UN MARKS THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

IN THIS ISSUEUN marks the Holocaust Remembrance Day.............................................1Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorated around the globe..............3Rethinking Poles and Jews.......................................................................4The unholy legacy of Pius XII...................................................................5The “no-parent” Kindertransport..............................................................6As Nazis age, leads still alive...................................................................7Rabbi Lau visits office of The American Society for Yad Vashem.........8-9New Yad Vashem books teach Holocaust to haredim..............................10Three brothers defied terror....................................................................11A helping hand for Nazi victims..............................................................12The Holocaust, viewed not from then but from the here and now...........16

Vol. 35-No.3 ISSN 0892-1571 January/February 2009-Shevat/Adar- I 5769

Over six decades after 6 millionJews, nearly a third of the total, and

countless other minorities were butcheredin the Nazi German Holocaust, it is morevital than ever to learn from the tragedy toprevent further atrocities, United NationsSecretary-General Ban Ki-moon warnedin his speech on January 27.

“We must continue to examine why theworld failed to prevent the Holocaust andother atrocities since. That way, we will bebetter armed to defeat anti-Semitism andother forms of intolerance,” he said in amessage marking the International Day ofCommemoration in memory of the victimsof the Holocaust.

“We must continue to teach our childrenthe lessons of history’s darkest chapters.That will help them do a better job thantheir elders in building a world of peacefulcoexistence. We must combat Holocaustdenial, and speak out in the face of bigotryand hatred,” he added in the message,read at a ceremony at UN Headquartersin New York by Deputy Secretary-GeneralAsha-Rose Migiro.

Mr. Ban noted that new initiatives inHolocaust remembrance and educationhave given an authentic basis for hope,which is the theme of this year’s observance,

the fourth since the General Assembly insti-tuted the annual commemoration.

“But we can and must do more if we areto make that hope a reality,” he stressed.“We must uphold the standards and lawsthat the United Nations has put in place toprotect people and fight impunity for geno-cide, war crimes and crimes against

humanity. Our world continuesto be plagued by ruthless vio-lence, utter disregard forhuman rights, and the target-ing of people solely for whothey are.”

As well as the ceremony,chaired by Under-Secretary-General for Communicationsand Public Information KiyoAkasaka, the UN marked theoccasion with panel discus-sions and other events, includ-ing an initiative by the UNDepartment of PublicInformation called the“Footprints of Hope,” whichbrings the global network ofthe UN Information Centerstogether with local schools tofurther youngsters’ under-standing of the Holocaust andtheir respect for human rightsthrough documentary and filmresources.

A new exhibit has also opened in theVisitors’ Lobby about the Nazi regimecalled “Deadly Medicine: Creating theMaster Race.”

General Assembly President Migueld’Escoto echoed Mr. Ban’s call to

the world to learn the lesson of theHolocaust. “We need to move beyond ourstatements of grief and memory, howeverpowerfully felt, and work to develop newways of thinking about the Holocaust,about genocide, about the apparently bot-tomless capacity for peoples’ cruelty toeach other,” he said in a message.

“That capacity is shared by all of us. Attheir core, all genocides, all holocausts,start with the alienation, demonization andthe marginalization of the “Other” – thosecitizens of another religion, another race,ethnicity, another set of political ideas, oranother sexual orientation than our own,”he added, calling for a struggle against

intolerance and for relationships thatreplace “us and them” with “we and ours.”

Also about unlearned lessons of theHolocaust was the speech of Rabbi IsraelMeir Lau, Chairman of the Yad VashemCouncil. Here are some excerpts from hisvery moving speech delivered at the UNheadquarters in New York.

“On April 11, 1995 50 years to theday of liberation of the concentra-

tion camp of Buchenwald I was invited toBuchenwald. This was my second visit.The first time I arrived there, together withmy older brother Naftalie, in January of1945. I was seven-and-a-half-years old.We’ve got two prisoner numbers, oneafter another, and at that moment, I lostmy identity. I was nobody. I was a number.On my second visit in 1995 I was a citizenof the independent state, the state ofIsrael, and I was a Chief Rabbi of the stateof Israel. Not nobody, but somebody, andnot a number any more.

You will agree that many things havechanged during these 50 years. May beyou will say it is time to open a new chap-ter. Let’s forget. Let’s forgive. I came to tellyou: We cannot forget. It is impossible toforget and we are not authorized to for-

give. Even if I am a man of forgivenessand kindness, I have no right to forgive onbehalf of my father, who was murdered inTreblinka at the age of fifty, of my 13-yearold brother Schmulik. I have no mandatefrom my mother, who died from torture,and starvation, and diseases in concen-tration camp of Ravensbruk, and my forty-two cousins. I cannot forgive.

Sixty years later the UN was clever andkind enough to declare January 27, theday of liberation of Auschwitz by RedArmy, t he I n t e rna t i ona l D ay o fCommemoration in Memory of the Victimsof the Holocaust. Sixty years after the hor-ror, but better later than never.

I want to share with you some of mythoughts. Nothing can be compared to

Holocaust, not because of the numbers,the gas chambers but because of the sys-tematic quest to liquidate a nation. FirstHitler declared it in his work “Mein Kampf.”Years later came Nuremberg Laws thatdeclared that Jews have no rights to pos-sessions, to freedom, not to life. Yearslater came the Kristallnacht, when 1500synagogues were burned and 30,000Jews sent to the concentration camps.What was the reaction of the free world?What did they see? What did they say?Now we know – almost nothing.

Three years later was Baby Yar. Thirtythree thousand, seven hundred seventy-one victims: children, babies, women.What was the reaction? Almost none.Three months later the WannseeConference took place near Berlin: Howto liquidate the Jewish people. Theycalled it the “Final Solution.” The finalsolution to solve the world’s problemswould be to get rid of the Jews, becausewe are the international poisoner.

Let me tell you several things aboutanti-Semitism. I believe that UN by

declaring January 27 the InternationalDay of Commemoration in Memory of theVictims of the Holocaust is looking not to

just condemn anti-Semitism, but to defeatit, if it’s possible. Anti-Semitism is a spiri-tual thesis, which has nothing to do withlogic. Why were we the target of the liqui-dation? Did we threaten any nation in theworld? Did we have an army?

What did we do? Why did you hate us?Why did you kill us?

In Poland, were I was born, it was saidthat the society rejects us, Jews, becausewe are different. We wear beards, blackhats, we look strange. If we were likeeveryone else the society would embraceus. Next to Poland, in Germany, manyJews were like everybody else. They con-tributed to arts, literature, politics,finances, they were doctors, lawyers,

(Continued on page 2)

UN MARKS THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Yad Vashem Council Chairman,addresses Holocaust Memorial Ceremony.

Holocaust Memorial Ceremony attendees at the UN observe Moment of Silence.

Page 2 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE January/February 2009 - Shevat/Adar I 5769

The original construction plansbelieved used for a major expansion

of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in1941 have been found in a Berlin flat,Germany’s Bild newspaper reported.

The daily printed three architect’s draw-ings on yellowing paper from the batch of28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One

has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter roommarked “Gaskammer” (gas chamber) thatwas part of a “delousing facility.”

The plans, published ahead of the 70thanniversary of the “Kristallnacht” alsoinclude a crematorium and a “L. Keller” —an abbreviation for “Leichenkeller” orcorpse cellar.

A drawing of the building for Auschwitz’smain gate was also found in the docu-ments that Bild said were believed to havebeen discovered when a Berlin flat wascleaned out.

The mass-circulation newspaper quoted

Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the feder-al archives office in Berlin, as saying theblueprints offered “authentic evidence ofthe systematically planned genocide ofEuropean Jews.”

There were mass killings of about onemillion Jews before the Nazi’s “FinalSolution” was formulated in late 1941. The

decision to kill Europe’s 11 millionJews was made at the WannseeConference in January 1942.

A copy of the minutes, known asthe “Wannsee Protocol,” is one ofthe most important documentsfrom the war.

The newly found Auschwitz blue-prints are dated October 23 1941and could offer historians earlierevidence of Nazi plans to kill Jewson a mass scale, Bild said.

“These documents reveal thateveryone who had even anythingremotely to do with the planningand construction of the concentra-

tion camp must have know that peoplewere to be gassed to death in assembly-line fashion,” Bild wrote.

“The documents refute once and for allclaims by those who deny the Holocausteven took place,” it added.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest — atleast 1.1 million Jews were killed there.

Auschwitz I was set up in May 1940 inan old Polish army barracks. The first vic-tims were gassed in September 1941.Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, opened inOctober 1941. Four large gas chamberswere added to the camp in January 1942.

BLUEPRINTS FOR AUSCHWITZ CAMP FOUND IN GERMANY

One of the barracks and a watch tower are seen in the for-mer Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland.

(Continued from page 1)bankers, politicians. Did they like us, did theyembrace us? So if you don’t like us becausewe are different and you don’t like usbecause we are the same as you – make adecision of what you want from us.

In Europe, they say it is not your home,we hate the foreigners, go to your homeand we’ll embrace you. So we went to ourhome. Now that we are home do you likeus? Ask our neighbors… The anti-Semitism is beyond logic.

A friend of mine, a Holocaust survivor,once said that Auschwitz was on a differ-ent planet. I told him that I totally disagree,that it happened here, on our planet. Theywere people like us – they liked music, lit-erature, poetry, they could kiss their ownbabies and they could tear our babies intotwo pieces. I saw it with my own eyes. Wecan’t escape the story of Holocaust bysaying that it happened on another planet.They were human beings like us, and ifthey could do what they did, we have toinvestigate. How can we promise thatthese things will never happen again? Did

we learn something sixty-four years later? Two million children in Africa died of

starvation twenty years ago, and what didthe world do? A million people were killedin Kosovo ten years ago for what? Itmeans that the world had learned nothingfrom the Holocaust. We have to studyfrom the very beginning. Every day, eight-een thousand children in the world die ofstarvation, and this is happening morethan sixty years after the Holocaust. Andthis means that we have learned nothingfrom the Holocaust.

