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Powerpoint about the Ordinary Stories of people and their lives during the Occupation of the Channel Islands.

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | HMD Committee Jersey – Jersey commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

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Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) on 27 January is the day to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution and in the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) is the charity which promotes and supports HMD in the UK.

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THE director of research at the UK's largest anti-fascism organisation will deliver the Island's annual Holocaust Memorial Day address in 2023.

Dr Joe Mulhall, from HOPE Not Hate, will speak at the ceremony at the Occupation Tapestry Gallery in the Maritime Museum at 1pm on Friday 27 January.

The service will be followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at the Lighthouse Memorial on the New North Quay, which commemorates the more than 1,000 Islanders imprisoned by the occupying force and most notably the 21 who died in German camps and prisons.

Dr Mulhall is an author and journalist who has written for The Guardian, Independent and New Statesman and appears regularly on programmes including BBC News, Channel 4 News, Radio 4's Today and The Moral Maze.

In addition, he has worked on numerous documentaries including Undercover in the Alt-Right, broadcast on Amazon Prime.

He said: 'I am thrilled to accept the invitation to speak at this Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Jersey.

'HMD is a time to remember the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust, under Nazi persecution and in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

'It is a time when we seek to learn the lessons of the past and recognise that genocide does not just take place on its own - it is a steady process which can begin if discrimination, racism and hatred are not checked and prevented.

'The people of Jersey know about the realities of Nazi occupation and it's also a day to remember their stories of persecution but also resistance and bravery.'

During his stay in the Island, Dr Mulhall will be appearing at Jersey Arts Centre on the evening of 26 January in an 'audience with' performance. He will also be visiting two secondary schools to discuss his work with students.

Previous speakers include gay rights campaigner and Labour peer Michael Cashman, TV presenter Michael Portillo - whose father fought against fascism on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War - Beirut hostage Brian Keenan, Holocaust survivor Sami Steigman and Occupation historians Dr Gilly Carr and Dr Paul Sanders.

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Holocaust Memorial Day: Author and journalist to speak in Jersey

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THE director of research at the UK's largest anti-fascism organisation will deliver the Island's annual Holocaust Memorial Day address in 2023. Dr Joe Mulhall, from HOPE Not Hate, will speak at the ceremony at the Occupation Tapestry Gallery in the Maritime Museum at 1pm on Friday 27 January.

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust School Resources

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust School Resources

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Here you will find resources to help your school mark Holocaust Memorial Day. We have a range of assemblies, lesson plans and activities to help your students learn about the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution, and genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, as well as contemporary issues.

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Image: illustration from Irmina by Barbara Yelin, Credit: SelfMadeHero © Barbara Yelin

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'What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life – that is what is abnormal.'                                          Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust                                        

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'What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life – that is what is abnormal.'                                          Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust                                        

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Powerpoint about the 21 people who were transported from Jersey in the German Occupation and who died as a result of their subsequent incarceration in concentration and internment camps.

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Powerpoint about the people who were evacuated just before the Occupation of the Channel Islands and deported during the Occupation by the German Authorities.

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Image of Bronja Meniuk, an orphan of the Holocaust who was granted permission and immigrated to the United States by plane on May 4, 1951.

The National Archives is the international epicenter of Holocaust-related research. NARA holds millions of records created or received by the U.S. Government during and after World War II that document Nazi war crimes, wartime refugee issues, and activities and investigations of U.S. Government agencies involved in the identification and recovery of looted assets (including gold, art, and cultural property)-as well as captured German records used as evidence at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals. We not only hold these records, we provide access to them. Here is a sampling of the most requested Holocaust-Era images.

Featured Document Display

Never Forget: Remembering the Holocaust. By the end of World War II, the Holocaust had claimed the lives of over 6 million Jewish people-nearly two out of every three in Europe. A letter describing the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, from Harold Porter to his parents is presented in memory of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazism.

Online Resource for Teachers

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Image of Bronja Meniuk, an orphan of the Holocaust who was granted permission and immigrated to the United States by plane on May 4, 1951. The National Archives is the international epicenter of Holocaust-related research. NARA holds millions of records created or received by the U.S.

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A Lesson Focusing on Battalion 101: Why did they shoot?

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A Lesson Focusing on Battalion 101: Why did they shoot?

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A free online lesson complete with learning objectives, a PowerPoint and resources ready to print.

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This lesson could be used as part of a Year 9 course or with the Germany module of Y10/11 SHP or Modern World. Students are confronted with moral issues and have to explain what prompted men to kill in the way they did- and the answer is not fear of reprisals. So what was it? Find out by working your way through this history mystery. I am grateful to Simon Harrison for extensively trialling, and then diamond-polishing the original lesson which makes a significant contribution to citizenship.

Learning objectives

to engage students' emotional intelligence to consider reasons for what appears today as extraordinary actions

to ground students' suggested solutions in the context of the time and knowledge about machinery of Nazi control

to develop students' ability to shift their thinking in light of new evidence

to grasp that the new evidence challenging received views itself has to be evaluated

Step 1

Read the story from slide 2 to set the dramatic scene. In the context of the Holocaust this may seem a relatively minor incident but the students will almost certainly express revulsion as did the men who took part. But why did they act in this way? Posing the question early makes them start thinking of the obvious reasons which they will refine later. So ask them to note their early ideas .

Step 2

Now sketch in the background contextual detail using slides 3 and 4.

