Special thanks, always, to the Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall in Carnegie, PA. That's the title of a talk I gave recently (June 2026) at my local library. I've been to a lot of lectures, presentations, and other similar events about the Holocaust. What I've noticed is that more often than not, all of these are about a narrow subtopic or only about a testimony of either a survivor or their G2 (their kid[s]), sometimes both. Further, unfortunately, there is usually little

Photo by Eric Odinski. I have the incredibly good fortune of calling Sue Tresatti my friend. Her dad, Norman Roth, was from Czechoslovakia. As a teenage boy, he survived persecution, a ghetto, two train rides, a death march, and the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. Last and only photo of the Roth family, about 1934. Norman is standing in the back center. For most of her life, Sue knew close to nothing about any of this as Norman didn’t talk about it. Her mom told her a couple

Among the readily available lists of defined terms about the Holocaust, very few are comprehensive. Most of them only include those that serve the mission of the product or information in which the terms and definitions are mentioned. This dictionary, a combination of six such lists, attempts to go beyond singular sources for all students of the Holocaust, regardless of level of education. It also contains select terms about genocide beyond the Holocaust. The numbers behind e

There is a myth that many victims of the Holocaust were tattooed at several camps. This is not true. Only Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooed its victims. The info sheet below, created and copyrighted in 2014 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, clarifies who received tattoos, how they received them, when, and why. It is presented here verbatim. Tattoos and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz During the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners receiv