Milton John Nieuwsma (pronounced "news-ma") (born September 5 1941) is an American writer, journalist and filmmaker noted for his work on the Holocaust. His 1998 book Kinderlager, about three young concentration camp survivors, was the basis for the 2005 Emmy Award-winning documentary, Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah, which he wrote and co-produced. Nieuwsma won a second Emmy in 2006 for the film Defying Hitler.
Nieuwsma was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the son of John Nieuwsma, a Dutch Reformed minister, and Jean (née) Potter, a teacher. In 1945, after World War II, his family moved to Bellflower, California. At the age of 5, he met Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch-born concentration camp survivor and author of The Hiding Place, whose family had hidden Jews in their Netherlands home during the war. Ten Boom was a guest at the Nieuwsma parsonage in Bellflower. In a 2001 interview, Nieuwsma recalled "sitting on (ten Boom's) lap...listening to her talk and wondering to myself, 'Who is this woman?' She reminded me of my grandmother." Ten Boom inspired him to learn more about the Holocaust.
Nieuwsma started his writing career as a reporter for the Holland (Michigan) Evening Sentinel, while in high school. After graduating with an English degree from Hope College in 1963, he worked as a public information officer at Wayne State University in Detroit and hosted a weekly radio program, The Fifth Freedom, on WQRS-FM, a Detroit fine arts station. In the late 1970s, Nieuwsma began writing historical features and travel articles for the Chicago Tribune . In 1978, he received a master's degree from the University of Illinois Springfield.
In 1994, while teaching journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Nieuwsma met Tova Friedman, believed to be the youngest Auschwitz survivor, which inspired him to write Kinderlager. Friedman is one of three children featured in the book. In 2001 Kinderlager was selected by the Hogere Europese Beroepen Opleiding (Institute for Higher European Studies) in The Hague as one of the top 10 books written on the Holocaust.
In 2005 the book was reissued under the title Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah as a companion to the PBS documentary which Nieuwsma wrote and co-produced. Released in 2005, the film received an Emmy Award from the Michigan chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for best historical documentary. The film also won a First Place Gold Camera Award at the International Film and Video Festival in Los Angeles. Today, Surviving Auschwitz is featured in many school-based Holocaust studies programs in the United States.
Nieuwsma won a second Emmy in 2006 for writing and co-producing Defying Hitler, a documentary about a Jewish fighter in the Polish Resistance.
Since 1997 Nieuwsma has lived in Holland, Michigan, where he continues to write. He and his wife, the former Marilee Gordon (m. February 1 1964), have three children, Jonathan, Greg and Elizabeth, and seven grandchildren.
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Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and eleven years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.
Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
House of Dolls is a 1953 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Holocaust (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 — April 20, 1978.
The Last Days is a 1998 American documentary film directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor and Kenneth Lipper; Steven Spielberg, in his role as founder of the Shoah Foundation, was one of the film's executive producers. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, focusing on the last year of World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and began mass deportations of Jews in the country to concentration and extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz. It depicts the horrors of life in the camps, but also stresses the optimism and perseverance of the survivors.
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.
The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar, thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
Michael Berenbaum is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. He served as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust (1979–1980), Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) (1988–1993), and Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute (1993–1997).
Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian-born American survivor of the Holocaust. Along with her twin sister Miriam, Kor was subjected to human experimentation under the direction of SS Doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Her parents and two older sisters were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau; only she and Miriam survived.
James Moll is an American director and producer of film documentaries and television documentaries. His documentary work has earned him an Academy Award, two Emmys, and a Grammy. Moll's production company, Allentown Productions Inc., has been based at Universal Studios since 1994, primarily producing non-fiction film and television projects. Moll also serves on the executive committee of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and serves as chair of the documentary award for the Directors Guild of America.
Debórah Dwork is an American historian, specializing in the history of the Holocaust. She is the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and formerly served as the Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Thomas Geve is an engineer, author and Jewish Holocaust survivor
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Liliana Segre is an Italian Holocaust survivor, named senator for life by President Sergio Mattarella in 2018 for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.
Renée Firestone is a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and educator, who became known for her fashion designs in the 1960s after she immigrated to the United States.
Tova Friedman is a Jewish American therapist, social worker, author, and academic born in Poland. She is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later served as the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties.
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