Step3

Turn to the Battalion itself using slide 5 and 6. Give the students this brief piece of background knowledge and then go straight into the mystery itself. You will find a set of cards (see downloadable and sample page) which you may want to adapt for your particular class. The idea is that they have to consider the value of the information on each card. Do they think that it exerted a strong or weak influence on the Battalion members? They start by reading the cards, taking it in turns, within their group of 3. They then discuss each and place it on a spectrum using the grid provided (see downloadable).

Step 4

When most have processed the information, ask for each group's three most influential cards.

Step 5

At this stage the students may feel that they have cracked the issue. This is deliberate, for it is at this stage that we want them to think even deeper. New evidence has come to light, revealed to the students using the 6 slides 10-15.

Step 6

Having seen this information for the first time, students will need to reflect on whether this changes their opinion. It is helpful if you print out the slides either 6 per page or 1 different one for each of the group members. Give a few minutes for the significance of the new evidence to be assimilated.

Step 7

Collect in any changed opinions. Students invariably like to know if they are right, so share with them slide 16 which is one historian's recent view, Christopher Browning's, from his book ordinary men; Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1993).

Step 8

Briefly tell them what happened to some members of the Battalion and ask for their reaction. If time you might want to draw out the significance of the episode. What light does it shed on the Nazi regime?

Plenary

In the pairs they have been constructing the line of significance, pupils are asked where they stand on the issue, literally. One of the pair moves to stand below a photo of Browning and or Golghagen (slide 15 and 16)which have been placed at either end of the room. Then the seated pupil of the pair has to explain why their partner is standing where they are.

It may be useful to bring up Goldhagen's Jewish roots to raise the question of whether this is really just about weighing the evidence. Also the fact the Browning was called by David Irving as a witness at his trial, only to turn out as one of the most useful witnesses against him.

© image above USHM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The author has made every effort to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material throughout the site. if any proper acknowledgement has not been made , or permission, not received, would the copyright holder kindly inform us of this oversight so that the necessary arrangements be made.

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Battalion 101: Why did they shoot? : a history mystery - Keystage History

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KeyStage history is a one stop shop subscription website to support the teaching and leading of history from Key Stages 1 to 4. Up-to-date expert advice from an experienced history consultant provides guidance you can trust, teaching and learning activities that inspire and outstanding lessons which will quickly prove indispensable.

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The Actions of Ordinary Men, Battalion 101

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The Actions of Ordinary Men, Battalion 101

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This includes an accessible account of the Battalion as well as some interesting questions to pose to pupils

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Social psychologist James Edward Waller describes the importance of studying perpetrator behavior.

What kind of person kills civilians, including old people and even babies, all day long? To find answers to such questions, historian Christopher Browning studied courtroom testimony made in the 1960s and 1970s by 210 men who served in the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 and were later charged with war crimes.

In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began to provide military-style training to uniformed police, and after 1939 they sent dozens of police battalions east to support the war against "Jewish Bolshevism" being waged by the German army and the Einsatzgruppen. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up of the German equivalent of city policemen and county sheriffs. It was assigned to the district of Lublin in Poland.

Psychologist James Edward Waller brings a psychological lens to understanding why people commit genocidal acts.

Like the National Guard in the United States, these German battalions were organized regionally. Most of the men in Battalion 101 came from working- and lower-middle-class neighborhoods in Hamburg, Germany. Major Wilhelm Trapp, a 53-year-old career police officer who had come up through the ranks, headed the battalion. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1932 but was not a member of the SS, the Nazi elite guard assigned to solve the so-called "Jewish Problem." The battalion's first killing mission took place on July 13, 1942. Browning reports:

Just as daylight was breaking, the men arrived at the village [of Jozefow] and assembled in a half-circle around Major Trapp, who proceeded to give a short speech. With choking voice and tears in his eyes, he visibly fought to control himself as he informed his men that they had received orders to perform a very unpleasant task. These orders were not to his liking either, but they came from above. It might perhaps make their task easier, he told the men, if they remembered that in Germany bombs were falling on the women and children. Two witnesses claimed that Trapp also mentioned that the Jews of this village had supported the partisans. Another witness recalled Trapp's mentioning that the Jews had instigated the boycott against Germany. Trapp then explained to the men that the Jews in Jozefow would have to be rounded up, whereupon the young males were to be selected out for labor and the others shot.

Trapp then made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments, one man stepped forward. The captain of 3rd company . . . began to berate the man. The major told the captain to hold his tongue. Then ten or twelve other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major.

Trapp then summoned the company commanders and gave them their respective assignments. Two platoons of 3rd company were to surround the village; the men were explicitly ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape. The remaining men were to round up the Jews and take them to the market place. Those too sick or frail to walk to the market place, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hide, were to be shot on the spot. Thereafter, a few men of 1st company were to accompany . . . Jews selected at the market place, while the rest were to proceed to the forest to form the firing squads. The Jews were to be loaded onto battalion trucks by 2nd company and shuttled from the market place to the forest.

Having given the company commanders their respective assignments, Trapp spent the rest of the day in town, mostly in a schoolroom converted into his headquarters but also at the homes of the Polish mayor and the local priest. Witnesses who saw him at various times during the day described him as bitterly complaining about the orders he had been given and "weeping like a child." He nevertheless affirmed that "orders were orders" and had to be carried out. Not a single witness recalled seeing him at the shooting site, a fact that was not lost on the men, who felt some anger about it. Trapp's driver remembers him saying later, "If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans."

Browning notes, "While the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were apparently willing to shoot those Jews too weak or sick to move, they still shied for the most part from shooting infants, despite their orders. No officer intervened, though subsequently one officer warned his men that in the future they would have to be more energetic."

