Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors

14/10/2026

Selma and Chaim met and fell in love at the Sobibor killing center. The young Jewish couple made a daring escape during the camp uprising in 1943 and went into hiding.
At least 167,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor.

14/10/2026

On October 14, 1943, the Jewish prisoners of the Sobibor death camp, in N**i-occupied Poland, staged a mass revolt against the SS. Their goal was to give a chance for all the camp prisoners to escape. Only 50 survived.

On October 14, 1943, the Jewish prisoners of the Sobibor death camp...

13/10/2026

On October 13, 1997, Yad Vashem recognized Metropolitan Ioakim Alexopoulos as a Righteous Among the Nations for helping to rescue many of the Jews in Volos, Greece along with their spiritual leader Rabbi Moshe Pessah.

Rabbi Moshe Pessah, the chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Volos, was summoned to German headquarters on September 30, 1943 (first day of Rosh Hashana) and ordered to submit a list of the names of all members of the Jewish community of Volos within 24 hours. Rabbi Pessah immediately contacted the Metropolitan of Dimitriada, Ioakim Alexopoulos, who advised the chief rabbi to urge the Jews to leave town at once and find refuge in the villages in the mountains. He gave Pessah a letter of introduction addressed to the clergymen in the villages surrounding Volos, instructing them to help and protect the Jews “in every way.” Alexopoulos’s actions contributed to the high percentage of Volos Jews who were saved. The only Jews left in the town were those who had not listened to his advice; they were arrested and sent to extermination camps.

12/10/2026

On this day in 1940, N**i German authorities ordered the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in occupied Poland.

It would become the largest Jewish ghetto in N**i-occupied Europe, with more than 400,000 Jews confined behind its walls, subjected to overcrowding, starvation, disease and systematic persecution.

Tens of thousands died from the horrific conditions, while hundreds of thousands were subsequently deported to N**i extermination camps, primarily Treblinka, where they were murdered.

Today, we remember the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, honour those who resisted N**i persecution and reaffirm our responsibility to preserve their memory

12/10/2026

On the morning of April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior, shot and killed two students in a campus dormitory. About two hours later, he chained the main doors of Norris Hall, the engineering building, and went from classroom to classroom opening fire. In roughly 11 minutes he killed 30 more people and wounded many others, then took his own life as police entered the building. It remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

In Room 204, 76-year-old professor Liviu Librescu heard the gunshots. The door couldn’t be locked from the inside, so he blocked it with his body and told his students to escape through the windows. He was shot four times through the door, but 22 students made it to safety. Librescu and one student, Minal Panchal, were killed.

Librescu had survived the Holocaust as a child in Romania and later defied its communist regime before reaching Israel in 1978 and Virginia Tech in 1985. He died on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Romania posthumously awarded him the Order of the Star of Romania.

11/10/2026

October, 1942 | Beginning of the deportation to Auschwitz of 46,000 Jewish people from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

11/10/2026

🔷 On October 11, 1943, Szyja Rabinowicz—a co-founder and board member of the underground Oneg Shabbat group active in the Warsaw Ghetto—was murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

🔷 Before the war, he owned and managed a roofing tile factory. He donated a significant portion of his profits to support Jewish culture, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It was likely there, prior to the war, that he met Emanuel Ringelblum, the creator of the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.

🔷 While in the ghetto, he lived at 31 Muranowska Street. He continued his political activities, notably playing an active role in distributing underground radio bulletins. He was also involved in social and cultural work, serving on the board of the Inter-District Commission of House Committees and the Commission for the Rationalization of Kitchen Operations.

🔷 In January 1943, he attempted to go into hiding on the "A***n side" with his family. However, tragedy soon struck: his wife and younger daughter were shot dead by the Gestapo.

🔷 Rabinowicz returned to the ghetto and tried to save himself by purchasing a forged passport for a South American country. Along with approximately 2,500 other Jews, he awaited departure at an internment camp established in the Hotel Polski building. From there, in 1943, he was sent to the Bergen-Belsen transit camp in Germany. Survivors recall that, while in the camp, Rabinowicz gave lectures on Yiddish culture and Jewish history. ____
Document titled "Production of Roofing Felt," information provided by Szyja Rabinowicz, a board member of Oneg Shabbat, ARG I 68.

🔷 11 października 1943 w obozie Auschwitz-Birkenau został zamordowany Szyja Rabinowicz - jeden z założycieli i członek zarządu konspiracyjnej grupy Oneg Szabat, która działała w getcie warszawskim.

🔷 Przed wojną był właścicielem i zarządzał wytwórnią dachówek. Znaczną część zysków przekazywał na wspieranie kultury żydowskiej, m.in. Żydowskiego Instytutu Naukowego JIWO. To tam prawdopodobnie poznał przed wojną Emanuela Ringelbluma, twórcę Podziemnego Archiwum Getta Warszawy.

🔷 W getcie mieszkał przy ul. Muranowskiej 31. Kontynuował działalność partyjną, m.in. brał czynny udział w kolportowaniu podziemnych komunikatów radiowych. Zaangażował się także w działalność społeczną i kulturalną. Był członkiem biura Międzydzielnicowej Komisji Komitetów Domowych i Komisji Racjonalizacji Pracy Kuchen.

🔷 W styczniu 1943 roku wraz z rodziną próbował ukryć się po aryjskiej stronie. Wkrótce jednak spotkała ich tragedia – jego żona i młodsza córka zostały zastrzelone przez Gestapo.

🔷 Rabinowicz wrócił do getta i próbował się ocalić, kupując fałszywy paszport do jednego z krajów Ameryki Południowej. Wraz z ok. 2500 innych Żydów czekał na wyjazd w obozie internowania utworzonym w budynku Hotelu Polskiego. Stąd trafił w 1943 r. do obozu przejściowego w Bergen Belsen (Niemcy). Ocalali wspominają, że w obozie Rabinowicz dawał wykłady o kulturze jidysz i żydowskiej historii.

