Holocaust

Ziva Geva Raiman Rimon was born in 1941 in the Ural mountains, on the run.Her mother and several other family members were fleeing eastward and spent most of World War II running further and further from Europe. Along the way, through harsh and miserable Siberia, several family members perished. Her…

I remember the feeling of first seeing the Moon through the small handheld telescope my father had smuggled from East Germany — how ancient yet proximate it felt, how alive, as though I could glide my six-year-old finger over its rugged radiance — the feeling of electric astonishment at something…

“Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic, unexampled 1937 essay Undersea as she incubated the ideas that would awaken humanity’s…

Sarah Davis survived the Holocaust. Decades later, when she was 95, she succumbed to COVID-19. Six of us stood around her grave at measured distances from one another; her children and grandson spoke of her life. In the far distance, four mortuary employees waited for the service to conclude so…

Image copyright AFP PHOTO/Nationalfonds/Kaczmarczyk/Marszalek Image caption Prisoners seem to have hidden dozens of items, including cutlery, scissors and scraps of leather A number of objects have been found hidden beneath a chimney at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.Knives, forks, scissors and tools were among the objects discovered in Block 17,…

A makeshift shrine near the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., in April 2019. (David Maung / EPA-EFE/REX)Maybe I’m getting soft, but I found these two emails very disturbing.“Dumb ass liberal Jew...Hope you get Chinese virus and suffer for lying to people...Really do.......”And this one:“Keep your mouth shut kike.…

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Sometimes, life asks this question not as a…

Alaska Legislature Rep. Ben Carpenter, R-Nikiski, speaks on the floor of the Alaska House of Representatives on March 18, 2020. (James Brooks / ADN) JUNEAU — A Nikiski Republican lawmaker opposed to pandemic safety measures at the Alaska Capitol compared them to Nazi Germany’s labeling of Jews in an email…

Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump’s Saturday morning started like so many of his mornings do: with a very early Twitter tirade. The president praised lockdown protesters harassing a local TV reporter, retweeted a cartoon depicting Rep. Adam Schiff as the Joker, and lauded a video of a right-wing columnist who was…

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Thousands of Bosnians, many wearing masks, demonstrated Saturday against a Mass in Sarajevo for Croatia’s Nazi-allied soldiers and civilians killed by partisan forces at the end of World War II.The Mass in Sarajevo was a replacement for a controversial annual gathering usually held in Bleiburg, Austria,…