As the killing continued, some officers reassigned anyone who asked, while others pressed their men to continue despite reservations. By midday, the men were being offered bottles of vodka to "refresh" them. Nevertheless, a number of soldiers broke down. Yet the majority continued to the end. After the massacre ended, the battalion was transferred to the northern part of the district and platoons were divided up, each stationed in a different town. All of the platoons took part in at least one more shooting action. Most found that these subsequent murders were easier to perform.

In drawing conclusions from the testimonies, Browning focused on the choices open to the men he studied.

Most simply denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, they did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but repeatedly claimed that they had not heard that part of his speech or could not remember it. A few who admitted that they had been given the choice and yet failed to opt out were quite blunt. One said that he had not wanted to be considered a coward by his comrades. Another-more aware of what truly required courage-said quite simply: "I was cowardly." A few others also made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political vocabulary and values of the 1960s were helpless to explain the situation in which they found themselves in 1942. As one man admitted, it was not until years later that he began to consider that what he had done had not been right. He had not given it a thought at the time.

Browning also points out:

[It is] doubtful that they were immune to "the influence of the times," . . . to the incessant proclamation of German superiority and incitement of contempt and hatred for the Jewish enemy. Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself. In wartime, when it was all too usual to exclude the enemy from the community of human obligation, it was also all too easy to subsume the Jews into the "image of the enemy."

The men who did not take part were more specific about their motives. Some attributed their refusal to their age or to the fact that they were not "career men." Only one referred to personal connections to Jews to explain his refusal. Browning writes:

What remained virtually unexamined by the interrogators and unmentioned by the policemen was the role of antisemitism. Did they not speak of it because antisemitism had not been a motivating factor? Or were they unwilling and unable to confront this issue even after twenty-five years, because it had been all too important, all too pervasive? One is tempted to wonder if the silence speaks louder than the words, but in the end-the silence is still silence, and the question remains unanswered.

Some historians point out that members of the battalion could have exposed themselves to more severe criminal charges in the German legal system at the time of the trials by mentioning antisemitism as part of their motivation in the killings. Browning continues:

Was the incident at Jozefow typical? Certainly not. I know of no other case in which a commander so openly invited and sanctioned the nonparticipation of his men in a killing action. But in the end the most important fact is not that the experience of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was untypical, but rather that Trapp's extraordinary offer did not matter. Like any other unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed the Jews they had been told to kill.

Connection Questions

1. What details in the text help you understand how Major Wilhelm Trapp felt about the killings? What choices did Trapp make? How do you explain his choices?

2. What role did "following orders" play in the choices made by Trapp's men? To what degree might conformity (the desire to fit in with a group's attitudes, beliefs, or behavior) have played a role? What other factors may have influenced their participation?

3. Scholar Daniel Goldhagen examined this same story and reached a conclusion different from Browning's. Goldhagen believes that antisemitism, rather than conformity, is a more convincing explanation for why so many men participated in the massacre at Jozefow. He argues that the men decided to kill when they could have opted out because they truly believed that killing Jews was the right thing to do; to Goldhagen, any explanation other than what he calls "eliminationist antisemitism" is inadequate. Do you agree? Is the desire to conform enough to explain why people would participate in such violence? Or must they also feel hatred for their victims?

4. In what ways, according to Browning, were the experiences of Police Battalion 101 "untypical"? Despite the unusual nature of these events, how can they help us understand the larger history of the Holocaust? How can the experiences and choices of these men help us understand human behavior?

5. Browning writes of the men who took part in the murders, "A few who admitted that they had been given the choice and yet failed to opt out were quite blunt. One said that he had not wanted to be considered a coward by his comrades. Another-more aware of what truly required courage-said quite simply: 'I was cowardly.'" Why might some men have felt that their decision to participate was cowardly? What is needed to make someone take an action that is different from the actions of the rest of a group?

6. Is it important to know the motives of perpetrators such as the members of Police Battalion 101? Is it possible to fully understand their motives? To what extent can we trust their own explanations years after the murders?

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Investigate perpetrator behavior with historian Christopher Browning's study of the men of a police unit that killed Jews during World War II.

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Collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Use this tool to search for collections that can be analysed in class or at home, including oral histories and videos that give an insight into the impact the Holocaust had on the lives of ordinary people.

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The Story of Martin Stern, a Holocaust survivor

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The Story of Martin Stern, a Holocaust survivor

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In this podcast Holocaust survivor Dr Martin Stern talks about his story. Martin was born in 1938 and lived in Holland. He survived camps at both Westerbork and Theresienstadt.

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In this podcast Holocaust survivor Dr Martin Stern talks about his story. Martin was born in 1938 and lived in Holland. He survived camps at both Westerbork and Theresienstadt.

You can listen to the interview with Dr Martin Stern MBE below:

