Fritz Pfeffer

Friedrich "Fritz" Pfeffer (30 April 1889 – 20 December 1944) was a German dentist and Jewish refugee who hid with Anne Frank during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands, and who perished in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Northern Germany.

In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, all names, apart from those of the Frank family, were changed to preserve the privacy of individuals mentioned. Pfeffer was given the pseudonym Albert Dussel.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Pfeffer

Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945) is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. By nationality, she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany (the Nuremberg Laws).

She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary, which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany. By the beginning of 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of Anne's father, Otto Frank's, office building.

After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945.

Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

It has since been translated into many languages. The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank

Margot Frank

Margot Betti Frank (16 February 1926 – early March 1945) was the older sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding, and who subsequently perished in Bergen-Belsen. According to the diary of her sister Anne, Margot was keeping a diary as well, but no trace of Margot's diary has ever been found.

Margot Betti Frank, named after her maternal aunt Bettina Holländer (1898-1914), was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and lived in the outer suburbs of the city with her parents, Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Holländer, and her sister, Anne Frank, during the early years of her life.

Margot Frank was 16 years of age when she and her family went into hiding. Her family hid in the back upper floors of her father's office building.

She attended the Ludwig-Richter School in Frankfurt-am-Main until the appointment of Adolf Hitler on 30 January 1933 to the position of Chancellor in Germany brought an increase of anti-Jewish measures, among which was the expulsion of Jewish schoolchildren from non-denominational schools.

In response to the rising tide of anti-semitism, the family decided to follow the 63,000 other Jews who had left Germany that year and immigrate to the Netherlands. Edith Frank-Holländer and her daughters moved in with her mother in Aachen in June 1934 until Otto Frank found accommodation in Amsterdam.

Margot and her mother left Germany to join him on 5 December 1933, followed by Anne in February 1934. Margot was enrolled in an elementary school on Amsterdam's Jekerstraat, close to their new address in Amsterdam South, and achieved excellent academic results until an anti-Jewish law imposed a year after the 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands demanded her removal to a Jewish lyceum.

There she displayed the studiousness and intelligence which had made her noteworthy at her previous schools, and was remembered by former pupils as virtuous, reserved, and deeply religious. In her diary, Anne recounted instances of their mother suggesting she emulate Margot, and although she wrote of admiring her sister in some respects, Anne sought to define her own individuality without role models.

While Anne inherited her father's ambivalence towards the Torah, Margot followed her mother's example and became involved in Amsterdam's Jewish community. She took Hebrew classes, attended synagogue, and in 1941 joined a Dutch Zionist club for young people who wanted to immigrate to Land of Israel to found a Jewish state, where, according to Anne, she wished to become a midwife.

On 5 July 1942, she received a notice to report to a labor camp and the next day went into hiding with her family at her father's office building. They were later joined by four other Jewish refugees and remained hidden for two years until they were betrayed on 4 August 1944 by someone who was never identified.

Along with the other occupants of the hiding place, Margot Frank was arrested by the Gestapo and detained in their headquarters overnight before being taken to a cell in a nearby prison for three days. From here they were taken by train, on 8 August, to the Dutch Westerbork concentration camp.

As the Frank family had failed to respond to Margot's call-up notice in 1942, and had been discovered in hiding, they (along with Fritz Pfeffer and the Van Pels family) were declared criminals by the camp's officials and detained in its Punishment Block to be sentenced to hard labor in the battery dismantling plant. They remained here until they were selected for Westerbork's last deportation to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944.

Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen on 30 October, where both contracted typhus in the winter of 1944. Margot Frank died several days before her sister Anne in early March 1945. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper and her sister Lin Jaldati buried them together in one of the camp's mass graves.

Otto Frank was the only one to survive out of the eight that went into hiding. When he returned to Amsterdam he was given Anne's diary by Miep Gies, which he later published. A diary kept by Margot Frank during her time in hiding is mentioned by Anne in her writings but has never been found. However, letters written by both sisters to American pen pals were published in 2003.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Frank

Edith Frank

Edith Frank (born Edith Holländer on 16 January 1900 – 6 January 1945) was the mother of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank.