There is an alley at Yad Vashem inJerusalem lined with trees, each of whichcarries a name of a righteous gentile whosaved Jews during the Holocaust. It is asmall alley, but if the world was not silent,if the Vatican would say a word to con-demn anti-Semitism and to fight Nazis thisalley could stretch from Yad Vashem inJerusalem to the UN building in New York.

This is my prayer to the Lord Almighty:Lord, make peace in Heaven and createpeace among us and the entire world. Andlet us say amen.”

UN MARKS THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

The CD Czech railway operator willon September 1, 2009, dispatch a

train from Prague to London to commem-orate the 70th anniversary of the rescuetransports of Jewish children from formerCzechoslovakia organized by BritonNicholas Winton in 1939.

Within the project, The “Winton Train –Inspired by the Good” art contest waslaunched for secondary school and uni-versity students aged 15-26.

They will compete in the categories ofphotography, literature, plastic art andfilm. All artifacts will be connected by thetopics of humanity, decency and charity.

The winners will get a free ticket for the“Winton Train” from Prague to London.

The train, with a steam engine and peri-od wagons, will follow exactly the same

route as 70 years agoWinton saved a total of 669 Jewish chil-

dren who were transported to Britainbefore the war erupted.

He had to secure for departure permitsfor all children from Germans, entry per-mits from the British authorities and theadmission to British families. OtherJewish children who stayed in the countryended in concentration camps, wheremost of them died.

Winton received a high Czech state dec-oration, and Queen Elizabeth II promotedhim to knighthood.

Some of the people whose lives Wintonsaved, and their descendants, will travelon the special train later this year.

Winton, who will turn 100 then, will proba-bly attend the train’s festive arrival in London.

WITON TRAIN TO COMMEMORATE SAVED JEWISH CHILDREN

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memo-rial and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre

slammed a Holocaust-denying Englishbishop whose excommunication has beencancelled by Pope Benedict XVI.

“It is scandalous that someone of thisstature in the Church denies the Holocaust,”the institution said in a statement referring toBishop Richard Williamson, who has publiclydenied the murder of six million Jews duringWorld War II.

“Denial of the Holocaust not only insultsthe survivors, memory of the victims andthe righteous among the nations whorisked their lives to rescue the Jews, it is abrutal attack on truth,” Yad Vashem said.“What kind of message is this sendingregarding the Church’s attitude toward theHolocaust?”

The Wiesenthal Center, an internationalJewish human rights body, said: “ThePope’s decision to welcome back such ahater into the Church lends moral cre-dence to deniers of history’s worst crime.“In addition to Bishop Williamson’sHolocaust denial looms the unchangingvirulent anti-Semitism of the Society ofSaint Pius as a whole,” it said.

The pope cancelled the excommunica-tion of Williamson and three other bishopsin a bid to heal a 20-year schism with tra-ditionalists led by rebel French archbishopMarcel Lefebvre.

The Roman Catholic Church published anedict lifting the 1998 sanction on Lefebvre’ssuccessor, Bernard Fellay, and three otherbishops in his breakaway conservativemovement, including Williamson.

He is on record as denying the exis-tence of the gas chambers.

“I believe there were no gas cham-bers.... I think that 200,000 to 300,000Jews perished in Nazi concentrationcamps but none of them by gas cham-bers,” Williamson was quoted as saying inan interview with Swedish SVT television.

“There was not one Jew killed by thegas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!”Italian Jewish groups criticized the deci-sion as a “negative, worrying and incom-prehensible signal.”

Uneasy relations between the Vaticanand Israel have been further strained byplans to declare Nazi-era Pope Pius XII asaint, despite widespread criticism of hisinaction during the Holocaust.

JEWISH ANGER AS POPE REINSTATES HOLOCAUST-DENIER

Polish officials marked the border ofthe former Warsaw Ghetto with

plaques and boundary lines traced in theground to preserve the memory of thetragic World War II-era Jewish quarter.

The head of Poland’s Jewish communi-ty, Piotr Kadlcik, called the project “veryimportant” and “the fulfillment of a dream.”

“For many years it was deliberate — noone really remembered that there used tobe another city here, there used to beanother reality,” Kadlcik said.

The Warsaw Ghetto was set up byNazi Germany in 1940, the year after itinvaded and occupied Poland, sparkingWorld War II. Over the next three years,half a million Jews were imprisoned inthe overcrowded enclave, many dyingof disease or hunger. For most, howev-er, it served as a holding place beforethey were sent to the death camps.

Eleonora Bergman, the head of theJewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, saidmarking the boundaries of the ghetto —shaped like a ragged puzzle piece in thecenter of the city — will help peopleunderstand the suffering better.

“It’s not in a museum — it’s in a realspace,” Bergman said. “It seems huge, but ifyou know half a million people lived here,you realize it was very overcrowded.”

Krystyna Budnicka, an elderly womanwho lived in the ghetto as a girl andescaped at age 11 through sewagecanals, was among the group, and alsopraised the project.

“Many people don’t know anything aboutthe ghetto, and it’s important to make themaware,” said Budnicka, 76. “There was fear,hunger, extreme poverty, your life was con-stantly in danger. I was a child, but I realizedI could die at any time.”

For herself, though, she said it is some-

times better not to reflect too much — andis strangely thankful that the whole areawas leveled by the Nazis and later rebuilt.That way, she doesn’t have to walk pastthe building where she lived with her par-ents, sister and six brothers — all of whomwere killed in the Holocaust.

“It’s the same place, but at the sametime it’s not the same place. Only thestreet names are the same,” saidBudnicka, who still lives within the bound-aries of the former ghetto.

Officials said inhabitants in the areawere supportive of the project, in somecases allowing markers to go up on pri-vate property.

Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz saidshe wants the city to remember the suffer-ing of a people who made up a third of itspopulation before the war.

WARSAW MARKS BORDERS OF FORMER GHETTO

School children inspect a memorial plaquethat marks the border of the former WarsawGhetto in Warsaw, Poland.

“Auschwitz: From the Depth of theAbyss,” an exhibition by Yad

Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial andRemembrance Authority in Jerusalem,was shown on 27 January at theEuropean Parliament in Brussels in theframework of the annual InternationalHolocaust Remembrance Day.

The exhibition comprises photographsfrom The Auschwitz Album and sketchesby Jewish artist Zinovii Tolkatchev, a sol-

dier in the Red Army who was present atthe liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27January 1945.

The International Holocaust RemembranceDay was marked at the EuropeanParliament by a special ceremony co-organized by the European Coalition forIsrael and the European JewishCommunity Center, under the patron-age of the parliament’s president Hans-Gert Poettering.

YAD VASHEM EXHIBITION AT THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

January/February 2009 - Shevat/Adar I 5769 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 3

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAYCOMMEMORATED AROUND THE GLOBE

ISRAEL — An exhibition on AlbanianMuslims who sheltered Jews during WorldWar II opened in a mixed Jewish-Arabtown of Ramle on January 27 to markInternational Holocaust RemembranceDay, but the event was overshadowed bytensions from Israel’s offensive in theGaza Strip.

It was the first time that Yad Vashem,Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, hashosted a standing exhibition in Hebrew andArabic. Holding the event in Ramle, a work-ing-class town where thousands of Arabslive alongside Jews, underscored the organ-izers’ goal of improving relations.

Some 20 Arab high school studentstoured the exhibition, confronted by a pic-ture of strewn corpses in Bergen-Belsenconcentration camp and then of black-and-white photographs of AlbanianMuslims who sheltered Jews.

Students were clearly interested. But theGaza offensive, which ended just over aweek ago, was also on their minds.

Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev,said the timing of the exhibit was unin-tended, since it was planned months agoto coincide with the internationalHolocaust day. Yad Vashem hosts a muchlarger ceremony on Israel’s annualHolocaust memorial day, which is markedaccording to the Hebrew calendar andtakes place each spring.

Shalev said Yad Vashem does notinvolve itself in the modern-day Mideastconflict, but said he hoped the exhibitionwould inspire and provoke discussion.

“There is nothing in common with thatperiod and this bitter conflict that goes onand on ... but if both sides recognize theirright to exist, side-by-side, we’ll find away. This kind of exhibition sheds light, itgives hope of the humanity of humanbeings,” Shalev said.

Yad Vashem has honored 63 MuslimAlbanians for sheltering Jews duringWorld War Two. They are among 22,000people that the museum recognizes as“Righteous Among the Nations” — non-Jews who defied their communities andgovernments to save Jews from death atthe hands of Nazis. The exhibition will runfor three months in Ramle.

***UKRAINE – Jewish communities in

Ukraine lit candles and observed amoment of silence to honor the 6 millionJewish Holocaust victims.

The moment of silence culminated aweek of events to commemorateInternational Holocaust RemembranceDay and to remember the 1.5 million Jewskilled in Ukraine, including meetings,roundtables, seminars and discussions,exhibitions and film screenings.

There was no official national ceremony,

but the Jewish Forum of Ukraine, the All-Ukrainian Association of Jews — made upof concentration camp and ghetto sur-vivors — and the Ukrainian Center forHolocaust Studies co-hosted a memorialmeeting called “Six Million Hearts” in Kievon January 27 at the Academic Institutionfor Political and Ethnic Studies. At thesame time, a group of Ukrainian young-sters gathered to mark the event at theJewish Council of Ukraine.

Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkovhosted commemorative meetings inremembrance of Holocaust.

***GERMANY – Germany’s Central

Council of Jews boycotted a ceremony in theBerlin parliament on Tuesday which com-memorated victims of the Holocaust, sayingtheir leaders had been treated without theproper respect in previous years.

The Council said its representatives wouldnot attend a speech by President HorstKoehler for the anniversary of the liberationof Auschwitz concentration camp, as theyhad not been greeted personally and hadbeen treated merely as “onlookers.”

“At some point, it is enough,” StephanKramer, General Secretary of the Council,told Reuters.

He also complained that in previousyears, the Council’s leaders, includingHolocaust survivors, had been givenseats among other visitors in the gallery,rather than in the main plenary hall.

“This symbol speaks for itself and is unsur-

passable in terms of its lack of respect,”Kramer told Die Welt newspaper.

He criticized politicians for failing toadjust the protocol at a time whenGermany was seeing a record number offar-right crimes, and when Pope Benedictwas rehabilitating a bishop who haddenied the extent of the Holocaust.

In his speech, Koehler said Germanshad a duty to protect Jews and the con-stant threat of anti-Semitic attacks wasshameful in the country responsible forthe Holocaust.

“It is a scandal that police have to pro-tect Jewish places from old and newextremists,” said Koehler. “Let us stand onthe side of our fellow Jews. Whoeverattacks them, attacks us all.”

***IRELAND – Four Irish-resident survivors

of Nazi concentration camps took part in theNational Holocaust Memorial Day commem-oration at the Mansion House.

In a moving ritual at the Dublin event,Tomi Reichental, Suzi Diamond, JanKaminski and Zoltan Zinn-Collis spokeseparately and at intervals the words “Iam here today not because of who I ambut because of what I am. I am a survivor

of the Holocaust.”In the keynote address, President

McAleese said: “Our job is not done until allcan sleep easy in their beds at night andfreely go about their business by day.’’

She said: “The wickedness and cruelty ofthe Holocaust lacerate our hearts to this day,

as they should. God forbid that any genera-tion will ever know the indulgence of forget-ting or ever cease to probe how it all came tobe. For somewhere in our world today, thereare men and women who are teaching theirchildren to hate the otherness of others and,in that toxic teaching, there germinates theseed that makes such a nightmare possibleall over again.”

She continued: “Never forgetting is ourduty and our responsibility . . . Europe’slaws and protective structures have pro-gressed considerably these 60 years, butfor all that, hate-filled ideas are still toutedand individuals still live in fear, and our jobis not done until all can sleep easy in theirbeds at night and freely go about theirbusiness by day.’’

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, EibhlínByrne, welcomed all at the beginning.Claes Ljungdahl, the SwedishAmbassador to Ireland, read theStockholm Declaration of 2000, whichpromised to remember the victims andsurvivors of the Holocaust and reaffirmedhumanity’s common aspiration to toler-ance and democracy.

A candle-lighting ceremony commemo-rated all who died in the camps.

***SPAIN – A Jewish human rights group

has condemned the cancellation of thisyear’s ceremony marking InternationalHolocaust Remembrance Day by theCatalunyan government in Barcelona onthe grounds of Israel’s recent militaryoperation in Gaza.

In La Vanguadia newspaper, an officialfrom the city of Barcelona explained thecancellation by saying:”Marking theJewish Holocaust while a PalestinianHolocaust is taking place is not right.”

“This remark came in the midst of aflood of reports in the local media thatdrew analogies between Nazi atrocitiesand Israel’s actions against Hamas terror-ism. Such discourse unfortunately seemsto have become endemic in Catalunya,”B’nai B’rith Europe said in a statement. “Not only is it cynical to relate the system-atic mass murder of six million Jews andnumerous other victims at the hand of theNazis to the deeply regrettable plight ofthe Palestinian population in Gaza. It alsoabets the agenda of Holocaust deniersand other revisionists who seek to down-

play or even deny this unprecedentedcrime against humanity,” it said.

Rather than to impute to the State of thesurvivors of the Holocaust the most evil ofall intentions, its biased critics ought tohave a closer look at the ideological foun-dation of Hamas and of its parent, theMuslim Brotherhood, which even pre-cedes the creation of the State of Israel.

“If Catalunya were to take its anti-fasciststance and its solidarity with thePalestinians seriously, it would criticallyconfront this Islamist terrorist movementand its anti-Semitic agenda, which is alsoat the root of the civilian population’s suf-fering in Gaza, rather than to resort toaggressive symbolic gestures thatamount to an insult to both the dead andthe survivors of the Holocaust,” B’naiB’rith added.

****BELGIUM – In the framework of the

International Holocaust RemembranceDay, the European Jewish CommunityCenter and other European Jewish organ-izations took part in an exhibition aboutthe Shoah displayed at the EuropeanParliament in Brussels.

The exhibition, featuring videos, testi-monies and footages, is open at the lobbyof the Altiero Spinelli building.

On January 25, at the initiative of theEuropean Friends of Israel, a delegationof 20 members of the EuropeanParliament and of EU national parlia-ments visited the former Auschwitz Nazideath camp in southern Poland.

They were joined by a delegation of theKnesset, Israel’s parliament, and later visitedthe Auschwitz Jewish Center, which openedin 2000 to teach future generations about thedestruction caused by the Holocaust.

Before Auschwitz became the ultimatesymbol of the Shoah or Holocaust, it wasjust an ordinary town known as Oswiecim.

1.5 million Jews died at the hands of theNazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau during WWII.

On January 28, European ParliamentPresident Hans-Gert Poettering and mem-bers of the assembly attended a specialcommemoration in the parliament premises.

The event ceremony for the EuropeanUnion member states was addressed byMoshe Kantor, President of the EuropeanJewish Congress.

“With the palpable rise in anti-Semitismand xenophobia felt in the European nations,the Holocaust is a crucial historical period tobe memorialized and never forgotten,“ theEJC president said in a statement.

“The lessons of the Holocaust are univer-sal ones which serve to remind all of human-ity of the dangers inherent within hatred,intolerance and ignorance,” he added.

“As an international community, it is crit-ical that we welcome this occasion toonce again educate people all over theglobe that this darkest of periods mustnever be forgotten.”

Holocaust survivors lay a wreath during aHolocaust Remembrance Day ceremony atYad Vashem in Jerusalem.

German President Horst Koehler delivers aspeech during a commemoration service forthe victims of national socialism at theReichstag building, seat of the German lowerhouse of Parliament Bundestag, in Berlin.

Sister Carmel Niland, a member of the Council ofChristians and Jews, and Shiela Zietsman, achaplain of East Glendalough School, lightingcandles during the Holocaust Memorial Daycommemoration at the Mansion House, Dublin.

The International Holocaust MemorialExhibition displayed in the lobby of theEuropean Parliament building in Brussels.


B O O K R E V I E W SB O O K R E V I E W S

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery ofMy Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood. ByMark Kurzem. The Penguin Group: NewYork, 2007. 418 pp. $26.95, hardcoverREVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

During the war, on a stormy night, alittle boy of about five years old,

runs out of his home into the darkness.Where to go? He has no idea. But in themorning he has an excellent view of a hor-rific scene. He sees his mother and hissiblings shot and slashed by the Nazisand their Latvian collaborators.

After a stunned silence, the boy simplyruns cold, and alone till he sees a houseand frightened, enters. An old and kindlywoman lives there. She gives him food,clothing, a warm place to lie down. Butthen her own son comes home and every-thing changes. He immediately realizesthe boy is a Jew, roughly and mercilesslythrows him into a wooden basket, andtakes him to the Latvians to be killed.

Then the miracle happens. The Latviansergeant, the leader of this band of killers,somehow takes a liking to the boy. Was itthe way the poor boy cried for a piece ofbread just as he was about to be shot?Could the boy have reminded the ser-geant of someone else? We will neverknow. But even after the sergeant knowsfor certain that the boy is a Jew, he con-vinces his men to make him their “mas-cot,” keeping the secret of the boy’s reli-

gion to himself. So what is a “mascot”? In return for a

name, a birthdate, food, and some kind ofshelter in the world, the boy gathers woodfor these Latvian Nazis; he prepares tea;picks strawberries; he goes on sorties

(Jew killing expeditions) with them; and, inthe end, wears an SS uniform, like them,and at times, a gun for photos.

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery ofMy Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood byMark Kurzem picks up the story many,many years later. The boy, now a man,calling himself Alex Kurzem (the soldiersinitially named him Uldis Kurzemnieks), is

beginning to unravel himself. He sits, hethinks, he can’t sleep. All that he deter-minedly repressed the many years he waswith the Latvians has taken their toll. Nowthe only thing Kurzem wants is to find out,where he comes from, who his motherwas, and just about anything else possibleabout himself. The only evidence he hasto go on are two words: “Koidanov” and“Panok.” He has absolutely no idea whatthey mean. But those words have beenwith him for as long as he can remember.Perhaps they hold the key to his identity.

Kurzem goes to his son Mark for help,and thus this “must read” book, this page-turner, this absolute thriller, begins. Markwill leave no stone unturned. He willpatiently wait for just the right moment toask his father questions. He will just aspatiently wait for the answers. He will gethis father to tell him everything about thecontents of the battered suitcase of mem-ories he always carries with him. Growingup, his father shared a little bit of informa-tion from that case with his family. Now,Mark needs to know much more. Mark willfind people who knew his father. He willfind photos, and even movies . . .