https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/martin_stern.mp3
So can you tell us a bit about your life before the Holocaust?
I was born in 1938 in Hilversum in the Netherlands. My mum and dad had fled Germany, they were both born in Berlin, and my father lived in a beautiful villa outside Berlin, his mum and dad, my grandparents were wealthy businesspeople, and very loyal Germans. Their older son fought in the First World War, and for all I know might have killed British soldiers, they were thoroughly German, but they were also Jewish. My mother was not Jewish; and decided to marry my father in 1938, and that in Germany was illegal. So they fled in to Holland, and they found that the Dutch, to avoid upsetting the Germans had made it illegal there too. So they got married in Belgium. And I lived with my mum and dad and my father was an architect, and I remember him doing architectural drawings at home, but that became impossible after the Nazi occupation of course.
So what were your experiences of the Nazi regime?
Well I remember just living like any little boy, with my mum and dad - but two years after I was born, the Nazis just invaded the Netherlands, they didn't care whether they wanted to be neutral - they flattened the centre of Rotterdam with their bomber fleet and told the Dutch that they would flatten other cities if they didn't surrender. Very soon after they came to power, they prevented Jews from working in Universities, working for the government, working for local authorities; Jews in professions like my father, an architect were only allowed to work for Jews, of course they were only a tiny minority of the Dutch population, and many of them were refugees who wouldn't be paying for an architect, so a lot of Jewish people were just ruined. Jewish shopkeepers were liable to find uniformed, government paid Nazi thugs bursting into their shop, smashing the place up, beating the people up and dragging the people away to, nobody knew where. So my father was no longer able to earn his living as an architect. He started making wooden toys in the basement of the block of flats where we lived, and I remember at the age of three being very upset with him because I wasn't allowed to play with these beautiful wooden toys he made. Then my father disappeared. And my mum wouldn't tell me where he was. And pretty soon after that she stopped me from playing with the other children in the street, because it was too dangerous for it to be known that there was a little boy whose father was a Jew living in that flat. So I lived a rather isolated life, although later on I was sent to a little school. I also remember German soldiers around in Amsterdam, sometimes marching down the street, I remember them laying cables in a big park near the centre of Amsterdam, the Vondelpark, and I knew enough to want to sabotage that so I, at the ripe old age of three, was talking with my mum about doing something to those cables, and she told me very sharply not to make any move that might look like that; that that would be very dangerous. So I do remember a few things about that period.

In 1942, two years after the start of the Second World War, I saw my father for the last time. He came home. It was a November evening, as it was getting dark, and my parents were very agitated; what had happened? My mum had gone into labour. And my dad had come home from his hiding place to help her get to the maternity hospital and to get me off to some friends of my parents; an architect and his wife also. So my baby sister was born. Now somebody in the hospital didn't wash their hands - my mother got an infection and died; there were no antibiotics of course. So the couple that had taken me in, they were stuck with me. And they looked after me for two years, and I lived in their flat - as a matter of fact around the corner - three blocks from the Anne Frank House. And it covers about the same period, I went to them at about the same time that Anne Frank went into her hiding place, and I was arrested about the same time that Anne Frank was arrested by coincidence. But I wasn't hidden; they pretended I was their son, and they took me shopping, they took me to the zoo, I remember being taken to a children's play, and we went for walks in the countryside. But I also remember looking out of the window of the first floor flat on that main road, radial road, radiating out from the centre of Amsterdam, and sometimes there would be brass bands marching, and of course being a little kid I was very enthusiastic about the brass band. And I remember the lady who was looking after me whose name she's still alive - her name was Katrine Radomachas - she's remarried, she has a different surname now but, really, with hindsight, I can see the dilemma, because she obviously didn't want me to admire the Dutch Nazi Party, which is what the brass band belonged to.

And at the same time she couldn't tell me too much about how bad things were that the Nazis were because being a little four year old at that stage, I have would soon told somebody else - I was being taken out of the flat as I said. So she had to be rather tight-lipped about that. And in retrospect I can recognise that dilemma being expressed in her trying to tread a fine line. I also remember a lorry load full of German soldiers stopping just below our window, and soldiers jumping out of the back, and running round the corner into one of the side roads, from this main road that we looked out on; and then I heard gun-shots. And I knew that in that little street, there was a black market, everybody knew. And the Germans had decided to control that in their way, and they drew their pistols and they shot people dead, and then I saw men being bundled into the back of the lorry and driven away - the ones that hadn't been shot dead. And I also remember bombers flying overhead, there was a day... I haven't read this in any history books but, there was a day when the Germans sent a bomber fleet over Amsterdam to impress the Dutch - the Amsterdam population, they made vapour trails, and the Dutch had a sort of slang term for that 'selling planks', it may sound rather silly but it was a sort of trace of humour in a grim, very threatening situation. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but in 1941, nine months after the Germans invaded there was a strike in Amsterdam, dock-workers, factory workers, transport workers and shop workers, and it spread to areas around Amsterdam, now what were they striking for? Free travel, higher pay? No, they were going on strike on behalf of their Jewish fellow citizens, to protest against the way they were being maltreated. The Germans knew how to deal with that - they shot people dead, and injured a lot very seriously. And they went into holding cells and prisons, loaded men into the backs of trucks, drove them into the dunes and shot them. Dead. And they made sure people knew. This rule by terror, it only works if the people you're trying to terrorise know. So the situation in which the Dutch came up with that slightly silly term 'selling planks' for the vapour trails of bombers, you know, it's humour under very, very frightening circumstances.

