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The Holocaust     Before the end of the Second World War over six million lost their lives in the Holocaust, many more were terribly affected. This page is dedicated to their memory.   If you can provide any additional information, please add it here. Those known to have been affected by The Holocaust during the Second World War 1939-1945. Herbst Willy. Levy Marga. Cook. Muhlbaum Abraham M.. Springhorn Albert J.. Auerbach Ester. Bienenfeld Henry. Blatz Alfred. Heldring Frederick. Horner George. Kleinman Josef. Loeb Liesl. Rieder Helen. Shnaper Abram. Spiegel Boruch. Starkman Leah. Zapooschenko Konstantyn Alexander. The names on this list have been submitted by relatives, friends, neighbours and others who wish to remember them, if you have any names to add or any recollections or photos of those listed, please Add a Name to this List The Wartime Memories Project is the original WW1 and WW2 commemoration website. Announcements The Wartime Memories Project has been running for 24 years. If you would like to support us, a donation, no matter how small, would be much appreciated, annually we need to raise enough funds to pay for our web hosting and admin or this site will vanish from the web. 27th April 2024 - Please note we currently have a huge backlog of submitted material, our volunteers are working through this as quickly as possible and all names, stories and photos will be added to the site. If you have already submitted a story to the site and your UID reference number is higher than 264001 your information is still in the queue, please do not resubmit, we are working through them as quickly as possible. Looking for help with Family History Research?   Please read our Family History FAQ's The free to access section of The Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers and funded by donations from our visitors. If the information here has been helpful or you have enjoyed reaching the stories please conside making a donation, no matter how small, would be much appreciated, annually we need to raise enough funds to pay for our web hosting or this site will vanish from the web. If you enjoy this site please consider making a donation. Want to find out more about your relative's service? Want to know what life was like during the War? Our Library contains an ever growing number diary entries, personal letters and other documents, most transcribed into plain text. We are now on Facebook. Like this page to receive our updates. If you have a general question please post it on our Facebook page. Wanted: Digital copies of Group photographs, Scrapbooks, Autograph books, photo albums, newspaper clippings, letters, postcards and ephemera relating to WW2. We would like to obtain digital copies of any documents or photographs relating to WW2 you may have at home. If you have any unwanted photographs, documents or items from the First or Second World War, please do not destroy them. The Wartime Memories Project will give them a good home and ensure that they are used for educational purposes. Please get in touch for the postal address, do not sent them to our PO Box as packages are not accepted. World War 1 One ww1 wwII second 1939 1945 battalion Did you know? We also have a section on The Great War. and a Timecapsule to preserve stories from other conflicts for future generations. Want to know more about The Holocaust? There are:0 items tagged The Holocaust available in our Library   These include information on officers, regimental histories, letters, diary entries, personal accounts and information about actions during the Second World War. Albert J. Springhorn 430th AAA My father, Albert J Springhorn, was a member of the 430th AAA US Army and served from D-day+1 through to the Battle of the Bulge. He acted as an interpreter at Dachau and Buchenwald. Mary E Springhorn Add to this record. Willy Herbst Willy Herbst was born in Zaberfeld, Germany and trained as a baker in Heidelberg. In 1939 aged 18, he was among the Jewish men sent to the Paderborn concentration camp by the Nazis to perform forced labor. Willy collapsed while being marched to a quarry in late 1939. The Gestapo sent him to be treated for a hernia, but the surgery was experimental. A sympathetic nurse intervened and helped him escape. Instead of reporting back to camp, he managed to obtain U.S. immigration papers, fled Germany for the United States with his mother and a friend. Although other siblings had slipped away earlier, his sister and everyone on his father's side of the family were killed at Dachau. Willy enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1943 and served in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. He entered Dachau within days of its liberation in April 1945. What he saw unnerved him. "Even though I had been in a concentration camp before, I never realized what might have been in store for me." he said later. His job was to supervise the unloading of a train with food for the survivors. He stayed there helping survivors and using his skill with dialects to expose camp guards who tried to claim they were not German and had not been involved in the atrocities. Willy was honorably discharged in January 1946 with the rank of technician fifth grade. He was awarded the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with four Bronze Stars. After the war, he returned to Philadelphia and worked in the dry-cleaning business. He married Ruth Mintz and the pair devoted themselves to the Jewish War Veterans organization. Together establishing a scholarship fund and served in the organization's national offices. Willy also gave lectures to high school and college audiences about his experiences during the Holocaust. S. Flynn Add to this record. Abraham M. Muhlbaum Abraham M. Muhlbaum was a survivor of the Holocaust and a member of the Dutch resistance during the second world war. He was born in 1922 in Berlin. Just before the Kristallnacht attacks in that city in 1938 he and his Jewish family managed to escape to Amsterdam, Holland. The German occupation of Holland began in 1940. Mr. Muhlbaum's parents and his three siblings were sent to a detention camp in 1943. Abraham escaped out of a window and crossed roofs to escape with fate. After this escapade he joined the Dutch resistance, finding shelter and obtaining faked identity papers for others. He used false papers to hide his Jewish identity. He was interned as a political prisoner, being moved between several prisons and labour camps. He was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp for eight months of the war until it was liberated in 1945. After the war he became a research physicist for the navy, living near Washington, USA. S. Flynn Add to this record. Cook. Marga Levy Marga Forester, 90, of Wynnewood, a Holocaust survivor who escaped from Nazi Germany to England on the famous Kindertransport, died Sunday, Feb. 9 at home. Mrs. Forester, the former Marga Levy, was married to fellow Holocaust survivor Frank Forester, who died of respiratory failure Dec. 3, also at home in Wynnewood. He was 88. They were together 69 years. As children - she was 16, he was 13 - the two left Germany on