What exactly does he find out? That’s forthe readers of this fascinating and uniquebook to discover. Does it help Kurzem any?Well, that’s another question . . .

P.S. – While readers of M&R may feelthey’ve read every kind of story about theHolocaust, this true story will surely makethem feel differently.

THE MASCOT: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERYOF MY JEWISH FATHER’S NAZI BOYHOOD

Rethinking Poles and Jews: TroubledPast, Brighter Future Edited by RobertCherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.230 pp. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.REVIEWED BY CHARLES CHOTKOWSKI

Those of us active in Polish-Jewishrelations have been doubly fortu-

nate in 2007 with the appearance of tworecent collective works in our field. Thefirst was Volume 19 of “Polin: Studies inPolish Jewry,” which was dedicated toPolish-Jewish Relations in North America.

Now comes “Rethinking Poles andJews,” in which editors Cherry and Orla-Bukowska have assembled a foreword, apreface, four introductions, and thirteenarticles, all of which address forthrightlythe contentious issues that always seemto crop up in discussions between Jewsand Poles.

As a longtime participant in these discus-sions, I can attest that the contributors to“Rethinking Poles and Jews” are knowledge-able persons, experienced in Polish-Jewishdialogue, whose individual efforts over theyears have helped to bring about the“brighter future” foreseen in the subtitle.

The book is divided into three parts.The first deals with anti-Polish stereo-types, the second with contextualunderstanding and dialogue, and thethird with contemporary Poland.

The first part unflinchingly addressesstereotypes of the kind Polish-Americanshave long had to deal with. In his introductionto this part, Thaddeus Radzilowski writes of“anti-Polonism,” a term avoided by others asa neologism, although the prejudice itdenotes is nonetheless very real.

Two articles deal with the depiction ofPoland and the Poles in the cinema.Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski reviews the neg-ative presentations found in Hollywoodproductions, which avoid the realities oflife in Poland, especially in wartime, andare fundamentally dishonest. LawrenceBaron discusses the rejection of positive

depictions in Wajda’s “Korczak” andPolanski’s “The Pianist” by critics whoprefer condemnation of the Poles over thenuanced truth.

Shana Penn’s review of American presscoverage notes the positive changes inreports on commemorations of the libera-tion of Auschwitz in 2005, as contrasted to1995, as well as noting the success ofPolish diplomats in correcting referencesto “Polish death camps.”

The signal contribution of Robert Cherryhas been the measurement of anti-Polishbias in this country. While there havebeen extensive surveys of anti-Semitismabroad, including in Poland, few similarstudies of anti-Polonism have been madehere. His article surveys anti-Polish bias-es among Holocaust teachers, findinggreater bias among non-historians thanamong specialists in the field.

In “Polish-Jewish relations in America,”Guy Billauer’s introduction to the secondpart, he notes “a steady but very slowimprovement in the way Jews view Polesand Poles view Jews ... [but] the two com-munities still see each other largely innegative terms.”

Much of the negativity derives from con-flicting memories of the Holocaust.Surprisingly, Havi Ben-Sasson finds thatduring the Holocaust years in Poland,Jewish attitudes toward Poles were initial-ly positive, and only later turned negative,as expectations of Polish support and res-cue were disappointed. I believe the riftwas inevitable, given the different fatesthe Germans imposed on the persecutedPoles and exterminated Jews. As JerzyAndrzejewski wrote in his novel “HolyWeek,” “Affairs great and small dividepeople, yet none so sharply as theinequality of fate.”

Helene Sinnreich describes how “pow-erful national mythologies” affect histori-ography, with Poles emphasizing Polishvictims and Jews emphasizing Jewish vic-tims. She finds that some historians, bothPolish and Jewish, now write “more bal-anced, contextualized histories.”

Father John Pawlikowski shares his (Continued on page 15)

RETHINKING POLES AND JEWS

The Shoah in Ukraine: History,Testimony, Memorialization. Edited byRay Brandon and Wendy Lower.Indiana University Press, US HolocaustMemorial Museum. 392 pp. $35 REVIEWED BY ALEXANDER ZVIELLI

This extensive collection of studieson the Holocaust in Ukraine origi-

nated in the summer research workshopheld at the US Holocaust Museum in1999. Since then, the editors – RayBrandon, a historian based in Berlin andthe former editor of the English edition ofthe Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, andWendy Lower, of the Ludwig MaximilianUniversity at Munich and the author ofNazi Empire Building and the Holocaust inUkraine – sought out additional contri-butions from international experts whowere doing groundbreaking researchon this subject.

They show how Hitler’s grandiose planto settle 10 million Germans and establishhis private paradise in Ukraine failed dis-mally, but more than 1.5 million Jews wererobbed and murdered there.

Lower describes how the Nazis devel-oped a sinister, utopian plan for exploitingUkraine’s human and natural resources.They firmly believed that this was absolutelyessential to secure the Reich’s future and thecontinued sustenance of the Wehrmacht,and since the largest population of SovietJews resided there, they had to be eliminat-ed, and as fast as possible.

The plan put an end to Ukrainian hopesfor independence, but this did not preventthem from cooperating with the regime, atleast insofar as the robbery and the mur-der of Jews was concerned.

Hitler appointed the Nazi ideologueAlfred Rosenberg to be the minister of theReich Commissariat Ukraine.

Accompanied by top Nazis, Rosenberghad brought in commissars, or “the torch-bearers of the German nation,” especiallyeducated for this purpose. They were nobureaucrats, but dictators who ruled withthe gun and a whip, which they placed ontheir desk in office hours. When onebecame “too soft,” he was quickly side-lined by others. Social outcasts, ama-teurs, adventurers and careerists becamethe colonial-style governors and decidedwho shall live and who shall die. The detailed history of the district of


ANATOMY OF THEUKRAINIAN GENOCIDE


The man who presided over the Vaticanduring the war stands accused of turninga blind eye to the Holocaust. And his rep-utation is still a source of division betweenCatholics and Jews.BY PETER POPHAM, THE INDEPENDENT

The “Pius Wars” that have long ragedover the Vatican’s desire to declare

Pope Pius XII a saint flared up againwhen the Jesuit priest in charge of thecanonization process declared that PopeBenedict XVI could not visit Israel until adisputed panel in Jerusalem’s Holocaustmuseum, which refers disparagingly toPius, is removed.

Pius XII, the austere, bespectacledVatican diplomat who reigned from 1939to 1958, has long been regarded by con-servative Catholics as one of the greatestof modern popes. His claim to sainthoodwas opened by Pope Paul VI, “with thesame sort of urgency and certainty,” theVatican journalist Robert Mickens said,“as when John Paul II opened the case forMother Teresa.”

But the Pius XII depicted in the YadVashem Holocaust Museum is a very dif-ferent figure. Included among the“Unjust,” those responsible directly or indi-rectly for the Holocaust, he is castigatedon a large panel in the museum for hisfailure “to leave his palace, with crucifixhigh, to witness one day of pogrom.”“When reports of the massacre of theJews reached the Vatican,” it goes on, “hedid not react with written or verbalprotests. In 1942, he did not associatehimself with the condemnation of thekilling of the Jews issued by the Allies.When they were deported from Rome toAuschwitz, Pius XII did not intervene.”

“As long as that panel remains in themuseum,” Father Peter Gumpel said,

“Benedict XVI cannot go to Israel becauseit would be a scandal for Catholics. TheCatholic Church is doing everything possi-ble to have good relations with Israel, butfriendly relations can only be built if thereis reciprocity.”

A spokesman for the Israeli foreign min-istry skirted the museum issue in his reply.“If Benedict XVI would like to visit Israel,he would be a welcome and belovedguest,” said Yossi Levy. “Pope Ratzingerhas already been officially invited andwhether he accepts or not depends entire-ly on his will.”

But Sergio Itzhak Minervi, a former Israeliambassador to Brussels and a historian,commented: “No moral entity, and least of allYad Vashem, can treat these historical ques-tions as if they were in a market, as FatherGumpel would wish: ‘unless you cancelthose phrases, I don’t come.’ Let us be seri-ous. History has need of proof, of docu-ments, which the church would be well toshow to the world.”

At the crux of the dispute, as themuseum caption states, is the fail-

ure of Pope Pius to make a protest of anykind, either verbally or in writing, as mil-lions of Jews all over Europe were takento the gas chambers. By the end of 1942,he had received reports of the ongoingmurder of Jews from at least nine differentcountries where the Holocaust was underway, including Poland, Slovakia andCroatia. The British envoy to the HolySee, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, practically aprisoner inside the Vatican after the Nazioccupation of Rome, wrote in his diarylate in 1942: “The more I think of it, themore I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre ofthe Jewish race on the one hand, and, onthe other, the Vatican’s almost exclusivepreoccupation with the ... possibilities ofthe bombardment of Rome.”

By the following year, the Holocaust had

arrived under the Pope’s nose: in October1943, more than 1,000 Roman Jews hadbeen rounded up and were beingprocessed for extermination in a militaryschool a few hundred yards from thePope’s window. The Pope was personally

warned by an Italian princess, EnzaPignatelli, who had managed to force a wayinto his study, about the imminent assault onthe city’s ancient Jewish community. “Youmust act immediately,” she had told him.“The Germans are arresting the Jews andtaking them away. Only you can stop them.”He told her: “I will do all I can.”

On 18 October, the day the 1,000 Jewswere dispatched to Auschwitz in cattle cars,Osborne was received by the Pope. Piusremarked that “until now the Germans havealways behaved correctly,” respectingVatican neutrality, but he hoped they wouldput more police on the streets.