Edith was the youngest of four children, having been born into a German-Jewish family in Aachen, Germany. Her father, Abraham Holländer (1860–1928) was a successful businessman in industrial equipment and was prominent in the Aachen Jewish community as was her mother, Rosa Stern. (1866–1942).

She met Otto Frank in 1924 and they got married on his thirty-sixth birthday, 12 May 1925, at Aachen's synagogue. Their first daughter, Margot, was born in Frankfurt on 16 February 1926, followed by Anne, who was born on 12 June 1929.

The rise of Antisemitism and the introduction of discriminatory laws in Germany forced the family to emigrate to Amsterdam in 1933, where Otto established a branch of his spice and pectin distribution company. Her brothers Walter (1897–1968) and Julius (1894–1967) escaped to the United States in 1938, and Rosa Holländer-Stern left Aachen in 1939 to join the Frank family in Amsterdam. Edith's sister, Bettina Hollander had died earlier at the age of sixteen due to appendicitis when Edith was just 14.

In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and began their persecution of the country's Jews. Edith's children were removed from their schools, and her husband had to resign his business to his Dutch colleagues Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, who helped the family when they went into hiding at the company premises in 1942.

The two-year period the Frank family spent in hiding with four other people (their neighbours Hermann van Pels, his wife and son, and Miep Gies's dentist Fritz Pfeffer) was famously chronicled in Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, which ended three days before they were anonymously betrayed and arrested on 4 August 1944.

After detainment in the Gestapo headquarters on the Euterpestraat and three days in prison on the Amstelveenweg, Edith and those with whom she had been in hiding were transported to the Westerbork concentration camp. From here they were deported to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944, the last train to be dispatched from Westbork to Auschwitz.

Edith and her daughters were separated from Otto upon arrival and they never saw him again. On 30 October another selection separated Edith from Anne and Margot. Edith was selected for the gas chamber, and her daughters were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

Edith escaped with a friend to another section of the camp, where she remained through the winter, but she died from starvation in January 1945, 20 days before the Red Army liberated the camp and 10 days before her 45th birthday.

When Otto Frank decided to edit his daughter's diary for publication, he was aware that his wife had come in for particular criticism because of her often disagreeable relationship with Anne, and cut some of the more heated comments out of respect for his wife and other residents of the Secret Annex. Nevertheless, Anne's portrait of an unsympathetic and sarcastic mother was duplicated in the dramatizations of the book, which was countered by the memories of those who had known her as a modest, distant woman who tried to treat her adolescent children as her equals.

In 1999, the discovery of previously unknown pages excised by Otto showed that Anne had discerned that although her mother very much loved her father, her father—though very devoted to Edith—was not in love with her, and this understanding was leading Anne to develop a new sense of empathy for her mother's situation.

By the time Edith and her daughters were in Auschwitz, Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Auschwitz survivor interviewed by Willy Lindwer in The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (page 129), observed that "they were always together, mother and daughters. It is certain that they gave each other a great deal of support. All the things a teenager might think of her mother were no longer of any significance".

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Frank

Miklós Vig

Miklós Vig was a Hungarian cabaret and jazz singer, actor, comedian and theater secretary in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Born in Budapest on July 11, 1898, he was murdered there on December 19, 1944 by members of the Arrow Cross.

He was born Miklós Voglhut in 1898 to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. Although he went to acting school, he had better success as a cabaret singer.

In 1924 as his career was picking up he changed his surname to Vig. He changed his name because Voglhut was a Jewish-sounding name and antisemitism was growing at the time. Vig means cheerful or merry; it is a nice, short, typically Hungarian name that also made a great stage name.

The fact that he was married to a Catholic woman, Kati Szőke, and the fact that he changed his name did not save him from the Holocaust. On December 19, 1944, Miklós was among a group of Jews who were bound, lined up along the banks of the Danube and machine-gunned into the river by Hungarian Nazis, members of the Arrow Cross Party. The Shoes on the Danube Promenade honors the memory of those who were murdered in this fashion.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikl%C3%B3s_Vig

Joseph Schmidt

Joseph Schmidt (March 4, 1904 – November 16, 1942) was a German Jew who was a tenor and actor.

