• The Duke of Somerset seemed to be irrationally favoured by Margaret of Anjou, arguably to the point of self destruction.
• Edmund Beaufort had a proven interest in the wives of kings, having pursued Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V previously.
• Some sources claim that Henry VI was in his stupor period when Edward would have been conceived and Henry was noted (according to some sources)to have said something to the effect that the 'holy ghost must be the father'.
• Henry and Margaret had produced no children in 8 years until (or right before) Henry went into his coma.

Other sources put no credence in this idea (Dan Jones doesn't seem to credit it) but it somewhat beggars belief. We know that people of the time whispered about this possibility but it seems like this would be the strongest casus belli for the Yorkist cause (instead of government mismanagement) and that it's underemphasised. I would like to know more about the arguments for or against Edward's parentage and what people were saying about it at the time.

Thank you for your time!

On January 27, 1945 the men and women of the 322nd Soviet Rifle Division liberated what remained of the Auschwitz camp complex. Auschwitz and more specifically the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was the place where the Nazis had in prior years murdered more than a million people in gas chambers, by shooting, starving, beating them and in many more, unimaginably cruel ways. It is a place that has since become synonymous with the Holocaust – the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and up to half a million Roma, Sinti, and other groups persecuted as "gypsies" by the Nazi regime and its collaborators – itself and thus the end of which marks an appropriate date to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Yet, while the Nazis had killed so many in Auschwitz, by the time the Red Army arrived only a fraction was left. Some 65.000 prisoners, mostly but not all Jews, had been forced on a death march by the Nazi adminstration of the camp. Some 7.000 sick prisoners and prisoners of older age or younger than 15 were left. What we know as the liberation of Auschwitz is different from the mental image we have of huge crowds converging on the Allies' jeeps as it was in Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen or Mauthausen. The prisoner left there were not easy to find the prisoners that still remained. And while their initial reaction was joy and emotion, there also was confusion and fear.

Eva Mozes Kor, then 10 years old, describes liberation as such:

We ran up to them [the Red Army soldiers] and they gave us hugs, cookies and chocolate. Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.

At the same time, Kor describes uncertainty and fear about where to got and what to do now:

I didn't even know where on earth I was, much less where my home was. You had to be a little smarter than I, a ten-year-old girl in a concentration camp to know what direction to start out in and where to go.

Another description of this day comes from Primo Levi, Italian survivor, famous for the literary accounts of his time. In the following passage he describes what follows the arrival of four Soviet soldiers on horses outside the perimeter of the camp:

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good shoulod have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense.

Levi, astute observers of people, was right in his assessment. The liberators of the Red Army found 7.000 survivors, 6000 dead, 837.000 women's coats and dresses, 370.000 men's suits, 44.000 pairs of shoes, piles and piles of prosthetic limbs and 305 sacks of human hair weighing a total of 7,7 tons – estimated to be hair form about 140.000 victims. Vassily Petrenko, Soviet General, commented on this discovery:

I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis' indescribable hatred towards the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis' treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis' treatment of women, children, old men. It was at Auschwitz that I realized the fate of the Jews.

For when the Red Army arrived in Auschwitz, it was far form the first camp they liberated. Starting in the summer of 1944, the Soviets liberated a variety of camps, among them the infamous Aktion Reinhard death camps. Soviet journalist and author, Vasily Grossman, himself Jewish, was a witness to the discovered camp of Treblinka and wrote in one of his most famous texts, The Hell of Treblinka:

Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one's heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their children and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. I've heard the stories of ten-year-old girls who confronted their parents with wisdom and comfort. I was told about dozens of doomed people who began to struggle. I was told about a young man who stabbed an SS officer with a knife [...] We were told about the tall girl who snatched a carbine from the hands of a Wachmann [sic] on "The Road of No Return" [what the Germans called "Schlauch", meaning the fenced in walk way in Treblinka towards the gas chambers] and fought back. The torture and execution she was subjected to were terrible. Her name is unknown, and nobody can pay it the respect it deserves.

As Grossman walks the grounds of Treblinka, where under his feet charred bone, hair and teeth emerged from the victims killed and hastily buried there, he focused, probably had to focus, on the stories of heroism and tangible action in the fac of certain death. But what he imparts is important and relevant still for the Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2020: We need to confront ourselves with the stories of those who were killed; those, who survived; those, who acted heroically; those, who couldn't; and the many, many more who were killed, beaten, brutalized and starved, deported, robbed, and exiled. For all those whose names we don't know, we need to pay our respects to those we know.

To people like Alexander Pechersky. Born in 1909 in Rostov he joined the Red Army in 1941 after the German attack on the Soviet. He was captured during the battle for Moscow and miraculously survived the wave of mass-killing Jewish POWs during that year and the starvation inflicted on all Soviet POWs. Kept in a work camp near the Minsk ghetto, Pechersky was deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in the autumn of 1943. There, he and the the other Soviet Jewish POWs were brought to dig trenches and build barracks and then be killed. Pechersky describes the first da yin Sobibor:

I asked [Soloman Leitman – a fellow prisoner] about the huge, strange fire burning 500 meters away from us behind some trees and about the unpleasant smell throughout the camp. He warned me that the guards forbade looking there, and told me that they are burning the corpses of my murdered comrades who arrived with me that day. I did not believe him, but he continued: He told me that the camp existed for more than a year and that almost every day a train came with two thousand new victims who are all murdered within a few hours. He said around 500 Jewish prisoners – Polish, French, German, Dutch and Czechoslovak work here and that my transport was the first one to bring Russian Jews. He said that on this tiny plot of land, no more than 10 hectares [24.7 acres or .1 square kilometer], hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, children and men were murdered. I thought about the future. Should I try to escape alone or with a small group? Should I leave the rest of the prisoners to be tortured and murdered? I rejected this thought.

