Category Archives: History

“The record she made with Peter Gabriel was one record that saved my life. That record helped me to get sober.” (Elton John)

BBC Documentary (2014): The Kate Bush Story – Running up That Hill. (YouTube, 60min, HD)

“For me to get into that creative process I have to have a sort of quiet place that I work from, and if I was living the life of, you know, someone in the industry, being a popstar or whatever, it’s too distracting, it’s too to do with other people’s perceptions of who you are. And what’s important to me is to be a human being who has a soul and who hopefully has a sense of who they are, not who everybody else thinks you are.”

“Do you know what happened to me on Dizengoff Street?”

New York Times Op-Docs: I Have a Message for You. This is a short video documentary by Matan Rochlit about holocaust survivor Klara Prowisor. “To escape Auschwitz, she left her father to die. Decades later, she got a message from him.”

“My grandmother Lea once told me a story about the woman who lived next door to her in Tel Aviv, of her capture by the Nazis in Belgium and of an unfathomable decision she had to take to save herself. I never forgot it […]

Many years later, once I’d become a documentary filmmaker, I decided to find out whether the woman was still alive.

She was. Klara was 92 years old and still living in the same Tel Aviv apartment. I flew out to see her the following week and asked her to tell me the story I’d heard from my grandmother in her own words.”

“I am not sad that I will die, but I am sad that I won’t be able to take revenge like I would like to.”

Deutsche Welle: Reconstructed Auschwitz prisoner text details ‘unimaginable’ suffering. “A newly reconstructed document written in 1944 by a Greek Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz tells of misery “the human mind can not imagine.” The text was discovered buried in the ground at the Nazi extermination camp.”

“Russian-born historian Pavel Polian … researched the texts for 10 years, and published the findings in his book, “Scrolls from the Ashes.” Such buried messages were found exclusively at Auschwitz, Polian said, “most of them in February or March 1945, right after the camp was liberated.” Nadjari’s was the last to be discovered, he explained, adding that it is highly unlikely any other messages by members of the “Sonderkommando” units are still buried in the ground.

All in all, about 100 of the almost 2,000 Auschwitz inmates tasked with disposing of the many thousands of corpses survived the concentration camp. Of the five who wrote and buried messages, Nadjari was the sole survivor.”

“There is no statute of limitation on the truth.”

The Guardian: Ex-FBI agent opens cold case review into who betrayed Anne Frank. “Vince Pankoke and his team will use new techniques to analyse large amounts of data to solve mystery of diarist’s capture.”

“A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in 1944.

Investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, are to be used by a team of 19 forensic experts led by Vince Pankoke.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has made available its archives and welcomed the initiative, which is being filmed and chronicled online, as the investigators, including historians, psychological profilers and former police detectives, work through the evidence.

The cold case review team has supervised a reconstruction, using actors, of the day of the Frank family’s arrest. One of the founding fathers of the FBI’s behavioural science unit, Roger Depue, is analysing contemporary witness statements and interviews.”

The New York Times: Ultimate Cold Case: Who Betrayed Anne Frank?

“A former FBI agent is heading up a cold case team more than 70 years after Nazi occupation police stormed the secret Amsterdam canal house annex where Anne Frank was hiding and sent her to her death in a concentration camp.

Suspicions that someone betrayed the Frank family are not new, but the latest attempt will seek out new connections in the case of the Jewish girl whose diary has captivated millions of readers worldwide.

Retired agent Vincent Pankoke said he had high hopes of solving one of the biggest World War Two mysteries in the Netherlands with the help of Big Data and modern policing techniques.”

The Washington Post: Who betrayed Anne Frank? Artificial intelligence could finally solve the mystery..

“For nearly 75 years, some of the greatest investigative minds have tried to figure out who tipped off the Nazis about Anne Frank and the seven other Jews who were hiding behind a movable bookcase in Amsterdam.

Now, a former FBI investigator working with a production company hopes the decades-old mystery can be solved with the help of a new mind — an artificial one.”

The effort is crowd-funded, see Cold Case Dairy for more information.

“Queen to E5!”

The British Museum: Curator’s Corner (Season 2 Episode 9): Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Chessmen. “Curator Irving Finkel recounts a magical adventure with The Lewis Chessmen. Content warning: wizard’s chess.”

André and I visited Lewis (& Harris) during our trip to Scotland this summer and happened upon the place where the Lewis Chessmen were found. I don’t play chess, but loved these figures. Our B&B on Lewis had resin replicas as decorative items on the breakfast tables, and we saw larger replicas carved from stone as doorstop or garden decorations. Unfortunately they were too heavy for our suitcase, or I would have bought one for our own garden.