Supporters of Pius claim that his silencewas necessary: to protest would haveexposed the church and Catholics acrossEurope to Nazi attack and made the Pope

himself vulnerable. Thousands of Jews,they point out, were hidden and protectedby individual priests and nuns. They alsoinsist that Pius’s canonization is a purelyinternal matter for the Church. “ForBenedict and other conservatives in theChurch,” says Mr Mickens, “Pius XII hasfor a long time been an iconic figure, a fig-ure of reason and stability. They also likethe fact that he was a staunch anti-Communist. They say that, if he had spo-ken out against the Nazis, he would haveput even more lives in jeopardy.”

But Robert Katz, author of several nar-rative histories of Rome during the Nazioccupation, said: “They argue that a lot ofworse things would have happened if hehad spoken. But what worse could havehappened than did happen?”

He went on: “It’s true that he did what hecould to protect the Vatican, and it’s truethat there were many individual acts byCatholics to save Jews. But these werenot ordered by the Vatican. If they madehim a saint he would become a role modelfor Catholics worldwide. His deeds wouldbe singled out for imitation and venera-tion; virtue would be found in a passivitythat was sometimes indistinguishablefrom complicity before the acts of perpe-trators of crimes against humanity.”

The new row over Pius emerges exact-ly 50 years after his death. “His sup-

porters are extremely frustrated,” said MrMickens. “They were hoping that his canon-ization would have happened by thatanniversary.” Instead, even Pope Benedict,one of Pius’s ardent admirers, is now callingfor a truce. The issue of the museum captionwas “important but not decisive,” said hisspokesman, Father Federico Lombardi. Andregarding Pius’s canonization, the Pope“maintains that a period of deeper study andreflection is opportune.”

THE UNHOLY LEGACY OF PIUS XII

Eugenio Pacelli: a controversial Pope who failedto condemn the holocaust of World War II.

BY JUDITH MONACHINA, THE BOSTON GLOBE

In December of last year, the Italianstate railway launched a 186-mile-per-

hour train that revolutionized travel in Italy.But below the track of that train’s send-offfrom Milan’s Central Station, anotherimportant door to history was opened. Thestate railway recently signed an agree-ment to allow work to begin on aHolocaust memorial there.

The heart of the memorial will be thetrack used to deport Jews and others from1943 to 1945. It has remained untouchedsince. “It’s a ruin, an archeological find,”said architect Guido Morpurgo, and hisdesign, with the track as the memorial’sheart, reflects this.

During the German occupation of Italy,8,628 Jews were deported from Italy andits territories, according to historian LilianaPicciotto. On Jan. 30, 1944, one of the 15deportation trains to leave this station car-ried 605 Jews to Auschwitz; most werekilled on arrival; 20 survived. LilianaSegre, who was 13, and her father wereon that train. He was killed. She is activein the memorial project.

Advocates of the memorial say that Italyhas had a difficult time coming to gripswith its role in this history, and indeed thestory is mixed. The great majority of ItalianJews escaped deportation, in part due toassistance from their non-Jewish friendsand neighbors, and there were no depor-tations prior to the German occupation.Still, Italy was Germany’s ally, and did

implement racial laws in 1938 that seri-ously restricted the lives of Italian Jews.The immediate family members ofMorpurgo, who is Jewish, were notdeported, but his father suffered greatlyfrom the persecution.

Mussolini was deposed in July of1943; Italy surrendered to the Allies

less than two months later, but Germanystill occupied much of the peninsula.

It was in this chaos, in late 1943, that thefirst train left Milan. Italians have naturallywanted to remember their very activeresistance movements, and, comparedwith other occupied countries, their betterrecord in terms of Jewish deportations.But this focus has often frustrated

Holocaust historians.The memorial will open a living history

book. Visitors will hear the rumbles andscreeches of arrivals and departures overthem, just as the prisoners would haveheard them 65 years ago, as they were

violently loaded from trucks to train cars inthis hidden, underground part of the sta-tion. The train cars were then raised on alift and sent to concentration camps.

Fifty years later, it was a church that firstrecognized the track’s role in history. For10 years, members of St. Egidio haveheld services at the track to remember thedeportations. “The most important guest(at the services) was not the chief rabbi ofMilan, but the archbishop,” said Roberto

Jarach, vice president of the MemorialFoundation.

Adovcates from the Center forDocumentation of Contemporary JewishHistory and Children of the Shoah workedto win support for the memorial and obtainthe space from the railway.

Throughout Italy, schools and organi-zations commemorate the liberation ofAuschwitz every Jan. 27. There is somuch Day of Memory activity that onemight think memorials unnecessary.But the foundation representatives saymemory can slip away, especially assurvivors die.

One point of contention is the memo-rial’s scope. Of Italy’s 23,000 politi-

cal deportees, most of them not Jewish,hundreds were deported from the Milanstation, and their memory should beincluded here too, say some historians.Jarach understands, but makes a distinc-tion: “One thing is deportation, another isextermination.”

Jarach hopes programs at the site willdeal with that part of the station’s history,as well as Italy’s current problems inte-grating immigrants.

However this debate is decided, thememorial may be an important step forItaly. In such a public setting, where320,000 people pass daily, it will be aplace to learn about what happened, andto help visitors reflect on the dangers oftyranny and be alert to the first signs of itin their own governments. Before thetrains leave the station.

ITALY’S MOVING EFFORT TO RECOUNT JEWS’ JOURNEY

The track that was used to deport Jews and others from Italy.


S U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RS U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RDuring World War II, the Sozanska

family gave shelter to RoziaRothshild and her family, hiding them fromthe Nazis. Sixty years later, Rozia reuniteswith Wiktoria Sozanska for the first time.“Her bravery is what has allowed me tolive and build a wonderful family of myown,” she says.

A moving reunion between a Holocaustsurvivor and the Polish woman who riskedher life to save her took place at JFK Airportin New York in November of last year.

Organized by the Jewish Foundation forthe Righteous, the meeting broughttogether Rozia Rothshild, who now lives

in Tivon, Israel, with her rescuer, WiktoriaSozanska from Wroclaw, Poland, for thefirst time in over 60 years.

Sozanska and her widowed mother andfive siblings hid Rozia Rothshild (neeSeifert) and her brother, father and aunt in

a bunker on their farm in Turka, Poland,from 1942-1944.

“I cannot fully express how grateful I amto Wiktoria and her mother Anna. Theyopened their home and their hearts to me,risking their own lives in order to saveme,” said Rozia.

“Their bravery is what has allowed me tolive and build a wonderful family of my own,with three children and four grandchildren. Iam so thankful to them and the JewishFoundation for the Righteous for making thisextraordinary reunion possible.”

In the fall of 1942, the Jews of Turka (nowUkraine) and the surrounding villages were

ordered by the Germans to move intothe Samberg ghetto. The Seifert fami-ly was among this group of 5,000 Jewswho lived in Turka.

While the able-bodied adults couldhide in a bunker in the woods, childrenand the unhealthy were forced go tothe ghetto, and the families had to sellall their belongings beforehand.

When Wiktoria Jaworska camewith her mother Anna, a widow withsix children, to look at the furniture,her mother saw Rozia and herbrother Lucien and wondered whatwould become of them. When sheheard they were going to be sent to

the ghetto with her father and aunt whowere disabled, she said, “We will takecare of you. You will come with us.”

In the middle of the next night, Wiktoria’sbrother Mikolaj came to the Siefert home in ahay cart and secreted Rozia, her brother

Lucien, her father Mendel andaunt Fanya away, pastpatrolling Germans, and hidthem in an undergroundbunker in her barn for twoyears. Each day Wiktoria andher family brought food to theSieferts and carried away theirwaste. While the Jaworskafamily had very little, theyshared what they had withRozia and her family.

There were severalclose calls. Wiktoria

had given her identity docu-ments to a Jewish neighborand was interrogated by the Gestapo fordays, never betraying her neighbor or theSeiferts. Wiktoria was finally released bythe Gestapo, when she convinced themthat she had not given her identity papersto a Jewess.

In the summer of 1944, as the Sovietarmy was approaching Turka, theGermans came though the area confiscat-ing animals, taking food, and searchingfor both deserters and hidden Jews.Wiktoria and her mother moved theSeiferts to the woods, where they lived fortwo weeks until the region was liberated.

Mendel, Fanya, Rozia and Lucienreturned to Turka and found devastation.

After the war, Mendel married Fanyaand the family moved to the United States.Rozia met an Israeli, they married andmoved to Israel, She now goes by thename Shoshanna, which is Hebrew for

“rose” – the same as her name in Polish.Wiktoria is in her 80s and lives inWroclaw, Poland.

“In the many years we have workedwith survivors and their rescuers, I remainawestruck by the heroism of the thou-sands of rescuers who risked their lives tosave others. By holding true to their val-ues, these individuals saved Jews fromcertain death,” said JFR Executive VicePresident Stanlee Stahl.

“We owe a great debt of gratitude tothese men and women, and through ourwork, hope to improve their lives and pre-serve their stories,” he added.

The Jewish Foundation for theRighteous was created in 1986 to providefinancial assistance to non-Jews whorisked their lives and often the lives oftheir families to rescue Jews during theHolocaust. Today the JFR supports morethan 1,200 aged rescuers in 26 countries.

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR MEETS HER POLISH SAVIOR

Wiktoria Sozanska and Rozia Rothshild meet in New York.

A Seifert family photo from 1955.

