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This Canadian soldier helped liberate Bergen-Belsen—80 years ago today

JL;DR SUMMARY Eighty years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Jack Marcovitch's daughters recount their father's experiences as a liberator and the subsequent impact on his life. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

HolocaustWwiiHolocaust RemembranceLiberationWar TraumaBergen BelsenJewish ArtifactsCanadian SoldierJosef Kramer

Places mentioned

Montreal, Quebec, Canada
"He'd been in the Canadian Army for a couple of years, having quit his job as a plumber in Montreal to enlist in Naziism."
Bergen-Belsen, Lower Saxony, Germany
"the former Second World War veteran telling the interviewer what he saw when he arrived at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi death camp in Germany in April 1945"
Vught, North Brabant, Netherlands
"That first camp is called Wucht, and it's located in the southeastern part of the Netherlands."
's-Hertogenbosch, North Brabant, Netherlands
"This was Camp Vught in Holland, Southeastern Holland. Sertengebosch is the big city."
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
"Jack Markovich died in 1994 in Ottawa, just a while after the CBC interviewed him and his son Don to talk to him about that wartime army film clip showing him at Belsen."
Chicago, Illinois, United States
"I'm joined by Markovich's daughters, Linda Eisenberg in Chicago and Gloria Bortz in Ottawa, who tell their father's story for the first time."
Poland
"There, he found storerooms full of Jewish religious artifacts left behind when the Nazis deported their victims to the death camps in Poland."
This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 49405
Cairo Source ID 72
Retrieved 2025-04-16 05:30:34 UTC
Curated 2025-04-16 06:03:17 UTC