Whilst I was living with Cathrien and Johannes Rademakers, the architect and his wife - they sent me to a little school nearby - it was a converted house, only very small really, and we didn't do anything fancy - no reading or writing - folding paper, singing songs, playing games, that sort of thing. And one day the teacher had taken us into the little school hall, and she was sitting behind the table on the little stage, and she'd lined us up ready to play some game, and two young men unexpectedly walked in - civilian clothes - and one of them asked 'Is Martin Stern here?' And the teacher immediately shot back 'No, he hasn't come in today.' And there I was. I didn't understand what was going on. I put my hand up, and I said, 'But I am here.' And as these two young men were leading me out of the room, I looked back, and I'll never forget the ashen face of the young teacher. And they took me outside, they had their bikes leaning against the lamppost, it was a drizzly day, they put me on the back of one of those bikes, the way people do in Holland. And off they cycled through Amsterdam to a big redbrick building, I was marched up some steps into the building, some more steps to the first floor - and very quickly shown into a large office, or led into a large office. Big ornate desk - the building by the way had been a school - the Germans had just booted out the pupils and the teachers, and they'd turned it into the interrogation centre for the Amsterdam district, and it had developed such a terrible reputation that after the war, the Dutch changed the street name because the name - being taken to the 'such and such street' it had acquired such a terrifying overtone in the Dutch language that they changed it to the name of a very famous Dutch resistance fighter - a sculptor who did a lot of work against the Nazis. So I know that that large room was the headmaster's office previously. But that wasn't the desk of a headmaster - it was very ornate, it was large, it had been stolen off a Jewish family, I'm sure, or a Jewish business. And there was a rather fat man behind the desk in a green military uniform, which means he would have been a member of Sicherheitdienst - the SD, translated as security services, so it was part of the same organisation as the Gestapo, responsible in occupied countries for rounding up and deporting Jews. And he started asking me questions, although by this stage I had a few questions of my own, 'when can I go back to school? When can I go home?' And he said his task, it wasn't his responsibility to answer these questions, and it was almost as though this rather fat, grown man in his uniform was expecting, me, a five year old to be sorry for him. And he must have known exactly what he was part of - in fact I have reason to believe he was the head of the SD in Amsterdam. Soon as he was satisfied that he'd got the right little boy, he ordered a man to take me out into the corridor, of course, a school corridor, lots of doors opening off this corridor, and all closed - except one. And as I was led past this one open door, I looked into a rather small room, a map on the far wall, and a man standing with his back to me, looking at the map, who I recognised! He, with his wife had been looking after me in his flat just round the corner from the Anne Frank House for two years! Of course I knew him! So I called out. I wasn't allowed to utter another sound, I was dragged away - that's all they wanted. They tricked me into giving away the fact that I could recognise him instantly even from behind. So he couldn't say that he hadn't had me in his house. Because you see they put up posters, they made announcements on the radio, they put display ads in the paper - anybody who helps a Jew to escape arrest will face the same consequences as the Jews. So that couple knew what risks they were taking - remember about the strike and about the bombers and so on. The Germans made no secrets of their brutality.

He was sent to a concentration camp in the Netherlands, where he was not treated too badly, the head of the Phillips company had made an arrangement with the Germans assuring reasonably humane treatment for Dutch prisoners in that concentration camp - it wasn't as good for Soviet prisoners of war and people like that. But from there he was transported in a cattle truck to Germany. 20 kilometres away from the big port city of Hamburg was a little village, a beautiful little village called Neuengamme - it's on a bend in the river, weeping willows, little cottages, and the setting sun in the evenings - I went there a few years ago, beautiful. And 500 yards away is the edge of a huge concentration camp, where men were shoved into holes in the ground to dig clay. First thing, on arrival in the camp, they had to strip, throw their shoes on one pile and their clothes on another, on more or less a run. They had to pick clothes off a pile - the first thing that happened, they got clothes that weren't their own, they were inadequate and they wouldn't fit. And in all weathers, in inadequate clothing, they would be shovelling clay, which would stick to the shovel, into metal steel trucks above head level, and if they didn't work fast enough, they were beaten. They were fed a ration such that starvation... people would starve to death. Half the people in Neuengamme died. The bread such as it was - was partly made of sawdust - it would have been inadequate even if it had been made totally of flour. Three tiered-bunks, up to six men to a single bed - dreadful hygiene, there wasn't enough washing facilities... it was filthy, the food was filthy, so they had diarrhoea and vomiting, six men to a bed, three-tied bunk-beds... you know, they died like flies. And Jo Rademakers got just his spectacles back. And he was a good man.

What about my sister? She was lying in hospital nobody to look... no mother, father couldn't look after her, he was hiding. She was taken in by a Dutch family that had done business with my grandparents. My grandparents had got this young lad who's a butcher's son in a small, rural Dutch town, employed on a floor above a shop, making mattresses. The sales rep spotted him as a bright lad, got him a ticket to Berlin, and he got trained in my grandfather's business. Huge success - he became great friends with my grandparents, and it seems that in the First World War, with money from my grandparents he was set up in a business of his own. Probably because the Western powers had a trade block - blockade against Germany as part of their war, for the First World War, and this would be a kind of, way, for a German company to evade the blockade - by selling to a neutral country - Holland, and they could sell on, of course. By the Second World War, this business was prosperous, and it was this man's own, he was rich in his own right by this stage, and he'd had four sons; his wife was so fed up of having sons that she dressed the fourth one as a girl, and he became the laughing stock of the village. And here was a little girl going begging. But it wasn't just that - they had a Jewish maid, and a live in maid, and they employed her deliberately in the hope it would protect her against deportation. They were already taking a risk. So they were brave as well. And my sister lived there for two years, until she was also arrested at the age of one year. You see, the Germans owned France, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkan countries, Hungary, Austria, allied with Italy; whatever they wanted in all those places they took - they owned the best part of the Soviet Union, and they had tens of thousands of bombers and tanks, and loads of heavy artillery, a huge army and navy and so on - they had everything. Wherever they went they took the best food, the best drink, they'd find paintings; the Germans didn't live at all badly until quite close to the end of the Second World War. It seems they needed one more thing; they needed my one year old sister, and they needed her dead. And that's a reflection I think on what at the time seemed a very powerful Third Reich, and the Nazi empire.

