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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Shony Alex Braun - Continental varieties 1/n The gypsy violinist of this record, Shony Alex Braun, was born in Transylvania, in 1930. I am not sure how truly gypsy he was, but he was half Jewish and as a
2/n result, survived the Holocaust serving time in both Auschwitz and Dachau. Braun credits his ability to play music as the reason for his survival. He would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his composition “Symphony of The Holocaust” on 1994. He moved to the US in the 1950’s
3/n and had a good career as a musician, composer, and actor. He would die in Los Angeles in 2002 of pneumonia. During the Holocaust, he was in a room with SS officers who wanted him to play for them. Struck by nerves, he forgot every tune he knew.
1/n #OTD on April 29, 1944, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews began when a train load of Jews were sent to Birkenau on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, according to the book by Laurence Rees. Another train filled with Hungarian Jews left for Birkeanu on April 30, 1944; the
2/n two trains with a total of 3,800 Jews reached Birkenau on May 2, 1944. There were 486 men and 616 women selected to work; the remaining 2698 Jews were gassed upon arrival.
On May 8, 1944, former Commandant Rudolf Höss (Hoess) was brought back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to
3/n supervise the further deportation of the Hungarian Jews. The next day, Höss ordered the train tracks to be extended inside the Birkenau camp so that the Hungarian Jews could be brought as close as possible to the gas chambers.
#OTD April 29, 1945 DACHAU, about 10 miles northwest of Munich, in Southern Germany, was liberated 1/n
2/n Dachau was originally intended as a camp for ‘political prisoners’ such as communists, trade unionists and other political opponents of the Nazis. This was soon extended to include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) and gay men.
3/n Large numbers of Jews were also interned at Dachau. In the days following Kristallnacht in November 1938, over 10,000 Jewish people were imprisoned in the camp.
Prisoners were forced into slave labour, to contribute to the expansion of the camp. Slave labour, medical
Thread
The occupation of France in 1940 led to the establishment of Nazi repression structures on French territory. From 1941 and faced with the failure of traditional forms of repression and in particular the shooting of hostages, a regular flow of deportees
from France was sent to the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
The total figure until 1945 of the population deported from repression from France is today estimated at 86,827 people.
This form of deportation mainly affects Jews. More than 75,000 Jews were transported in
this way until August 1944, most of them awaited certain death in the gas chambers. They then join the common lot of the deportees, in the concentration camps promised to a slow elimination by the work. By 1945, only 3% will stiil be alive.
#OnThisDay, April 28, 1908, Oskar Schindler
(1908–1974) was born
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in Moravia, at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. An ethnic German and a Catholic,
he remained in Svitavy during the interwar period and held Czech citizenship after Moravia was incorporated into the newly established Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Oskar Schindler, a German Catholic industrialist, moved to Kraków and
assumed responsibility for the operation of two formerly Jewish-owned manufacturers of enamel kitchenware. He then established his own enamelworks in Zabłocie, outside Kraków. That factory became a haven for about nine hundred Jewish workers, providing them relief from the
#OnThisDay, April 28, 1944, Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini was executed
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On April 28, 1945, “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.
The 61-year-old deposed former dictator of Italy was established by his German allies as the figurehead of a puppet government in northern Italy during the German occupation toward the close of the war. As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, defeat of the Axis
powers all but certain, Mussolini considered his options. Not wanting to fall into the hands of either the British or the Americans, and knowing that the communist partisans, who had been fighting the remnants of roving Italian fascist soldiers and thugs in the north, would try