AMNON RUBINSTEIN,THE JERUSALEM POST

Seventy years ago, the first of thekindertransport left Germany for

safety in Britain. The first one arrived atHarwich on December 2 bringing 200 chil-dren from Berlin’s Jewish orphanage,torched the month before during thepogrom named Kristallnacht. This event isrightly celebrated in Britain. Here was anact of generosity and kindness whichstood out in singular isolation.

Following the Kristallnacht pogrom,the British Parliament and governmentdecided to give shelter to refugee chil-dren, mostly Jewish, menaced by theNazi regime. Indeed, Britain’s excep-tional humanity and generosity contrastdramatically with the universal indiffer-ence to the unfolding Jewish tragedy inGermany of 1938. Moreover, the chil-dren were generally well received: Oneof them – now 81 – told London’sEvening Standard how he was electedvice-captain in a Margate school,although he hardly knew any English.

Britain’s act of humanity contrastssharply with the American failure. A similareffort in the US failed to pass the congres-sional committees. Eventually, 1,000mostly Jewish children were allowed intoAmerica between 1934 and 1945 in asemi-clandestine operation, which hascome to be known as the “One ThousandChildren.” Britain was different.

The year 1938 was a watershed: In July,the Evian conference ended in a fiasco.Thirty-two countries deliberated the

refugee question – withoutmentioning the word Jew -and decided to do noth-ing. Almost all of the par-ticipating countries openlyrefused to take in Jewishrefugees.

Hitler rightly saw inthat refusal a green lightto unleash his hordes inthe November pogrom.Then came the quickaction of the British gov-ernment which managed– with the brave help ofQuakers - to save almost10,000 children.

Having said that, thereare other aspects to thekindertransport. TheBritish government didnot allow them to immi-grate to Britain. Theywere given only temporary shelter, anda condition was attached: They had tocome without their parents. Thus thechildren – ranging from infants to 17-year-olds – had to leave their parents inGermany, Austria and Czechoslovakiaamid tragic scenes in which, by Naziorders, no emotion was allowed to beshown. They made their way to Britainvia Holland as de facto orphans. Infantswere carried by their older siblings andthe absence of their mothers andfathers was, naturally, traumatic.

This is significant. Here were parentsready to send their unaccompanied off-spring to a foreign land. The Evian partic-

ipants could have conceivably deludedthemselves into believing that no mortaldanger awaited the Jews. But now, inDecember 1938, after the pogrom, thereadiness of the parents testifiedto their realization that they had to savethe lives of their children. The mortal dan-ger was palpable. From now on the failureof the West to take in Jewish refugeesacquired a new dimension: indifference inthe face of death.

At the same time, the kindertransportshowed that the Nazis were ready to letJews out. The fate of the Jews was sealedby both the Nazis’ brutality and theabsence of sheltering countries. But whywere the parents not allowed to enter

Britain? After all, here was thec r è m e - d e - l a - c r è m e o fEuropean society – leadingcitizens who would haveenriched the economy, sci-ence and arts of the Britishisles. And there was not evenan issue of immigration. Theparents, like their children,could have been granted tem-porary shelter, thus avoiding acruel separation.

But the children arrivedohne eltern, without parents;they were elternlose kinder –parentless children. In otherwords: the kindertransport isboth testament to British gen-erosity and to the then-pre-vailing prejudice againstJews. Most parents, needlessto say, did not survive to seetheir children.

W hy is this important nowadays?Because the events of the

Holocaust are remembered by Jews ascharacterized by two types of responsibil-ity – for the actual murder, and for the fail-ure to save the menaced Jews. Of course,there is no comparison between the actu-al butchers and the indifferent onlookers,but anybody who wants to understand theIsraeli psyche must realize that evenBritain’s unique act of humanity delivers adouble message – a double sense of hor-ror at the actual slaughter, as well as asense of being betrayed by the Westerndemocracies.

Israelis live with these double traumas.

THE “NO-PARENT” KINDERTRANSPORT

Children of the Kindertransport.


Six decades after the end of WorldWar II, the world’s remaining Nazi

war criminals and witnesses to their atroc-ities are fast dying of old age. But theGerman office charged with preparingprosecutions of Nazi crimes, far fromshutting down, has rarely been busier.

“Twenty-five years ago, we thought ourwork would be coming to an end now,”said Kurt Schrimm, lead prosecutor ofGermany’s central office for the investiga-tion of “National Socialist Crimes.”

But as Schrimm and his staff of six combrecords around the world in a final pushfor justice, they continue to come up withfresh leads and evidence. Today the officeis pursuing 20 to 40 cases, he said includ-ing the extradition of former U.S.autoworker and accused Sobibor deathcamp guard John Demjanjuk. At least afew cases are still going to trial.“There are still thousands of cases noone’s ever heard of,” he said. “And I’msure there are still thousands of culpritsout there.”

“Last Chance” to find Nazi war criminalsin South America Prosecuting Nazi warcrimes has always had its challenges. Thefirst head of Schrimm’s office, establishedin 1958 to pursue further Nazi prosecu-tions in the wake of the Nuremberg trials,

was eventually discovered to be a formerHitler storm trooper.

Until the 1970s, German law included astatute of limitations on murder thatthreatened to put an end to the office’sefforts to prosecute Nazi criminals. Thatwas lifted.

Today, the biggest problem facing theagency is that both its targets and the wit-nesses needed to effectively prosecutethem are generally in their mid-80s orolder. Many have died, and others are toofrail for trial.

“You can start a trial only with theaccused alive and witnesses alive thatyou can call to testify,” said Carlo Gentile,an expert on Nazi war crimes at theUniversity of Cologne. “If you don’t havewitnesses and perpetrators, then you canonly work as a historian.”

Getting aging criminals to court is anincreasing challenge but not an impossi-bility. Currently Josef Scheungraber, anelderly former German infantryman, is ontrial in Munich on charges of taking part ina massacre of 11 men and boys in theItalian village of Falzano.

German prosecutors hope to prove thatScheungraber and fellow soldiers commit-ted murder when they locked 12 Italians ina farmhouse and later blew it up. The sole

survivor of the attack today, now 79, hasbeen called to testify as a witness.

An Italian court convicted Scheungraber of thecrime in 2006, but in absentia, and he hadcontinued to live freely in southernGermany until the latest prosecutioneffort.

Schrimm’s office also hopes within ayear to extradite Demjanjuk to facecharges of murdering Jews at a Naziprison camp in occupied Poland, wherethe Ukrainian-born U.S. autoworkerallegedly was a guard.

“To prove there was killing isn’t suf-ficient,” Schrimm said. “You have

to prove it was murder find evidence ofmotives like racism or show it wasextremely gruesome. And after 60 yearsit’s extremely difficult to prove what some-body thought.”

With witnesses dying out, most of thetips Schrimm’s office receives thesedays are from documents. In the mid-1990s, Italian officials discovered aroom full of files documenting Nazi warcrimes. The trove of documents, creat-ed by the Allies, had been handed tothe Italians for use in prosecutions butinstead was locked away. Today the so-called “Closet of Shame” has become amajor source of new prosecutions,

including that of Scheungraber.Schrimm’s prosecutors also recently

discovered that Josef Mengele, AdolfEichmann and other infamous Nazis whofled to South America after World War IIcarried a particular type of InternationalRed Cross travel document. Schrimm’sagency is now combing throughImmigration records in Argentina andother South American nations looking forsimilar documents and “people we don’tknow the names of yet.”

The Ludwigsburg office, which celebrat-ed its 50th anniversary in December, hasso far forwarded 7,394 investigations toGermany’s courts for prosecution.

Keeping up morale in the German officecan be a challenge, particularly as anincreasing number of prosecutions fail asthe accused or key witnesses die.

“I have long talks with everyone that youcan’t measure your success by the peopleyou manage to jail,” Schrimm said.Still, the office will stay open, Germanstate prosecutors have said.

These days, “the goal and satisfactionfor us is to clarify what really happened,”said Schrimm, whose team has amasseda vast archive of documentation on Nazicrimes. “Even victims say their interest isnot that an old person goes to prison butthat the world knows what happened.”First published in Chicago Tribune.

AS NAZIS AGE, LEADS STILL ALIVE

BY CAM SIMPSON, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The global quest to ferret out moneyand property left behind by Jews

killed in the Holocaust is now targetingIsrael, and investigators say it’s proving atleast as difficult in the Jewish state as itdid in Europe.

Many big banks and the governmentitself have resisted efforts to claim hun-dreds of millions of dollars in compensa-tion for bank deposits, land, corporateshares, art and other assets that investi-gators say once belonged to Jews killedby the Nazis and their allies.

“I cannot say that the Israeli establish-ment has been, or is, happy about thereturn of properties,” says Avraham Roet,the recently retired chairman of theCompany for Location & Restitution ofHolocaust Victims Assets Ltd. The privatefirm, often referred to simply as theCompany, was created by the Israeli par-liament after its investigators identified upto 9,000 bank accounts suspected ofbelonging to Holocaust victims.

Thousands of European Jews depositedor invested tidy sums here during thedecades before World War II, often withoutvisiting what was then British-controlledPalestine. After many were killed in theHolocaust, their substantial assets wentunclaimed, passing into the hands of thegovernment of the newly created nation ofIsrael and some of its largest banks.

While some Israeli institutions havechallenged the validity of the Company’sclaims, they are generally loath to saymuch about any of this in public. Mr. Roetand others say the institutions privatelyargue they should be treated more gentlythan their European counterparts becausethey are in a different position than banksand governments that actively assistedthe Nazis. They also say any assets onceowned by Holocaust victims that weresubsumed over the years served a publicgood because they went toward building aJewish homeland.