It was the Dutch police that came to arrest my sister. In the shouting match that the woman of the family had with these Dutch policemen, the sixteen year old fiancée of her oldest son took my baby sister in her arms and escaped into the garden, and got away. And these policemen made such threats to the woman, that the next day the family put my baby sister on their lap in the car, and drove from their village to Amsterdam, and handed her over to the Amsterdam police, who handed her over to the Nazis. And so she and I ended up in a prison camp in the Netherlands, it was called Westerbork - it was barbed wire, watch-towers, armed soldiers with guns in those watch-towers. First thing I was told on arrival was 'don't go anywhere near the barbed wire because you'll be shot.' Wooden, creosoted huts, very crowded, terrible food and not much of it, and trains leaving every week. Cattle trucks, goods trucks. And as a five year old, I could stand at the edge of the clearing where the trains were being loaded. People like sardines in those wooden trucks. And the people loading them in - they were railway men, they didn't look terribly different from the railway men who check my tickets these days - they looked like ordinary people. And there were a few soldiers, a few German soldiers, not many, but I was standing close enough, I could see their faces, they looked like ordinary men inside their uniforms. And stupid and ignorant as I was - I mean, I'd given myself away because I didn't know what was going on. It was a puzzle to me how one set of human beings, who looked normal, could do just that to another set of human beings. Who were normal! They were the people I'd been living in the camp with! They were normal, decent, ordinary people. And then the doors were shut. And they were sealed shut with steel wire. I'd been on enough train journeys to know that wasn't normal for a train journey. And then before the train slowly pulled out, a German soldier, with a rifle over his shoulder would step up, on to a little metal step that had been screwed to the end of the truck, and hold on to a handle that had been screwed there for the purpose; and as the train slowly pulled out, there was a soldier with a rifle on the end of each wooden truck. And people were trying to peer out through the little wooden openings in the side of these trucks... and stupid and ignorant as I was... I could figure out what one of those soldiers would do with one of those guns, if one of the unfortunate people inside should manage to escape during the journey. And then my turn came. I was told I would have to be on the next train. It turned out to be a passenger train. Compartments! Padded seats! Very crowded, and nobody would tell me where we were going and the point wasn't that they wouldn't tell me, it was because they didn't know. I ended up in a compartment, and opposite me was a woman who I didn't know with a baby on her lap. And that, she told me, was my sister! I don't remember seeing her in the camp at all; it was a funny sort of life there... and I had seen her a few times, but I wouldn't have recognised her. But I was worried she would get cold with a draft. She was in a beautiful white crocheted baby shawl, and I thought the holes would let the draft through. And the woman tried to reassure me about that, I hadn't a clue of course what I was going towards. Well, we were unloaded at a huge German railway station, herded into a hall, on a platform; huge glass panel doors - so we could see people catching trains, coming from trains, greeting each other, all those things people do on a railway platform, and they could see us. Huddled on the floor. And then we were crammed into a cattle truck.

One bucket, for people to relieve themselves - men, women, children. No room to sit; we were squashed up against each other, we could only stand. And it wasn't an express train. Sometimes it went at normal speeds, sometimes it went slowly for long periods, very slowly. And sometimes it stood still for long periods. And the whole journey - I don't know how long it took - but my guess is three or four days and nights, it for sure wouldn't have had priority on the German railway system, and towards the end of the journey, I remember asking the adults around me why an old man was lying on the floor of the truck, sleeping with his eyes open. I'd never seen a corpse. How it came that he was able to - that the corpse was able to lie full length on the floor - I mean maybe everybody had squeezed back, I don't know. Maybe - I know from reading that people did die during such journeys, and it may be that some corpses had been moved out - I do remember the door being opened and the bucket being passed in and out - the door was just lowered slightly. It was a cattle truck - the kind with a door that cattle can walk up and down rather than the sliding doors of a goods truck. And so it may be that corpses had been moved out, I really don't know, my memory is fragmentary.

Well, we arrived at our destination, the door was lowered, there was a blue sky, a few white clouds, and we were in a town. Not wooden huts and mud but proper buildings, a street, pavements, even a grassy square. And I wanted to run in there to see if there was a gap in the fence. And I was immediately barked at via the inmates, 'don't do that you'll be shot!' And I was herded into a group of little boys, don't ask me where my sister was, I was way beyond thinking about that. And I landed in a building which they called an orphanage - it was for children who were there without their parents. Pleading for food and being told there wasn't any. And there was an 18 year old inmate, a prisoner who was looking after this bunch of little boys - and he eventually relented, and asked a boy a few years older than myself, perhaps eight - to take me into another room to where there was this iron stove in the middle of the room which was lit. That was unusual for a concentration camp. And he got a little aluminium pan, and about a teaspoon full of rolled oats, and he went to the tap and a little trickle of water came out, and on that stove he made me a little bit of porridge. And that is the most memorable meal I've had in my entire life.

I don't know how long I was there. I think it was the same day that I was removed from there by a Dutch woman who I didn't know. And she took me to the place where she slept. It had been a shop - everything had been stripped out, so we had ceiling, floor, walls, doors each side opening onto different streets with shop windows onto the two streets. And on the floor, sleeping places for women, shoulder to shoulder. We were in a place called Theresienstadt. That was the name the Germans used, it's now called Terezin, that's the Czech name, it was in the Czech Republic, and it still looks very similar to the way it did. It was a walled town, a garrison town, full of buildings with dormitories for soldiers, and so the Germans used it as a prison for Jews who for some reason they wanted to keep alive for a while. And this lady, her name was Mrs. De Jong - the Dutch version of Young, if you like - and she'd been imprisoned there for marrying a Jewish market trader. She wasn't Jewish. But that was enough of a crime in the eyes of the Nazis to get her imprisoned.

