Walking Through Silence: A Son’s Journey to Auschwitz in 2025
I came to Auschwitz not as a historian or photographer, but as a son. Walking through Birkenau in 2025, I confronted memory, loss, and the responsibility to remember.…
The Arch That Stayed With Me
A brief scene in A Little Romance introduced me to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Nearly fifty years later, that small arch between the Louvre and the Tuileries remains one of my favorite places in Paris.…
A Parisian Museum, a Family’s Tragedy, and the Lessons of History
The Musée Nissim de Camondo is one of Paris's most beautiful house museums. Behind its extraordinary collection of French decorative arts lies a tragic family story that ended in Auschwitz.…
Crossing Half the Planet
The Longest Journey of My Life For most of my life, Australia and New Zealand felt almost theoretical — names at the bottom of the map, separated from my daily reality by oceans and time zones. I had…
The Honourable Woman
The Honourable Woman is a 2014 British political spy thriller written and directed by Hugo Blick for the BBC and SundanceTV. It is among the best television series I have seen. Maggie Gyllenhaal star…
Hitler’s Last Direct Order
The last military order personally signed by Adolf Hitler is a remarkable historical document. Written as Berlin fell to Soviet forces, it reveals how Hitler viewed himself even as the Third Reich was collapsing around him.…
Robert Clary: From Hogan’s Heroes to Holocaust Witness (1926-2022)
For many viewers, Robert Clary will always be Corporal LeBeau from Hogan’s Heroes. Behind the laughter, however, was a Holocaust survivor who lost nearly his entire family and spent decades ensuring that the stories of victims and survivors would not be forgotten.…
Google Engineer Uses AI to Identify Faces in Holocaust-era Photographs
Can artificial intelligence help restore identities lost during the Holocaust? From Numbers to Names, created by Google engineer Daniel Patt, uses facial recognition technology to connect Holocaust victims and survivors with photographs scattered across historical archives.…
Memorable Places
Places that have stayed with me.…
A Lesson in Staying Awake
I had flown from Washington Dulles through Iceland, and by the time I reached Glasgow I wasn’t hungry so much as determined — determined to stay awake until a reasonable bedtime and reset my clock. La…
Walking Along the Seine
In 2014, I stumbled across Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light. The author, David Downie, is an American who has lived in Paris since 1986. He loves Paris deeply and knows it far better than…
Swiss Economic Ties to Nazi Germany
During World War II, Switzerland maintained extensive and highly profitable economic ties with Nazi Germany — ties that its own parliament would eventually commission a landmark inquiry to investigate…