“They said, ‘We are not really cheatingthe survivors. It’s all within the Jewish

community, within Israel. It’s not the sameas it being held by the Swiss,’” MichaelBazyler, an expert on Holocaust assetsfrom the Chapman University School ofLaw in California, says Israeli bankers toldhim in 2006. “That was sort of theirexcuse. And I’m saying, ‘Wait a second.It’s not your money.’”

Mr. Roet, whose two sisters died in a

concentration camp near Auschwitz, Poland,started investigating and targeting some ofIsrael’s most powerful institutions after hisfirm opened last year. The 80-year-oldstepped down from the Company’s top job inAugust but remained a director and its mostpublic face.

Earlier this year, he went after BankLeumi Le-Israel B.M., Israel’s second-largest financial institution, claiming itowed more than $34 million, a figurederived from a government-approved for-mula for fixing the value of roughly 1,300accounts once held at the bank.

Last year, on the same day Bank Leumi,the Company’s biggest private target sofar, announced that it had hired a retiredIsraeli Supreme Court justice to scrutinize

each of those accounts, the bank’s direc-tors said they would give about $4.79 mil-lion to the Company. Although insistentthat it owed nothing, the bank said thepayment was being made “out of publicsentiment and as a gesture of goodwill.”The bank disputes many of Mr. Roet’sclaims and says it owes little.

While most of the Company’s focus has

been on bank accounts, it says it has alsolocated about $86.7 million worth of realestate that had belonged to Holocaust vic-tims and more than 1,000 stolen works ofart in the Israeli Museum that had beenrecovered by the Allies from the Nazis.Museum officials have published a com-plete catalog on their Web site and theCompany’s Web site. They also spon-sored a special exhibition earlier this yeartitled, “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from theHolocaust in the Israel Museum.”

The Company has sweeping powersallowing it access to government andbusiness records to find lost assets andlay claim to them. It then tries to locateheirs — whose names it is forbidden bylaw to publicly disclose — for any money

it recovers. When it can’t find heirs, ittransfers the money to needy Holocaustsurvivors living in Israel. Recovered pro-ceeds also fund the company’s opera-tions.

Run out of a suite of offices in a glass-and-steel tower four stories above a hard-wood-flooring store in this suburb of TelAviv, the Company has so far recoveredassets valued at just over $183.9 million.That includes about $44.7 million from thegovernment.

Mr. Roet estimates conservatively thatthere’s $500 million of victim’s assets inIsrael. That’s based on those alreadyrecovered and claims either already madeor being prepared. He believes that figurecould reach as much as $1 billion whenthe quest is over, especially if land valuescontinue to rise in Israel’s urban centers.

By comparison, a 2001 settlementbetween Jewish groups and Austria’s gov-ernment and private sector totaled about$360 million. A 1998 settlement betweenJewish groups and a collection of Swissbanks reached $1.25 billion.

As in Europe, it’s impossible to knowhow much was really lost in Israel. TheNazis and their surrogates tried to hidetheir genocide. There is no reliable reg-istry of the dead, nor of their internationalassets. Those who survived didn’t typical-ly hold onto the sort of records that canbuttress a claim.

In the 1990s and earlier this decade,Jewish groups threatened or took legal

action against European governmentsand businesses. The U.S. got involved,threatening reluctant European compa-nies with sanctions.

Under intense international pressure,deals were reached across the Continent.Settlements were often based on frag-mentary evidence and statistical esti-mates of what banks and institutionsowed. After hammering out a total pricetag, the targeted institutions funded settle-ment pools, or agreed to specific proce-dures for paying claims. Heirs with verifiedaccounts or other documented assets typ-ically got top priority. The remaining cash


BATTLE FOR HOLOCAUST ASSETS ROILS ISRAEL

Estelle Sapir displays a photo of her late father Joseph Sapir, a World War II death camp victim,during a news conference in 1998. Ms. Sapir announced she had reached a settlement with CreditSuisse over her claim on her father.


RABBI LAU VISITS THE OFFICE OF THE After the official United Nation’s International Day of

Holocaust ceremony Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairmathe American and International Societies for Yad Vashbefore his appointment as a Chairman of the Yad VashAnnual Tribute Dinner of the American and Internatio

Rabbi Lau briefed the Board that, in Yad Vashem inerstone of the new International School of Holocaof this project since 91 seminars for teachers and eYad Vashem last year alone.

One of such seminars last summer was attended by 70China. They bring back to their classrooms what they h

“I am very happy that the torch of remembrance is vivors”, said Rabbi Lau, “because we are not allowed t

At the end Rabbi Lau, recognized the great work for Society for Yad Vashem and its chairman, Eli Zborows

Eli Zborowski, Chairman, American and International Societies for Yad Vashem, Caroline Massel, Chair, AmericanSociety for Yad Vashem Young Leadership Associates, Ariel Zborowski and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman ofthe Yad Vashem Council.

David Halpern, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Counciland Jeremy Halpern.

EliVaYa

Mr. and Mrs. Arturo Constantiner, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, Eli Zborowski,Chairman, American and International Societies for Yad Vashem, Elizabeth Zborowski, Eugen Gluck.

At the Board Meeting: Elizabeth Wilf, Eugen Gluck, Zygmunt Wilf, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Melvin Bukiet, Joseph Wilf,Leonard Wilf, Eli Zborowski, David Halpern, Marilyn & Barry Rubenstein and Louis Rosenbaum.

Lili Stawski, Ellis & Israel Krakowski, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the YadZborowski, Chairman, American and International Societies for Yad Vashem.


AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMf Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of thean of the Yad Vashem Council visited the office ofhem and participated in the Board Meeting. Twicehem Council, Rabbi Lau was a guest speaker at theonal Societies for Yad Vashem in New York.in Jerusalem just a week ago, he placed the cor-

aust Studies. Rabbi Lau stressed the importanceeducators from all over the world were held in

00 teachers from 52 countries including Japan andhave learned in three weeks at Yad Vashem.given to the second and third generations of sur-o extinguish this light of remembrance.”

the cause of remembrance done by The Americanski.

Hon. Kiyo Akasaka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Public Information, Hon. Asha-Rose Migiro, United NationsDeputy Secretary-General, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, Ambassaor Gabriella Shalev.

i Zborowski, Chairman, American and International Societies for Yadashem, Israel Krakowski and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of thead Vashem Council.

d Vashem Council, Elizabeth Zborowski, Eugen Gluck, Rebbetzin Lau, and Eli

Rebecca Hanus, Nicole Pines, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, Ariel Zborowski, Eli Zborowski,Chairman, American and International Societies for Yad Vashem, Jeremy Halpern, Julie Kopel, Aaron Bernstein, Caroline Massel,Chair, American Society for Yad Vashem Young Leadership Associates and Alan Fried.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman, American and International Societies for Yad Vashem, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of the YadVashem Council, Harry and Danielle Karten.


REPORT FROM REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMYAD VASHEM

MATTHEW WAGNER, THE JERUSALEM POST

Anew four-book series entitled YearsWherein We Have Seen Evil that

teaches the Holocaust from a religiousperspective was launched by YadVashem.

The books, and the accompanying testi-monies preserved on CD, will be used asthe basis for teaching the Holocaust inharedi educational institutions.

The books mark an ongoing trend atYad Vashem to emphasize the particular,subjective experiences of individualHolocaust victims over attempts to viewthe Holocaust as a collective experience,said historians, educators and haredi fig-ures involved with the project.

“The secular Zionist state originally cre-ated Yad Vashem to present theHolocaust as a collective memory that fitnicely into a secular Zionist narrative,”said Dudi Zilbershlag, the first harediboard member of Yad Vashem.

“It basically ignored the courage of spir-it demonstrated by so many pious Jewswho did not lose faith throughout the hor-rors of the Shoah.

Haredim distanced themselves from theZionist tendency to emphasize the few

examples of physical courage, militarismand revolt against the Nazis that helpedshatter the myth that Jews were led assheep to the slaughter.

But over the years, people at Yad Vashemrealized the absurdity of it all. How can youfocus on the few incidents of partisanuprisings when these make up just afraction of Holocaust experience?”

Nava Weiss, head of YadVashem’s Haredi Department, whichwas established seven years ago,said that tailoring the teaching of theHolocaust to the special needs of theharedi community is part of largertrend in Israeli society.

“Over the past few decades wehave seen the focus move

from the collective to the individual,”said Weiss. “Israeli society hasmatured. We no longer think in terms ofa monolithic whole. Rather, we recog-nize the diversity of different groups.Teaching the Holocaust is no different.”

The four-book series focuses on thelives of Orthodox Jewry during theHolocaust and the special moral and reli-gious dilemmas they faced.

The first volume tells the story of theOrthodox community in Germany duringthe 1930s. According to Zilbershlag, thebook intentionally shatters the stereotype

of the haredi Jew as coming exclusivelyfrom Eastern Europe.

“It presents the heritage of RabbiSamson Raphael Hirsch, the forerunnerof modern Orthodoxy, who combinedTorah scholarship with work and world-

liness,” he explained. The second vol-ume traces the life of religious Jews inthe ghettos.

Specifically religious dilemmas, such asmaintaining a kosher diet when starvationis rampant, or celebrating the holidayswithout being allowed access to houses ofprayer, are examined.

The third volume is about various res-cue attempts, including an entire chapter

devoted to the attempts by Rabbi ChaimMichael Dov Weissmandl to save Jewsthrough bribery.

The fourth and final volume is devotedto the Final Solution.

Funding of the series was provided byRudolph and Edith Tessler in memory

of the children of Shlomo and Esther Tesslerand the children of David and FradelHoffman.

