, businesses and belongings. For many, there was nowhere and no one to return to. On top of this, camp survivors in particular also suffered from poor health due to years of malnutrition and poor sanitation.
3/n By the spring of 1945, approximately eight million people had been displaced from their homes by the war. By autumn 1945, the Allies had repatriated six to seven million of these people. The one million or so people who remained (approximately 250,000 of which
Maria Agnese Tribbioli 1/n Simone Sacerdoti, his wife Marcella (née Belgrado) and their children Cesare-David (b. 1938) and Vittorio (b. 1941) lived in Firenze. Simone was the community cantor, and family life revolved around the synagogue and the
2/n Jewish community. The 1938 race laws made life more difficult for the family, but Simone continued to work as a cantor. When the Germans entered the city in 1943, they remained in their home. However, on November 6, 1943, the Germans and Fascists raided the community offices
3/n and synagogue, and created such chaos and destruction that the family decided to flee. Simone had become involved in rescue activities, and helped the well-known Rabbi Nathan Cassuto save other Jews, aided by Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa and many other clergy members.
The Holocaust diary of Renia Spiegel 1/n
It begins in January 1939, with 14-year-old Spiegel navigating bombing raids in her hometown of Przemyśl, Poland, which was then under Soviet occupation.
2/n After the Nazis invaded in 1941, Spiegel vividly described the first-hand horrors of the Holocaust. Bombs fells, Jewish families disappeared, and the Nazis created a Jewish ghetto in 1942.
Renia Spiegel, from Przemysl, south-east Poland, began her book when she was 15.
3/n Its pages give a first-hand account of bombing raids, being forced to go into hiding and the disappearance of other Jewish families from the Przemysl ghetto set up by the Nazis in 1942.
But amidst the tales of horror, Renia - who had aspired to be a poet - described