And so, Alexander Pechersky became the leader of the Sobibor uprising, the largest successful death camp uprising during the war. He, toegether with the other prisoners made a plan of both vengence and escape: On October 14, 1943 Perchensky and his comrades lured German officers in the camp to various workshops under the guise of fitting clothes and similar activities where they then brained them with an axe they had taken from the workshop or cut their throats while cutting their beards. They were discovered a little early but had by that time managed to arm themselves. All hell broke lose: Inmates were shooting at guards, running in all directions, and crossing the minefield outside of the camp. 80 were killed then and there, over a hundred were recaptured. Of the approximately 400 prisoners that participated, 53 survived the war, among them Alexander Pechersky, who only died in 1990.

His story however does not have the happiest of endings: He was, as a surviving POW, put in a penal battalion and after the war briefly arrested during Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union. Due to international pressure, he was released but still had lsot his job and lived in poverty until the de-Stalinization of the late 50s and early 60s. Even then, when he testified f.ex. for the Eichmann trial, this was only possible under strict KGB supervision. When he was denied to testify at a trial in Poland in 1987 that was what broke him according to his daughter and he started suffering from severe depression and died three years later.

To people like Berthold Rudner. Rudner was a German Jew and Social Democrat who worked both as a metal worker and the journalist. An anti-Nazi of the first hour, Rudner was arrested and imprisoned in 1938. When the German government started deporting German Jews in the autumn and winter of 1941, Rudner was on one of the transports to the Minsk ghetto. A diarist, Rudner would describe the deportation in his diary that after the war somehow made its way to a friend of his, while he himself was killed, most likely in June 1942 when the diary ends.

He describes the deportations from Berlin to Minsk in vivid detail in his diary, especially the terrible, terrible cold. But what he also describes is that during the deportation, he met an older lady from Berlin with whom he shares a somewhat limited space in the train. They start discussing music and discover their mutual love for Bach. Rudner describes how he and the old lady help themselves bear the cold, the lack of water, the overflowing latrine, the standing for hours by talking extensively about their favorite musician and music in general. Rudner describes how he is convinced that probably both he and the old lady survived the deportation to Minsk because they could take about one of the beloved subjects. How a simple act of kindness, of shared passion enable them to survive their tribulations – at least until arrival.

To people like Fanja Barbakow, a Jewish schoolgirl in the Soviet town of Druja born in 1923. On June 16, 1942 she wrote a goodbye letter. She and her parents had hidden in a Bunker in the ghetto of Druja, knowing that it was only a matter of time until they were discovered by the Germans and shot like the other inhabitants of the ghetto. They had heard the shots only a few days prior. In her letter, Fanja wrote:

This is the last salutation to all from Fanja and all her relatives. My dear relatives!!! I write this letter prior to my death. I don't know when I and all my relatives will die because we are "Jews". All our brothers and sisters died a horrible death by the hand of the criminals. I don't know who from our family will survive and will have the honor to read my letter and my proud last salute to all my beloved ones who still suffer under the criminals. [...] Soon we will lie in a ditch. I am not sure you will know where that ditch ist. Mama and Papa can't bear it anymore. My hand shakes too, so badly that I can't finish writing properly. But I am proud to be Jewish. And I die for my people. I want to live and see better times but all is lost for me. I send my love to you all, relatives in the name of all here – Papa, Mama, Sima, Sonja, Zusja, Fasja, Chaca and little Zeldanka who doesn't understand yet.

Camp Druja prior to the shooting, in the bunker, 4 in the morning, 16.6.1942

Good bye and fare well,

your Fanja

Like Grossman, we need to pay our respects to Alexander, Bertold, and Fanja and to the countless more named and unnamed victims of Nazi slaughter and brutality. We need to remember and hold up their memory. Not just because we owed to them, not just because it is the right thing to do, not just because of the moral imperative to do so – but also because of what Levi writes about: the burning shame – the shame that the just man experiences at another man's crime, that Alexander Pechersky, Bertold Rudner and Fanja Barbakow and many, many more were killed; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense.

Because it is this burning shame and this guilt that we need to feel when we want to take the message of "Never again" seriously. It is this shame that needs to motivate us to go and look at the world and vow that our actions need to be in the service of the goal of no one ever having to face what Fanja Barbakow faced again; no one ever having to do what Alexander Pechersky did again; no one ever being forced to grip life like Bertold Rudner did ever again.

Grossman finishes his essay on Treblinka with the words:

We walk on and on across the bottomless unsteady land of Treblinka, and then suddenly we stop. Some yellow hair, wavy, fine and light, glowing like brass, is trampled into the earth, and blonde curls next to it, and then heavy black plaits on the light-colored sand, and then more and more. Apparently, these are the contents of one – just one sack of hair – which hadn’t been taken away.

Everything is true. The last, lunatic hope that that everything was only a dream is ruined. And lupin pods are tinkling, tinkling, little seeds are falling, as if a ringing of countless little bells is coming from under the ground.

And one feels as if one’s heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human cannot possibly stand it.