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Opracowanie pt. „Produkcja papy dachowej", Informacja przekazana przez Szyję Rabinowicza, członka zarządu Oneg Szabat, ARG I 68

10/10/2026

Oskar Schindler, who passed away on October 9, 1974, is one of the most well-known of the Righteous Among the Nations, rescuers of the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 film, "Schindler’s List," made Oskar Schindler a household name.

Schindler is credited with saving the lives of 1,300 Jews by employing them in his factories in German-occupied Poland during WWII, which prevented them from being deported to N**i death camps.

Schindler falsified his records, listing children and mothers as specialized workers. When the Krakow ghetto was liquidated, and its Jewish inhabitants sent to camps, Schindler relocated the Jewish workers to barracks in his factory. When the nearby Płaszów labor camp was liquidated, Schindler moved the workers to near his hometown, again saving them from death camps. When hundreds of workers were sent to camps, he negotiated and paid for their release.

Schindler was left penniless after the war. He visited Israel 17 times, and was warmly welcomed by survivors until his death in 1974.

In this photo from 1946, Schindler stands with some of the Jews he had rescued © Yad Vashem

10/10/2026

904 boys stood between the SS and the gate. One prisoner refused to hand over a single one.

Buchenwald, early 1945. In a camp built to work men to death, the children were the most defenceless of all — starved, beaten, and marked for the transports that meant death. But in Block 66, the children's barrack, they had a protector.

Antonín Kalina, a Czech political prisoner, was the block's elder. He falsified the records — re-sewing the Jewish stars off small coats, listing Jewish boys as Christians on the papers the SS checked. He begged and bartered for extra food, blankets and medicine, sometimes giving up his own rations. He taught the boys lessons and songs, trying to keep a little of childhood alive inside hell. When the SS came to march the children toward the gate, Kalina ran to the commander and bluffed in perfect German until the order was withdrawn. His file was marked "return not desired" — a death sentence, had the war lasted a week longer.

On 11 April 1945, American troops liberated Buchenwald. 904 children walked out alive.

Among the faces in this photograph — child survivors in outfits cut down from German uniforms — is Israel Meir Lau, then a small boy, later the Chief Rabbi of Israel.

Kalina never spoke of what he did. He died in Prague in 1990, unknown. In 2012, Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations — because his children, by then old men, finally told the world.

Fellow prisoners later recalled his answer, when they asked why he risked everything: "I've already lived my life, but those kids have to survive."

Some fathers are born to their children. Some are chosen by them. 🕯️



📷 Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph 19753 (public domain). Group portrait of child survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp, ca. May 1945.

10/10/2026

On October 9, 1943—Yom Kippur—the Germans selected 50 people from the detention area within the Płaszów camp and executed them by shooting, as recorded by Ryszard Kotarba. That same day, dozens of people from the *Ostbahn* facility near the Kraków-Grzegórzki station were also murdered. Collective punishment was imposed for work-related negligence or failure to meet deadlines set by the commandant, who arbitrarily determined the number of individuals to be executed. Göth remained dissatisfied with the progress of the work and tormented the technical supervisory staff—particularly the head of the *Bauleitung* (Construction Office), engineer Zygmunt Grünberg, who was constantly persecuted and brutalized. There are documented cases of the shooting of *Kapos* responsible for the NKF, Bonarka, and Oleandry work groups, as well as those overseeing the tailoring and brush-making workshops. When a wall collapsed at the barracks construction site—a project then deemed a priority—architect Diana Reiter was shot on Göth’s orders. In March 1943, citing alleged negligence, Göth ordered the ex*****on of the entire *Kommando* responsible for maintaining order in the camp.

📖 Source: Ryszard Kotarba, *Niemiecki obóz w Płaszowie 1942–1945. Przewodnik historyczny* [The German Camp in Płaszów 1942–1945: A Historical Guide], 2nd revised edition, Kraków 2016.

📷 Institute of National Remembrance Branch in Kraków (ZAL/KL Plaszow)

9 października 1943 roku, czyli w Jom Kippur – jak pisze Ryszard Kotarba – Niemcy wybrali z aresztu znajdującego się w obozie płaszowskim 50 osób a następnie rozstrzelali ich. Tego samego dnia wymordowano też kilkadziesiąt osób z placówki Ostbahn koło stacji Kraków-Grzegórzki. Stosowano odpowiedzialność zbiorową za zaniedbania w pracy lub niedotrzymanie wyznaczanych przez komendanta terminów robót, a ten dowolnie ustalał liczbę przeznaczonych do rozstrzelania. Göth był wciąż niezadowolony z postępu prac i dręczył ludzi z nadzoru technicznego, a głównie kierownika Bauleitungu inż. Zygmunta Grünberga, ciągle prześladowanego i katowanego. Znane są przypadki zastrzelenia kapo odpowiedzialnych za prace grupy NKF, Bonarka i Oleandry, z warsztatów krawieckich i szczotkarskich. Gdy runęła ściana budowanych koszar, priorytetowego wtedy obiektu, na polecenie Götha zastrzelona została inż. arch. Diana Reiter. W marcu 1943 roku, za rzekome zaniedbania, Göth nakazał rozstrzelanie całego komanda odpowiedzialnego za porządek w obozie.

📖 Źródło: Ryszard Kotarba, Niemiecki obóz w Płaszowie 1942–1945. Przewodnik historyczny, wydanie II poprawione, Kraków 2016.

📷Oddział Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w Krakowie (ZAL/KL Plaszow)