He was born in Davideny (Ukrainian: Davydivka), a small town in the Bukovina province of Austria-Hungary, later Romania and now part of Ukraine.

As a child of musical parents, young Joseph was influenced by many cultures. In addition to German, which was his first language ^[1], and Yiddish, he learned Hebrew and became fluent in Romanian, French and English. His first vocal training was as an alto boy in the Czernowitz Synagogue. His talents were quickly recognised and by 1924 he was featured in his first solo recital in Czernowitz singing traditional Jewish songs and arias by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini and Bizet. Soon he moved to Berlin and took piano and singing lessons from Professor Hermann Weissenborn. He returned to Romania for his military service and became cantor of the Czernowitz synagogue.

In 1929 he went back to Berlin, where Cornelis Bronsgeest, a famous Dutch baritone, engaged him for a radio broadcast as Vasco da Gama in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. This was the beginning of a successful international career. Owing to his diminutive stature (he was just over 1.5 m) a stage career was impossible; however his voice was extremely well suited for radio. He made many records, first for Ultraphone, then for Odeon/Parlophone, was featured in many radio broadcasts and acted in several movies in both German and English.

Ironically, Joseph Schmidt enjoyed his greatest successes during the rise of the German Nazis, who subsequently prohibited Jewish artists and writers from working. In 1937, he toured the United States and performed in Carnegie Hall together with other prominent singers such as Grace Moore. The Nazis banned him from performing in Germany and Austria, but he was still very much welcome in the Netherlands and Belgium, where he was immensely popular.

In 1939, he visited his mother in Czernowitz for the last time. When the war broke out that year he was caught in France by the German invasion. He attempted to escape to the United States but, unfortunately, this failed. Making a dash for the Swiss border, he was interned in a Swiss refugee camp in Gyrenbad near Zürich in October 1942. He had been already in frail health. Harsh camp life and lack of medical care brought about a fatal heart attack on November 16, 1942. He was only 38 years old.

He had a sweet lyric tenor voice with an easy high register, sailing up even to a high D. His warm timbre was perfectly suited for the melodies of Schubert and Lehár. His popular song recordings were the best-sellers of that age.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schmidt

Dora Gerson

Dora Gerson (March 23, 1899 – February 14, 1943) was a Jewish German cabaret singer and motion picture actress of the silent film era who was murdered with her family at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin, Germany, Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman in Germany where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit Harlan.

The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Harlan's niece later married the American Jewish filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

In 1920, Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise) and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane (Caravan of Death). Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. Both films are now considered lost films. Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films.

By 1933 however, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the German-Jewish population was systematically stripped of rights and Gerson's career slowed dramatically. Blacklisted from performing in "Aryan" films, Gerson began recording music for a small Jewish record company. She also began recording in the Yiddish language during this time, and the 1936 song "Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn" became highly regarded by the Jews of Europe in the 1930s.

Gerson's most memorable recordings from this era were the songs "Backbord und Steuerbord" and "Vorbei" (Beyond Recall), which was an emotional ballad, subtly memorializing a Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party:

“

They're gone beyond recall A final glance, a last kiss And then it's all over under the frame of eternity A final word, a last farewell

”

In 1936, Gerson relocated with relatives to the Netherlands, fleeing Nazi persecution. She had married a second time to Max Sluizer (b. June 24, 1906). On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands and the Jews there were subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and restrictions as in Germany. After several years of living under oppressive Nazi occupation, the Gerson family began to plan to escape. In 1942, Gerson and her family were seized trying to flee to Switzerland, a neutral nation in World War II Europe. The family were sent by railroad car to transit camp Westerbork bound for the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dora Gerson at the age of 43 along with her husband and their two children, Miriam Sluizer (b. Nov 19, 1937) and Abel Juda Sluizer (b. May 21, 1940), all perished in Auschwitz February 14, 1943.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Gerson

Kurt Gerron

Kurt Gerron (May 11, 1897 – November 15, 1944) was a German Jewish actor and film director.

