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The first transport of Jews to Auschwitz was 997 teenage girls. Few survived | Stuff

Edith Friedman Grosman’s sister, Lea Friedman, second from right, with other girls from their Slovakian village on Passover circa 1936. Lea died in Auschwitz.

As world leaders gather in Poland Monday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, Edith Friedman Grosman will be far away in Toronto, Canada.

On Monday, the energetic 95-year-old, who was on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, plans to live-stream the ceremony from home, but only if she feels up to it.

She’s already returned to Auschwitz four times, and that’s enough.

“I’m glad they’re doing something for Auschwitz 75,” she told The Washington Post. “But they have to do something in 100 years and 125 years, too.”

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→ 5 December 2019
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Grandson of Last German Politician Capable of Stopping Word War 2 Dies in New Zealand | MSC Newswire

Tony Haas

Anticipating Hitler’s rise pre-war politician told family to get as far away from Germany as possible

The death in New Zealand’s Wairarapa Valley of Tony Haas (pictured) severs one of the closest human link’s with Germany’s Nazi era.

Haas was the grandson of Ludwig Haas the minister for Baden and member of the Reichstag for the German Democratic Party and a determined opponent of the National Socialists, the Nazi Party.

Ludwig Haas died unexpectedly in 1930.

He is often considered the only politician who, had he lived, could have foiled the rise of Hitler and thus averted World War 2.

On his deathbed Ludwig Haas, anticipating Hitler’s rise and what was to come and knowing he would be powerless to do anything about it told his son, Karl, father of Tony Haas, to move as far away from Germany as possible –and stay there.

The family did this, re-establishing in New Zealand.

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→ 23 April 2019
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The Frenchman who used games to save Jewish children | NZ Herald

Georges Loinger

Heartwarming….

It had all started as a game. During World War II, when hundreds of Jewish children were hidden at chateaus in the French countryside, kept out of sight from the nation’s Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators, Georges Loinger entertained them with calisthenics, football matches and ball games.

Tall and athletic, Loinger was a Jewish engineer turned physical-education teacher, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him “pass” as a non-Jew while he travelled across France, secretly visiting the chateaus and other makeshift refugee centres to keep his young wards healthy with exercise.

But as anti-Semitic legislation gave way to mass deportations and murder, his exercise routines turned into a morbid form of training, preparation for the day in which Loinger would, if everything went smoothly, smuggle the children across the border into neutral Switzerland.

As a grim backup, it was also preparation in case the children were discovered and sent to a concentration camp.

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