People who think they've heard too much about the Holocaust possibly haven't come across these stories. It would be a shame to leave them in ignorance.
67. Henry Greenbaum:
When Mr. Greenbaum... tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.
But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number - A188991 - tattooed on his left forearm.
In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.
First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.
Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.
68. The figure 42,500:
Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler's reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.
The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.
69. Ari Rath:
"The most terrible thing was not the way hundreds of thousands of Austrians celebrated Hitler's arrival, but the enthusiasm with which they dispossessed the Jews," recalled Ari Rath, a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna at the age of 13.
Rath... was back in the city of his birth speaking to a group of schoolchildren about his experiences, as part of a parliament-sponsored education project.
"We went from being people to non-persons overnight," he said in fluent German, a language he suppressed for decades.
70. Tomi Reichental:
Reichental lost 35 relatives in the Holocaust. As a boy he was profoundly traumatised by his experiences after being uprooted from the family farm and forced to go on the run.
In late 1944, the Gestapo cornered Reichental and his brother Miki in a shop in Bratislava. They beat the boys and captured the rest of the family. Their next ordeal was Bergen Belsen. Reichental describes it as "hell on Earth". Here he saw his grandmother Rosalie die of starvation and her body dumped on the piles of rotting corpses that ringed Belsen in the spring of 1945. For 60 years Reichental couldn't speak about the horrors he lived through.
71. The figure 11,343:
Bulgaria has expressed regret that more than 11,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.
A Bulgarian parliament declaration did however praise Bulgarians for having blocked the deportation of more than 48,000 Jews during the war.
It said it could "not be disputed that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia".
Most Jews sent to the Nazi German death camps in Poland died.
Referring to the 11,343 deported, the MPs' declaration said "we denounce this criminal act, undertaken by Hitler's command, and express our regrets for the fact that the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act".
72. Efthymios Kontopoulos, witness:
It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city's Jews.
"My father brought me into town," Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish, said. "We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges."
On March 15, 1943, the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Thessaloniki. Some 4,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz. Eighteen more convoys followed. By August, the Jewish community of the city, known as the Flower of the Balkans and a major center of Sephardic Jewry for 450 years, was no more. Of the 55,000 Jews in the city on the eve of the war, 49,000 were deported. Only 1,950 survived.
This month, as the remnants of the Thessaloniki Jewish community prepare to mark the 70th anniversary of the deportations, Kontopoulos believes he has a powerful symbol of the community's destruction: four of the railway cars used in the transports to the death camps.
(For an index to the whole series, see here)