separate Kindertransports, the rescue effort in which Britain agreed to take in 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland when the Nazis were gaining power. Although the transports saved 10,000 Jewish children and babies from the Holocaust, most of the youngsters never saw their parents again, according to the Kindertransport Association. "I vaguely remember being given 10 days' notice that I was going to be able to leave Germany and travel to England on a 'children's transport.' I was so excited, I felt sick all the time and spent my last 10 days at home in bed," Mrs. Forester wrote in a memoir. On the train platform in Berlin, she recalled thinking her parents looked sad. "I wonder in retrospect if they had an intuition that they would never see me again," she wrote. As the train from Berlin neared the border with the Netherlands, SS men boarded to check passports. "We were petrified in case they would stop us from leaving Germany. . . . Once in Holland, we felt free!" she wrote. The children took a ferry to Harwich, England, where they were met by the Jewish Refugee Committee. She was lodged in a boardinghouse in Birmingham before being sent to the countryside to escape German bombing. She later learned her transport in July 1939 had been one of last ones to get children out of Germany. Once Britain entered World War II in September 1939, the rescue missions stopped. She also learned that her parents and younger brother died in a concentration camp. Frank Forester had arrived on an earlier transport, in December 1938. His parents disappeared; he never learned their fate. "That's what brought them together. They were both orphans," said the couple's daughter, Carole Parker. They met at the boardinghouse where they both lived. He served in the British army; she cooked for the British Fire Service, the agency responsible for fighting the fires started by German air raids. The two married in 1944. After moving to London in 1950, the couple and their daughter came to the United States in 1956 and settled in Chicago s.flynn Add to this record. Recomended Reading. Available at discounted prices. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews Patrick Desbois Winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Studies. 'An outstanding contribution to Holocaust literature, uncovering new dimensions of the tragedy, and should be on the shelves of even the smallest library. Highly recommended.' - Library Journal "In Jewish tradition the greatest category of acts one can perform are those of 'loving kindness,' including taking care of the sick, welcoming the stranger, and sheltering the needy. The most treasured of these acts is taking care of the dead because, unlike the others, it cannot be reciprocated. Jewish tradition posits that it is then that the individual most closely emulates God's kindness to humans, which also cannot be reciprocated. Father Patrick Desbois has performed this act of loving kindness not for one person but for hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered in cold blood. He has done so despite the fact that many people would have preferred this story never to be uncovered and others doubted that it ever coul More information on: The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz Olga Lengyel Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". Today, with 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, and neo-Nazism on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist. More information on: Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries Laurel Holliday An excellent resource for kids and adults all aroud the world. This book shows what it was like during the holocaust and very heavy details about the holocaust itself. This is on of the many holocaust books I read, and out of all of them, this one is the best. More information on: Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries World War II (Who? What? When?) Bob Fowke 'We loved this series. Really good, easy-to-use, exciting reference books, but the size and appearance of a novel. Topics and themes are covered in alphabetical order and there's a simple cross-referencing system which is really easy to use. A good, fascinating selection of information and facts that can be dipped into; helpful and clear 'how to read this book' explanation at the front, and glossary of terms and index at the back. Great, eye-catching covers.' -- The Guide to Literacy Resources 2003 'The series covers eras closely linked to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's key stage 2 units. They approach history through the humorous, gruesome facts that KS2 pupils love to know. The cartoons and informal style make them suitable for independent reading - an unsuspecting way of learning about the past.' -- TES Teacher 20030613 'a very accessible reference book.' -- Primary Times 20030331 Product Description As the title implies, the book provides information on the key peo More information on: World War II (Who? What? When?) Star of Fear, Star of Hope Jo Hoestlandt Each year I do a thematic unit on the Holocaust and this is one of the picture books that I use with my sixth grade students. They enjoy the story and the pictures portray the writer's feelings were very. More information on: Star of Fear, Star of Hope Anne Frank's Story Carol Ann Lee The life story of Anne Frank, from her early happy childhood in Frankfurt, growing up in Amsterdam, her two years in hiding and the last few months of her life in the concentration camps. Narrated in six clearly written chapters, this biography for children answers the many detailed questions about Anne that readers of the Diary often have, and includes interesting anecdotes from friends who survived her. There is an Historical Note at the beginning of the book and a map of Europe, so that children will be able to understand the situation at the time, and an Introduction by Anne Frank's cousin, Buddy Elias. More information on: Anne Frank's Story When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Judith Kerr Anna is nine and is far to busy with schoolwork, tobogganing and making important decisions about whether wood yo-yos, are better than tin, to do more than notice the posters of the man who has a moustache like Charlie Chaplin. It isn't until one morning she finds her papa has disappeared that she starts to listen to the grownups talk of Hitler, elections and Anna's Jewish background. And then one afternoon she comes home from school to discover her missing father is uneasy over their safety and they must go to Zurich that very week to meet him that she realises how serious the threat of Hitler is. It is the story of a lost childhood and the dissent from fame and wealth to poverty and having a price on your head. It is the story of four lives destroyed by the Nazis. And it is a true story. It is one of the best books written about World War Two it shows the funny sad side of a childhood destroyed by hate. And the difficulties of French and English to a nine year old girl from Berli More information on: When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Links

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