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Magda Hilf was born December 19, 1921, in Maly Kevesd, Czechoslovakia.

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 Magda Hilf was born December 19, 1921, in Maly Kevesd, Czechoslovakia.  Her early years consist of ma ny fond memories, with family and friends and books, all in a rural setting.  After 1938’s Munich Accord, the situation changed:  when the Hungarians took over her region, the restrictions began.   Her father lost his business, and he and so many other men were conscripted into the labour battalions, with many dying on the eastern front.  Even so, Magda and her family lived in their village; life had become more harsh, but they could endure.   After Nazi occupation in 1944, not even that was possible anymore:  her family was driven to the nearby ghetto in Sátoraljaújhely, Hungary.  Shortly after, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where all were killed except for Magda, who was selected for slave labour and sent to the Junkers factory in Merkleeberg.  Magda recalls that conditions there were better, though the hunger persisted.  In April 1945, she was forced onto a death march,

A Dose of Histoy - The Babi Yar massacre

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 A Dose of Histoy - The Babi Yar massacre On Friday, Sept. 26, 1941, when the Germans occupied Kyiv, announcements printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German began to appear on lampposts and walls around the city ordering all Jews to assemble Monday at 8 a.m. near the site of a Jewish cemetery.  That morning, the day before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur was to begin, over 33,000 people gathered, mostly women, children and the elderly, as the Soviet government had already mobilized the men capable of fighting into the Red Army. The multitude was marched under guard through a barbed wire enclosure leading into Babi Yar.  Babi Yar – “yar” means ravine in Russian and Ukrainian – is actually a system of ravines, where estuaries that once fed into a tributary of the Dnieper River had left steep troughs and inland fields. As the assembled Jews entered the ravine on that day in 1941, German SS units, together with Ukrainian prisoners recruited from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp to serve the N

WEARING MASKS AS BAD AS MASS MURDERER

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 WEARING MASKS AS BAD AS MASS MURDERER  The original photo was taken during the  pogrom in Lviv, Ukraine, 1941. Organized by Germans, carried out by locals.  We see a Jewish woman being undressed by a local woman.  Sphe is being photographed, looking directly into the camera, staring anxiously at the photographer, crying out for help. 135,000 - 150,000 Jews lived in Lviv - only 823 souls survived.  On 3 July 1941, 4000 Jewish people were stripped down naked in the streets of Lviv - tortured, beaten and murdered. Because they were Jewish.  And THIS is what some Germans compare today, May 2020, with the German government's REQUIREMENTS for dealing with a worldwide pandemic?  Who has undressed, tortured, beaten and then murdered you in the streets in the last few weeks simply because you are German?  Folks, this is absurd.  You are denying the Shoah. G-D forbid you should ever, ever experience something like that.  I am disappointed.  Disappointed and deeply upset. My maternal grandmo

Klara the wife of my cousin Jacob was a holocaust survivor, they met in Israel after the war.

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Klara the wife of my cousin Jacob was a holocaust survivor, they met in Israel after the war. Klara was born in 1933 in the city of Lviv, where horrific pogroms against the Jews took place in 1941. Jewish women were raped in the streets.  They stripped and beat Jewish women and men in the streets of Lviv. Ukrainians and German Nazis murdered  4,000 Jews including children in Lviv during this pogrom.  I learned about Klara after I received her file from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The documents from the Holocaust Museum show that Klara  was a child at Camp Dornstadt after the war.  "The children's camp in Dornstadt did not exist very long. After 9 month, in July 1946 the camp was closed, and the children with their teachers tried to make Aliyah to Israel.  They went on board the immigrant ship, 'Theodore Herzl', but the ship was intercepted, and the Jews were sent to refugee camps at Cyprus. They were able to go to Israel in 1948, when

DECLARATION BY THE ITALIAN GENERAL The picture shows General Alexandro Luzano standing over a slaughtered Serbian kid in front of a school in Prebilovci.

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 DECLARATION BY THE ITALIAN GENERAL The picture shows General Alexandro Luzano standing over a slaughtered Serbian kid in front of a school in Prebilovci.  General Alexandro Luzano writes to Mussolini:  Dear Duce,  My boundless loyalty to you, I hope, gives me the right to depart from a strict military protocol in something.  That is why I am in a hurry to describe to you an event that I have personally attended over the last three weeks.  Visiting the towns of Stolac, Capljina and Ljubinje (between 60 and 130 km north of Dubrovnik) - I learn from our intelligence officers that the previous day, Pavelic's Ustashas had committed a crime in one village (Prebilovci), and that when it was read  , the surrounding Serbs get upset again.  I miss words to describe what I found there.  In a large school classroom, I found a slaughtered teacher and 120 of her students!  No child was over 12 years old!  Crime is a wordless and naive word.  It went beyond any madness!  Many were cut off their

NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH – 45TH INFANTRY DIVISION (THUNDERBIRD DIVISION)

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 NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH – 45TH INFANTRY DIVISION (THUNDERBIRD DIVISION) Like many units drawn from areas where Native American culture remained strong during the 20th century, the 45th Infantry Division identified strongly with that heritage and included many Native Americans from multiple different Nations. Formally organized in 1923 as a National Guard Division, the 45th ID included units from Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, sparsely populated states with a strong Native American presence; as of 1940, the 45th included about 2,000 Native Americans from some fifty tribes. To honor that heritage the 45th adopted a yellow-on-red swastika as its insignia, long a common symbol used by the Southwest and Plains Nations.  The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s forced the 45th to reassess its insignia, replacing it in 1939 with the iconic yellow-on-red thunderbird. The Thunderbird Division deployed to Europe in 1943 and fought through 511 days of combat, including four am

December 7, 1941 was a sunny and quiet Sunday morning on the US Naval Base in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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 December 7, 1941 was a sunny and quiet Sunday morning on the US Naval Base in Honolulu, Hawaii. The sailors had enjoyed another quiet Saturday night, and early risers were awakening to a sunny day.  Routine events such as loading provisions onto ships were taking place, and the last thing anyone on the base suspected that morning, was a devastating surprise attack on the base.  However this quiet morning in paradise was shattered at 7:48 am local time, by the sound of 177 aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacking the US Naval Base, with the intent to destroy and damage as much of the US Pacific Fleet as possible, before it could respond to Japanese operations taking place on the same day against British, Dutch and US territories in southeast Asia.  This first attack wave began bombing the hangars and parked aircraft of the island’s airfields while at the same time launching torpedoes against the US warships moored in the harbor.  In the first five minutes of the attack, four ba