She had no children, and that troubled her a great deal, and she wanted to look after children, she asked Jews who were forced to do office work in this prison town, and once somebody said to her there's a train coming through from Holland tomorrow, there are two children on that train whose father killed two German soldiers, why don't you look after them. And so she got me out of one building and my baby sister out of a different building, and there she was, on that bare floor of the shop next to her sleeping place. Extraordinary. How the man in Theresienstadt knew, I'll never know, he is no doubt long dead, and no doubt died during the war. But she looked after us for the remainder of our time, we were moved from dormitory to dormitory, she worked in the kitchens, and she stole food for us, whilst others were dying from starvation. A combination of starvation and terrible hygiene, especially the older people. And she brought cooked food to us in the dormitory. This in a place where the SS would climb through a window of a dormitory, tell everybody to stand to attention, do it quickly and unexpectedly, [and] a man found with one cigarette in his pocket would be shot. And she was stealing food, when other people were dying. An inmate might have thought it was their good deed for the day to report her to the authorities. She was risking her life. And we never starved. I was darned hungry, but there's a big difference between being darned hungry and being a pot-bellied skeleton. Huge difference. I never starved - and my baby sister neither. Theresienstadt was disgustingly crowded. The streets, the dormitories, everything - had about seven or eight times the number of people the town was built for. Any the sewerage and the water supply, as well as the food were totally inadequate. And of course we just wore the same clothes that we'd been arrested in, and there wasn't much opportunity to wash them. So the place stank, I don't actually remember that; I'm telling you know what Mrs. De Jong told me after the war, but I certainly remember bed bugs, and fleas vividly, and there were also lice, I don't actually remember they were there, because towards the end there was an outbreak of the disease called Typhus - which is lethal - and that's spread by lice, you don't get it unless there are lice. And all the time, again trains, the goods trucks and cattle trucks were coming into the camp, because again, the Germans had used slave labour to build a railway spur into the town, and men were crammed into that, and then postcards came back for the women remaining behind saying don't worry, we're working hard but we're all right, and no more was heard from that man. So Theresienstadt was emptied out a little bit. And then it was announced that women who wished to join their men could do so. And would you believe it? A nice passenger train turned up - green, clean, padded seats and all that. And the ladies were invited to join this nice looking train. I know from what Mrs. De Jong told me after the war there was a fierce argument, she was trying to persuade people not to board that train, she said 'forget those postcards, those men are dead.' She was married to a market trader, she was not married to a professor, she'd had primary schooling only, she wasn't [a] sophisticated person, but she was not stupid, she was a sharp cookie in all sorts of ways. And most of the women went. And so Theresienstadt became even less crowded.

At this point, the Germans turned up with pots of paint, and lots of other things, and the shelves of shops were kitted out to look as if they were in business. A counter, a window display, a tinkly bell on the door, an inmate told to pretend to be a shopkeeper, you go in... and this actually happened because Mrs. De Jong, there was camp money printed, because the inmates had to work, and the Germans had the idea they would pay them camp money, so you couldn't use it for escape of course, or for bribing the guards to communicate with the outside, which is something they very much feared, the Germans very much feared. So she thought that maybe with this camp money, she might be able to buy something and the prison actor who was meant to be the shopkeeper just laughed at her and said 'don't you realise this is all a sham?' And then the Red Cross was invited in, and they saw an orchestra, and there was loads of fine musicians imprisoned there, and the Germans had got lots of fine musical instruments from all the Jews they'd killed, and there was a classical orchestra playing for the Red Cross inspection team. A playground had been equipped for the children - the children were seen munching thick sandwiches, and a cart loaded with vegetables crossed from one side of the road to the other side of the street in front of their very eyes - and of course it drove straight out of Theresienstadt because a prisoner had been told to run ahead of these inspectors and warn the cart driver to just drive it past the Red Cross inspectors. And the Red Cross reported that conditions for Jews in the concentration camps weren't too bad, and then the people who were involved in prettying up the town were all shoved on a train and gassed in Auschwitz. There were actually two Red Cross inspections. The first one occurred before I went there, the second one was whilst I was there and the second time apparently they weren't fooled quite so much. But it's not a glorious episode in the history of the Red Cross, I'm sorry to say. We did however, via the Red Cross get some food parcels, and under those circumstances, I mean there wasn't a vast amount of food in each parcel, but it made a terrific difference, so we were very grateful for that.

So then there was an announcement that children had to be on the next train. Mrs De Jong - I wasn't aware of it at the time - but she told me afterwards was in a great dilemma. She couldn't avoid putting us on the train because we weren't hidden, everybody knew we were there, but she believed we would be going to our deaths. The question was, would she come with us? She decided to come with us. And I remember going with her, and my little baby sister to a children's dormitory; most of the children in Theresienstadt were in special buildings, I don't know of any other children who were kept like us, by a stranger, an adult stranger in an adult dormitory. So full of children, this dormitory, and a man with a clipboard comes in, reads out a list of names... those children follow, gradually the rooms empty, in the end the three of us were left in this now otherwise empty dormitory. And I have quite a vivid memory of Mrs. De Jong being in a great state of agitation. You see, if she had failed to hear our names, she was for it. If she left the room without an order, she was also for it. We stayed for hours. Eventually she very cautiously opened the door and crept out, and she came back maybe ten minutes later - the train had gone.

