Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue known as Pan Doktor or Stary Doktor. He was an early children's rights advocate, in 1919 drafting a children's constitution.
Esther "Etty" Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943, she was deported and murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Petr Ginz was a Czechoslovak boy of partial Jewish background who was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto during the Holocaust. He was murdered at the age of sixteen when he was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed to death upon arrival. His diary was published after his death.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Irène Némirovsky was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France and wrote in French, but was denied French nationality. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.
Helga Deen was a Jewish diarist whose diary was discovered in 2004, which describes her stay in a Dutch prison camp, Kamp Vught, where she was brought during World War II at the age of 18.
Herzogenbusch was a Nazi concentration camp located in Vught near the city of 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The camp was opened in 1943 and held 31,000 prisoners. 749 prisoners died in the camp, and the others were transferred to other camps shortly before Herzogenbusch was liberated by the Allied Forces in 1944. After the war, the camp was used as a prison for Germans and for Dutch collaborators. Today there is a visitors' center which includes exhibitions and a memorial remembering the camp and its victims.
Věra Kohnová was a Jewish girl who was deported with her family first in January 1942 from Plzeň to a concentration camp in Theresienstadt and in March 1942 to the Izbica Ghetto in Poland. Věra Kohnová became famous for her diary, which she wrote from August 1941 to January 1942. The diary, in which she watched the last months of life of the Jewish inhabitants of Plzen as a child, she stopped writing a few days before her deportation to Theresienstadt. Věra Kohnová is one of the child victims of the Holocaust. Due to her having the same age and her also writing a diary, she is often compared to Anne Frank.
Rut "Rutka" Laskier was a Jewish Polish diarist who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling the three months of her life during the Holocaust in Poland. She was murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 at the age of fourteen. Her manuscript, authenticated by Yad Vashem, was published in the Polish language in early 2006. English and Hebrew translations were released the following year. It has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank.
Hélène Berr was a French Jewish woman, who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France. In France she is considered to be a "French Anne Frank". She died from typhus during an epidemic of the disease in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that also killed Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
The Grossaktion Warsaw was the Nazi code name for the deportation and mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto during the summer of 1942, beginning on 22 July. During the Grossaktion, Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups, marched through the ghetto, and assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square for what was called in the Nazi euphemistic jargon "resettlement to the East". From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka.
Elfriede Geiringer was a Jewish survivor of World War II and the Holocaust. She was the second wife of Otto Frank, who was the father of Anne and Margot Frank.
The Jewish student David Koker lived with his family in Amsterdam until he was captured on the night of 11 February 1943 and transported to camp Vught.
Eva Schloss is an Austrian-English Holocaust survivor, memoirist and stepdaughter of Otto Frank, the father of Margot and diarist Anne Frank. Schloss speaks widely of her family's experiences during the Holocaust and is a participant in the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive project to record video answers to be used in educational tools.
Rywka Lipszyc was a Polish-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust survivor. She was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp followed by a transfer to Gross-Rosen and forced labor at its subcamp in Christianstadt. She was then taken on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, and was liberated there in April 1945. Too ill to be evacuated, she was transferred to a hospital at Niendorf, where the record of her life ended.
Renia Spiegel was a Jewish-Polish diarist who was killed during World War II in the Holocaust.
Eva Heyman was a Jewish girl from Oradea. She began keeping a diary in 1944 during the German occupation of Hungary. Published under the name The Diary of Eva Heyman, her diary has been compared to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She discusses the extreme deterioration of the circumstances the Jewish community faced in the city, offering a detailed account of the increasingly restrictive anti-Jewish laws, the psychological anguish and despair, the loss of their rights and liberties and the confiscation of property they endured. Heyman was 13 years old when she and her grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust.
The question of how much knowledge German civilians had about the Holocaust whilst it was happening has been studied and debated by historians. In Nazi Germany, it was an open secret among the population by 1943, Peter Longerich argues, but some authors place it even earlier. After the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".