Things You Didn’t Know About the Holocaust

Anecdote about place names in Europe:

During the time my husband Mitch and I were stationed with the U.S. Army in Munich, Germany from September 1970 to May 1972 we overheard two young Americans talking on a train. They had unsuccessfully been trying to find Florence on a local map. Having learned ourselves that place names were in the language of the map, Mitch and I knew that Florence on the map was actually Firenze.

Why am I sharing this anecdote now? Because place names in Europe change depending on which government is in charge, what language the name is being expressed in, etc. What’s equally confusing is country names.

On a chest in my living room I have a children’s puzzle (ages 4 and above) of the current countries of Europe. This helps me with some of the lesser-known countries. It doesn’t help with the countries of Europe just before WWI or after WWI or as the Nazis began annexing and conquering other European regions or countries in the 1930s. Or the changes from after WWII to now.

One other European place name anecdote:

Years ago my husband had a law firm client who was a Holocaust survivor born in Ruthenia, a place you won’t find today on any current European maps. When the client went to renew his passport, the clerk said that the client had written his country of birth — Hungary — incorrectly. The client insisted he knew where he had been born. The clerk said that part of Europe was now Ukraine and the client’s passport had to state Ukraine as the country of birth.

Quick word about historical dates:

As with any historical record, there are discrepancies. For example, the date the Jews of Warsaw were told they had to enter the Warsaw Ghetto area (October 1940) was earlier than the date that the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off from the rest of Warsaw (November 1940). People talking about the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto might use the date of either month without necessarily being inaccurate.

Regardless of the place or country name, the Holocaust was not uniform across all places and all times except for the eventual goal (developed as WWII brought more places under Nazi control) of the elimination (read “murder”) of all Jews.

In the chapters of this in-progress book THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST, I hope to make this confusing European place/country name information as well as the differing and confusing aspects of the Holocaust as coherent as possible. (On the topic of place names, you might want to get children’s puzzles of your own for the different time periods.)

Phyllis Zimbler Miller — Los Angeles — November 2024