Persecution - TracesOfWar.com

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Article by Patrick Praet
Published on March 1st, 2019

Jews in hiding in Okegem, a forgotten episode

In Okegem, like in every other municipality, personal drama’s happened: prisoners of war and employees who were sent to Germany for forced labor, escaped young men in the south of France, the daily attempts to make a living, occasional passages of German soldiers... And yet remarkable things happened that only few people were aware of...

Article by Kevin Prenger
Published on February 22nd, 2019

Bunker tragedy at concentration camp Vught

The Bunker tragedy happened in the night of 15th - 16th January 1944 at concentration camp Vught in the Netherlands. Under the authority of camp commander Adam Grünewald 74 female prisoners were detained in a cell after they protested against the interment of a fellow prisoner. The room with the surface of 9 m² had a poor ventilation system, and because of that ten women died of suffocation during the imprisonment. The news of this tragedy quickly got outside the camp and was extensively described by the Dutch illegal press. This was a thorn in the flesh of Nazi leadership in the Netherlands, which was trying to limit such violent incidents in the model camp in order not to fuel the resistance in the Netherlands.

Article by Kevin Prenger
Published on May 29th, 2018

Kristallnacht

In the night of November 9 to 10, 1938, a large-scale and violent anti-Jewish protest took place in Germany and Austria. Jewish shops and homes were demolished and looted, synagogues were put on fire and individual Jews were mistreated and some even murdered. The protest had evolved into a pogrom. The night would enter the history books as the Kristallnacht (Night of Crystals).

Article by Robert Jan Noks
Published on November 22nd, 2017

Concentration camp Majdanek

Nowadays, the location of the former concentration camp Majdanek lies well within the city limits of Lublin, a city in eastern Poland near the Ukrainian border. Today it looks somewhat like a park at some 2,5 miles from the city center. It is surrounded by modern apartment buildings and a Roman Catholic cemetery that was already there before the camp was built. The highway to the Ukraine and Russia runs along the former camp grounds. In the war, this was a major route for the German army to the eastern front and from the fall of 1943 onwards for the retreating German forces.

Article by Gerd Van der Auwera
Published on November 4th, 2017

Concentration camp Treblinka

Regarding the Holocaust, Auschwitz immediately comes to mind. It is the best known Nazi extermination camp. It is often forgotten though that Auschwitz was not the only extermination camp, in addition there were Camp Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. This article is about the last camp. It was an element of Aktion Reinhard and perhaps the most efficient extermination camp. Over a period of 18 months, approximately 800,000 people were killed here.

Article by Robert Jan Noks
Published on October 24th, 2017

Concentration camp Sobibor

Sobibor is a small village in southeast Poland in the province of Lublin, on the railway between Chelm and Wlodawa and a few miles distant from the present Polish eastern border with the Ukraine. Had it not been for World War Two, it would have remained no more than an unimportant and unknown hamlet. History though decided otherwise. In the vicinity of the village, across from the local train station and a few miles from the frontier river Bug, the Germans constructed an extermination camp in the spring of 1942 in a remote, wooded and swampy location which was to give Sobibor a sinister place in history.