History

At one program in commemoration of the Holocaust, one Jewish university professor who had studied and investigated the concentration camps and its effects it left behind on all prisoners in the camp, made this statement at the beginning of his talk saying: ‘All Jewish inmates in the camp were all

Let me please give you first some background information about myself and our family in which I grew up when I was your age and still going to school, because it had a strong influence on me as a young growing teenager. It will help you to better understand my

During the 2007 school year eighth-grade students from Columbia Explorers Academy (Chicago, Illinois) asked Rudolf Graichen two questions regarding his personal experiences. Question #1 : How did you feel when you went to prison both times ? Question #2 : How did you survive the Holocaust ? Nazi Prison Survivor

Living conditions got much worse as the war expanded. Prisoners from all of Europe overloaded the camps. Non-Jewish prisoners who could speak German and who had been in camp for a long time became foremen. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses had been incarcerated even before the war. Because the camp supervisors noted

My first camp was Sachsenhausen. I arrived there in January 1940. Most prisoners were German. They did hard labor, had extra food, and slept in bunks. “Dangerous” individuals were isolated in special barracks and worked in so-called Strafkommando (punishment units). Jehovah’s Witnesses were usually assigned to the Strafkommando upon their arrival in the camp. Jews

In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, I was an 18-year-old Jewish lad living in Germany.  I witnessed the dreadful rise of Nazism and its growing anti-Semitism. The arrest of opponents and the opening of concentration camps for dissident Germans, including Jehovah’s Witnesses (also known as Bible Students), plunged