Now, we now know that that train went to Auschwitz. Those children were kept alive for a bit, and then loaded on a truck and taken to the gas chambers and were not seen again. Why our names were not called, I have no idea. Maybe the list was made up in the buildings where the children were, and we were highly untypical, I mean if the Germans had had time, they would have caught up with us. There was a pit being dug for our bodies; they were attempting to create a gas chamber, but the Soviet army was approaching - Germany was collapsing. Towards the end, the Red Cross took over the management of the camp, even before the Germans could desecrate it. And there weren't the number of German personnel left to finish us off. And when I meet a British soldier now, as I sometimes do on events like Holocaust Memorial Day, I pat them on the back and I say 'if it wasn't for you, fighting on the Western Front, the war might have taken a little longer and I wouldn't be here.' Because that's the truth. On the 8 May, the night of 8-9 May '45, the Soviet army entered Theresienstadt, following the surrender of the Nazi empire, and promptly disappeared again because there was a big outbreak of typhus in the town, and the last thing you want in an army is Typhus. Also I'm sure that the transport means weren't available to take us away. So we stayed there somewhat longer, I guess a couple of weeks is my guess, maybe two or three weeks probably until the epidemic was under control, and until lorries were available for transporting civilians. And a long and eventful journey started, during which Mrs De Jong, because she had my by now, two year old sister with her, was allowed to sit in the cab next to the driver, whilst I sat with all the adults in the back of the lorry, high army lorry. And this convoy of lorries went day and night, and Mrs De Jong fell asleep during the night against the door and the door flew open, and my sister fell off her lap. From this high lorry cab, I mean, a military lorry, so huge ground clearance, whilst it was moving during the night. I only heard about it the following morning when Mrs De Jong told me, and I didn't know I was going to be a doctor, but I examined my baby sister from head to toe, and she had only a few scratches. Quite amazing, but she could have died on the way home. There was an incident, it's crazy, there were all sorts of things that happened during that journey, we were... spent the night in all sorts of different places, railway station, a sort of chateaux, and I'm sure what had been a prison camp, that's what it looked like. Except the gate was open, we could wander out. And I did. And so exploring outside the barbed wire, I found this round, black object, just outside the barbed wire, and I was about to pick it up when I heard screaming behind me, and three or four little boys, running towards me like I've never seen anybody run before or since, and they got to me and they explained what a landmine was. So I mean, incredible!

And we eventually arrived in the Netherlands, on one of these barges that you see on the Rhine, I mean like a slave ship, it was a horrible stench, we were allowed to go and take a breath of fresh air through the one tiny opening, but there was so many people there, the opportunity was very limited. And it was hot - it was June by this time. And we arrived in the Netherlands; the family that had taken my sister in was waiting for us, they'd been warned by the Red Cross. And we were immediately taken away from Mrs De Jong. It broke her heart, and it broke mine. They took my sister in again, spoilt her rotten, and she loved it and I was sent to the lady who looked after me before, and to cut a long story short, I went from family to family to family, very disrupted by school to school, and then ended up with the family who had taken my sister in, and they treated me very badly, all the members of the family were fine, but the woman of the family really didn't want another boy and she made it very obvious. And I used to lie crying in my bed at night, with good reason. But she unexpectedly died one night. And her husband tried valiantly to look after us; they were quite an elderly couple by this stage; by the standard of those days. And he got some housekeepers, who were disastrous, fortune hunters actually. And meanwhile, my family in Manchester was clamouring to have us, and we were transferred to my father's sister and her family in Didsbury, Manchester. And I arrived really not being able to speak any English, sent to a school where I couldn't tell when there was a French lesson when they were speaking French, because the French was so bad, and I couldn't understand the English either. Or not much of it, and it was quite hard, but in the school of hard knocks, I learnt English well enough in two terms that when I moved to another school the boys in the class didn't realise I was born anywhere but England. And it took me three months to cotton on to the fact that they didn't know, I just took it for granted they would. It never occurred to us, until we had a conversation about it three months later. It was a hard and unpleasant way of learning English but I did. And I ended up having the good fortune to go to a wonderful school, Manchester grammar school, which really saved me. No words of praise can be great enough. From there I got to Brasenose College, Oxford, got a medical degree, I mean my university days were the happiest days of my life, and I'm so grateful for that. And I got British nationality, and I had to report at the Manchester central police station in Bootle Street. And we couldn't find the right office, and nobody could tell us; there weren't so many people being naturalised in those days. But we found it and there was a door with frosted glass panels like in American detective films, you know, where the name of the detective is on the door, and we saw the inscription on the door, it said 'firearms, explosives, dangerous drugs and aliens.' So we knew were in the right place. That was at the age of 16. But I qualified in medicine and got absolutely wonderful training, went from one wonderful teaching hospital after another - trained by a succession of the most wonderful doctors, and then of course a wonderful career as a doctor; at least the work was wonderful, working with patients, you know, solving problems, and I've got three children and five beautiful grandchildren, four granddaughters and a little grandson, and we're expecting further grandchild, and of course I have a wife in Leicester, and very grateful to have been given British nationality, to be a British citizen. Because I never had Dutch nationality, they called me stateless, so it's the British; it's Britain that's given me a real home.

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Martin Stern MBE

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In this podcast Holocaust survivor Dr Martin Stern talks about his story. Martin was born in 1938 and lived in Holland. He survived camps at both Westerbork and Theresienstadt. You can listen to the interview with Dr Martin Stern MBE below: https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/martin_stern.mp3 So can you tell us a bit about your life before the Holocaust?

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This website has been created to look at the lives of four people who lived during the Holocaust.

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OOEJ - Homepage - Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary Journeys

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OOEJ retraces the steps of four people whose lives were irreversibly altered during the Holocaust between 1933-1945

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Nazi Persecution of other groups: 1933 ‑ 1945

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In addition to singling out Jews for complete annihilation, the Nazis targeted Roma and Sinti people (Gypsies), black people, gay people, Jehovahs Witnesses, and mentally or physically disabled people for discrimination and persecution.