'holocaust' - tagged features

2007 also saw the 60th anniversary of the first time Anne Frank’s diary was published. The account, written by a Jewish girl in hiding in Amsterdam during World War II, is widely recognized as a definitive document of the era. To mark the anniversary, the Swiss relatives of the Frank family transferred their private archives to the Anne Frank Foundation in the Dutch capital. Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s Marijke Van de Berg met Anne Frank’s cousin, Buddy Elias. 

As the years pass, the tragedy of the Holocaust, now more than six decades ago, is fading from living memory. The last survivors and eye witnesses are dying, and there are concerns that communicating the scale of the Nazi genocide and its importance to current and future generations will become more difficult. To try and counter that, the Berlin campus of a Jewish-American university has put together Germany's first master's degree dedicated to communicating the Holocaust to the public. This week the seven master students attended their first seminar. 

60 years ago today Anne Frank's diary was published for the first time. The diary of a Jewish girl who went into hiding in Amsterdam during World War II is widely recognised as a definitive document of the era. To mark the anniversary, the Swiss relatives of the Frank family have transferred their private archives to the Anne Frank Foundation in the Dutch capital. Marijke Van de Berg asked Anne Frank's cousin Buddy Elias why they had decided to bring the archive to Amsterdam... 

No another reminder of the holocaust - this time in Warsaw where the cornerstone for the Museum of History of Polish Jews was laid in the polish capital. The people behind the project are emphasising that their ambition is not to build “just a Holocaust museum' but a centre of dialogue, culture and the long and rich history of Polish - Jewish coexistence. Joanna Najfeld from Polish Radio External Services reports 

“Never again”: how many times have we heard that, after genocides, wars and human rights violations…..yet these are still happening. Well let’s zoom in on an original project which is hoping to change this… "So that children know" is the title of an EU-funded project, in the Czech Republic. It’s goal is to teach fourteen and fifteen-year olds about human rights. The idea is not new - what makes it special is that it aims to break with the old practice of memorizing a text; instead it encourages pupils to talk about various aspects of human rights – and takes them to a World War II concentration camp. Radio Prague’s Daniela Lazarova reports. 

Romania belatedly acknowledged its role in the Holocaust. It was only in 2004, that a committee for the investigation of the Holocaust crimes published an official report according to which between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were exterminated by the Romanian army in the war zones of Bassarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. These are the highest numbers in a country other than Germany. Before 2004, there was very little talk of the scale of Romania’s contribution to the Holocaust. But the last 3 years has seen a lot of campaigning aimed at making Romanians aware of those crimes. 

Berte is a Jewish holocaust survivor. In 1943, in Nazi occupied Holland, Berte was rounded up with her parents by the Nazis and sent to Camp Westerbok in the netherlands and then on to Bergen Belsen, the notorious concentration camp in Germany, where she spent the rest of the war. When she was freed by the Russian army in 1945 she was 7 years old. Last month she and 69 other Dutch survivors returned to the site of the camp to finally inaugurate a Dutch memorial. Radio Netherlands' Jonathan Groubert went with her...