Born Kurt Gerson into a well-off merchant family in Berlin, he initially studied medicine but was called up for military service in World War I. Seriously wounded he qualified as a military doctor of the German Army. After the war Gerron turned to a stage career and became a theatre actor under director Max Reinhardt in 1920.

He appeared in secondary roles in several silent films and from 1926 also directed film shots. He had his breakthrough starring in such films as The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) opposite Marlene Dietrich, while on stage he originated the role of "Tiger" Brown in the premiere production of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) at the Berlin Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928, also singing Mack the Knife.

After the Machtergreifung in 1933 Gerron left Nazi Germany with his wife and parents, traveling first to Paris and later to Amsterdam. There, he kept on working as an actor at the Stadsschouwburg and director in several movies. He was offered employments in Hollywood by the agency of Peter Lorre and Josef von Sternberg, but refused several times, one time because his potential employer didn't offer first class tickets, and stayed behind in Europe. After the Wehrmacht had occupied the Netherlands, he was interned in the transit camp at Westerbork before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There he ran a cabaret called Karussell to entertain the inmates.

In 1944, Gerron was either persuaded or coerced by the Nazis to make a propaganda film showing how humane the conditions were at Theresienstadt. After shooting finished, Gerron and the members of Jazz pianist Martin Roman's Ghetto Swingers were deported on the camp's final transport to Auschwitz. Gerron was killed immediately upon arrival, Roman and guitarist Coco Schumann survived. Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers to be closed forever the next day. Gerron's film, supposed to have been titled either Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement) also known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), was supposedly never completed and exists today only in fragmentary form.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gerron

Hana Brady

Hana Brady (Hana "Hanička" Bradyová) (16 May 1931 in Nové Město na Moravě – 23 October 1944 in Auschwitz, Poland) was a 13-year old Jewish girl murdered in the Holocaust. She is the subject of the 2002 non-fiction children's book Hana's Suitcase, written by Karen Levine.

Hana Brady was born in Nové Mesto, Czechoslovakia. She and her older brother George watched their parents being arrested and taken away by the Nazis. Hana and George were sent to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. In 1944, Hana was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. While her brother survived by working as a labourer, Hana was sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival on 23 October 1944.

Hana's Suitcase

The story of Hana Brady first became public when Fumiko Ishioka （石岡史子 Ishioka Fumiko）, a Japanese educator and director of the Japanese non-profit Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center exhibited Hana's suitcase in 2000 as a relic of the concentration camp. Visiting Auschwitz in 1999, Ishioka requested a loan of children's items, things that would convey the story of the Holocaust to other children.

I went to Auschwitz in 1999 and asked for a loan of some children's items. I specifically asked [for] a shoe, this little shoe, and I asked for a suitcase. A suitcase – that really tells you a story of how children, who used to live happily with their family, were transported and were allowed to take only one suitcase. [The suitcase] shows this journey. I thought an object like a suitcase would be a very important item to let children in Japan learn what happened to children in the Holocaust.
—Fumiko Ishioka

The suitcase turned out to be a very capable means of telling the story of the Holocaust, reaching out to children at their level.

In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don't see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children were really shocked. 'She was my age.' That really helped them a lot, to focus on this one little life that was lost. They could really relate her to themselves and try to think of why such a thing could happen to a girl like her. Why the Jewish people? And why children? They then realized there were one and a half million children. —Fumiko Ishioka

The suitcase has large writing on it, a name and birthdate and the German word, Waisenkind (orphan). Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana's life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada. The story of Hana Brady and how her suitcase led Ishioka to Toronto became the subject of a CBC documentary. The producer of that documentary, Karen Levine was urged to turn the story into a book by a friend who was a publisher and whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Said Levine, "I first read about Hana’s suitcase in December 2000. I read about Hana’s suitcase in The Canadian Jewish News. My heart started to beat. I fell in love with the story instantly. This was a different kind of Holocaust story. It had at its centre a terrible sadness, one we all know too well. But it had a modern layer to it that lifted it up, that had connection, and even redemption."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hana_Brady#Hana.27s_Suitcase