Midwest Center for Holocaust Education

Anne Frank’s final diary entry sounds like any normal 15-year-old girl who is struggling to fit in.

She was filled with self-doubt and criticized herself for not having the courage to show what she called the “pure Anne from within.” She wrote: “I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental, and not take me seriously.”

She was just a teenage girl trying to make sense of who she was. But Anne never got the chance.

Just days later, in 1944, German and Dutch authorities discovered and arrested Anne, her sister, Margot, her mother, Edith, her father, Otto, and the four other Jews hiding with them in a secret annex in Amsterdam.

When Anne died months later at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she had no idea that millions of people would eventually read and relate to her words. Otto, the annex’s only resident to survive the Holocaust, ensured that Anne’s memory lives on in her diary.

Photo: Anne Frank Fonds

Of Blessed Memory
Rachel Kurz
1934 - 2026

Rachel Kurz Obituary (1934 - 2026) - Leawood, Kansas Rachel was born on July 15th, 1934 and passed away on July 31st, 2026 at the age of 92

2 August 1943 | Jewish prisoners at the German extermination center launched a successful revolt.

The uprising started at around 4 pm. During that hot day, a part of the camp staff went by the Bug river to swim in it. It is unknown how many guards were killed by the prisoners during the uprising. Probably not many. However, the plan to burn the camp down was successful. Only the brick building with gas chambers was left standing.

Around 300 prisoners lived to be free. The remaining number out of 850 prisoners perished under the gunfire of the guards. However, most of the escapees were killed during pursuit or after it. Around 90 people survived the war.

Read more: https://www.polin.pl/en/the-treblinka-uprising

16-17 July 1942 | "Vel' d'Hiv Roundup", mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police supervised by the Germans. 13,152 Jews were arrested (incl. ca. 4000 children). Most of them later - through Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande - were deported to Auschwitz.

Planning for the Vél d'Hiv roundup took place among René Bousquet, secretary general of the French national police; Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy Régime; SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, head of Adolf Eichmann's Judenreferat (Jewish Section) in France; and SS-Oberstürmführer Helmut Knochen, head of the German Security Police in France.

In order to guarantee the participation of the French police in the roundups, N**i officials agreed to focus on foreign and stateless Jews, thus initially sparing the French Jewish population from deportation.
The Director of the local Paris Municipal Police, Emile Hennequin, sent precise expectations for the roundup to the police prefecture three days before the event. The roundup was originally set to take place from July 13–15, which included Bastille Day, the French national holiday. The holiday was not celebrated in the occupied zones of France, and in order to preclude local rioting, N**i officials allowed French officials to delay the operation until July 16–17.

Beginning in the early hours of July 16, French police rounded up thousands of men, women, and children throughout Paris. By the end of the day, the police had taken 2,573 men, 5,165 women, and 3,625 children from their homes. The roundup continued the following day, but with a much smaller number of arrests.

Approximately 6,000 of those rounded up were immediately transported to Drancy, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Drancy was at that point a transit camp for Jews being deported from France. The rest of the arrestees were detained at the Vélodrome d'Hiver (Winter Cycling Track), an indoor sporting arena in Paris's fifteenth arrondissement.

After five days, Jews incarcerated at the Vél d'Hiv were transferred to other transit camps outside Paris. At Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, French police guarded these men, women, and children until transport to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. At the end of July, the remaining adults were separated from their children and deported to Auschwitz. Over 3,000 children remained interned without their parents until they were deported, among adult strangers, to Auschwitz as well.

Read more: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-velodrome-dhiver-vel-dhiv-roundup

Our Kansas and Missouri teachers are among this cohort. They have a powerful week of learning ahead of them.

The people in these caskets survived the Holocaust—only to be murdered by an antisemitic mob just over a year later.

In 1946, a large crowd of civilians, police officers, and soldiers gathered outside the Jewish Committee building in Kielce, Poland. They were furious because a local Polish boy claimed he'd been kidnapped and held at the building. In reality, he'd run away from home and lied to avoid being punished.

Police investigated, but the crowd grew restless. Eventually, shots were fired into the Jewish Committee building, and dozens of Jews were beaten to death in the streets.

When Polish photographer Julia Pirotte arrived in Kielce, the mob had murdered at least 42 Jews and wounded many others. She captured the heartbreak at the funeral in this scene and photographed survivors hospitalized from their injuries.

Although the Holocaust ended in 1945, hatred of Jews across Europe remained.

Photo Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Julia Pirotte.