Until recently, the haredi education sys-tem did not teach the Holocaust.

In part this was due to a dearth of teach-ing materials, said Weiss. But it was alsopart of the haredi rejection of Zionist nar-rative of the Holocaust and its refusal torecognize Holocaust Remembrance Day,which fell on the anniversary of theWarsaw Ghetto uprising.

Even today, the teaching of the Holocaustand other “secular subjects” are discontin-ued for boys when they reach the eighthgrade and graduate from Talmud Torah toyeshiva. In yeshivot, studies are restricted tothe learning of the Talmud and other strictlyreligious subjects.

Females continue to devote themselvesto general studies through high schooland there is even Holocaust studies at thewomen-only Beit Vegan College inJerusalem, which has a predominatelyharedi student body.

NEW YAD VASHEM BOOKS TEACH HOLOCAUST TO HAREDIM

ETGAR LEFKOVITS , THE JERUSALEM POST

Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem HolocaustMemorial inaugurated in December

2008 a new research center on the aftermathof the Holocaust, focusing on survivors’ post-war experiences in an attempt to better pre-serve the memory of the Shoah.

The establishment of the DianaZborowski Center for the Study of theAftermath of the Shoah, which will operateunder the auspices of the InternationalInstitute for Holocaust Research at YadVashem, comes amid widespreadHolocaust revisionism as the number ofsurvivors continues to dwindle.

Dr. Ze’ev Mankowitz, the center’s direc-tor, noted that it was being launched at atime when contemporary Holocaust edu-cators from around the world were tryingto grapple with how to preserve the mem-ory of the Holocaust today.

“Until now, the priority of Yad Vashemhas been to focus on the issue of theHolocaust itself, but now the question ofthe memory of the Holocaust hasemerged to be of equally crucial impor-tance,” Mankowitz said in an interview.

Serving as a hub for higher learning, thecenter will promote research and educa-tional activities relating to the study of sur-vivors’ post-war experiences. It will focuson topics such as Europe as viewed bysurvivors, early attempts to institutionalizethe memory of the Holocaust, the crisis ofliberation for the survivors, and the Shoahas depicted in modern literature and films.

“For decades, we have addressedaspects of the Holocaust through the aca-demic work of our research institute. Now,post-Holocaust issues dealing with thesurvivors, history and memory - whichdirectly relate to how the Holocaust is

viewed by young people today - willreceive the same scholarly attention it sorichly deserves,” said Yad Vashem chair-man Avner Shalev.

“Acritical aspect of the story of theHolocaust survivors is how we

struggled to return to life. How were thesurvivors received by their countrymenand societies? How did our new countriestreat us and view us? These questions, Ibelieve, are vital to a deeper understand-ing of the long-lasting effects of theHolocaust,” said survivor Eli Zborowski,chairman of the American Society for YadVashem and a donor of the new center.

Due to time constraints, the center -which will operate with a basic staff of sixpeople but will work with researchersaround the world - will initially focus on theconsequences and implications of theShoah for the Jewish people worldwide inthe first quarter-century after theHolocaust, primarily during 1944-1961.

“This is a huge undertaking, and we aretrying not to bite off more than we canchew,” Mankowitz said.

He noted that the center’s work wouldinclude the debate among survivors in theearly days of the state regarding whetherto accept money from Germany, as wellas the trials of Nazi war criminals such asthe 1961 Eichmann trial, the struggle forreturn of Jewish property, and memorial-ization of Holocaust victims.

“Our priority is to give survivors a micro-phone so they have an opportunity tomake their voices heard,” Mankowitz said.

About 250,000 Holocaust survivors livein Israel.

“The Holocaust has become so criticalin public debate about human rights inEurope,” he said. “Holocaust remem-brance is becoming something of a litmustest of decency.”

NEW YAD VASHEM RESEARCH CENTERFOCUSES ON POST-WAR EXPERIENCES

BY SHALOM BRONSTEIN

The Yad Vashem Archives hold solu-tions to questions many people never

thought could be answered. In his 1996book The Book and the Sword—A Life ofLearning in the Shadow of Destruction, myteacher, mentor and friend, 2008 IsraelPrize Laureate Prof. David Weiss Halivniwrites: “I do not say kaddish for my sisterChanna Yitte or for my father, because I donot know when theydied. But I do rememberthem during the Yizkorservice.” After I read thebook, I asked RabbiHalivni if anyone hadchecked Yad Vashem formore information aboutthe fate of his family.With his permission, Ibegan a search that con-tinues to this day.

I first discovered thatthe story he was toldand believed for manyyears about his father,Z a l e r ( B e z a l e l )Wiedermann, turnedout to be incorrect. Inhis book, Halivni relatesthat his father wasdeported to Auschwitzin 1944: “I was told bysome people that fromAuschwitz he had been taken to Warsawto clean up the rubble, and from there, onhis way to Dachau,he had stepped off thewrong side of a train, was attacked by SSdogs, and consequently died.” Accordingto the “Original Dachau Entry Register” inthe postwar International Tracing ServiceRepository at Bad Arolsen, a copy of

which can be found in the Yad VashemArchives, Zaler Wiedermann was indeedon the death march from Warsaw toDachau. However, he arrived in Dachauon 6 August 1944, and died there on 11March 1945.

Halivni also mentions his great-uncle,Rabbi Leib Weiss of Tyachevo, “whosepicture on the ramp in Auschwitz has beenreproduced, unidentified, in many bookson the Holocaust, including the

Encyclopedia Judaica.”The Encyclopedia creditsYad Vashem for the pho-tograph. I brought thisinformation to the YadVashem Photo Archives.Since German soldierstook the photographssecretly, often to show thehumiliation of Jews, it isextremely rare to knowthe identity of people insuch photos. The namingof Rabbi Weiss then led tofurther identifications byHalivni and his late wifeTziporah of people inother pictures at YadVashem, enabling former-ly anonymous Jews toregain their true identities.The picture is now dis-played in the HolocaustHistory Museum with all

its subjects properly identified.In describing his own experience,

Halivni writes that when he jumped off thetrain upon arrival in Auschwitz, his auntcalled out to him in Yiddish, “May theTorah that you have so diligently laboredon protect you!” Halivni knew that Josef


PIECE BY PIECEYAD VASHEM ARCHIVES REVEAL THE FATE

OF RABBI DAVID HALIVNI’S FAMILY

Rabbi Leib Weiss of Tyachevo (center),his son Shlomo Weiss (right) and ItzoEinhorn (left) in a group of men under-going selection after their arrival atAuschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944.


BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

Politicians, the best of them, are apeculiar breed. Sometimes they do

things because they care. Sometimesthey do things for the vote. And some-times, due to political expediency, theymove on to another issue . . . .

Interestingly, when we, survivors, chil-dren of survivors, or great-grandchildrenof survivors, think of World War II, thename Fiorello H. LaGuardia seldomcomes to mind. If we do think of him at all,it’s in terms of his being the belovedmayor of New York City from 1934-1945.However, this five-foot man, described as“pugnacious, loquacious, competitive, andblunt” in the book by Thomas Mann enti-tled, Fiorello LaGuardia: A Fighter AgainstHis Times 1882-1933, always tried to dowhat he could for the European Jewswhenever he could . . . that is, when hewas politically able to . . .

For example, in 1919, United StatesHouse of Representatives memberLaGuardia, then thirty-seven years-of-age, was concerned about the anti-Semitic riots going on in the “new nationstates carved out of the German, Austrian,

and Russian empires.” Because of this,he introduced “a resolution of protest”which would direct the delegates to theParis Peace Conference to make it clearthat the United States would neither con-sort with nor aid nationsthat allowed such actsto be committed in theirmidst. The result: “civiland religious rights” forJews were made a partof the treaties formallyorganizing these “newstates in eastern andcentral Europe.” (Thatthese treaties, in theend, would mean little,well, that’s anotherissue.)

Additionally, through-out his early career inthe House, LaGuardiadeterminedly foughtagainst the tightening of immigration quo-tas – especially of southern and easternEuropeans, in other words, Italians andJews. Thus, he found himself oftendefending their ways and their lifestyles.For, sadly, even among Americans, therewere a growing number of those who felt

Nordics were “superior” and more worthyof United States citizenship.

Then, in 1933, LaGuardia was quickto recognize who and what Hitler

was about, and, as was LaGuardia’swont, he shared his opin-ions with everyone! Incoun t l ess pass iona tespeeches, according to LaGuardia historians RonaldH. Bayer, Alyn Brodsky,Lawrence Elliott, J. PaulJeffers, and ThomasKessner, who wrote of thatperiod, he railed againstHitler calling him all kinds ofnames. In fact, “he calledhim `that brown-shirtedfanatic now menacing thepeace of the world’ andsuggested that he beenshrined in a chamber ofhorrors at the forthcoming

[1939] New York World’s Fair.” Moreover, as the expression goes, “La

Guardia didn’t just talk the talk, he walkedthe walk.” Among other things, accordingto the above-noted, he didn’t wantAmericans to buy German goods, he did-n’t want the city to utilize materials made

in Germany, he retaliated when an AmericanJew could not be assured of his safety whentraveling to Germany, soon he wantedAmerica to sell planes again to Britain andFrance – hence ending “the restrictive neu-trality laws” (Kessner 469).

Indeed, throughout the war LaGuardiatried to do what he could for us . . . but, henever went so far as to confront the presidentvis-à-vis rescuing the suffering Jews ofEurope. Why? LaGuardia had dreams,dreams of acquiring a national post .

In later years, LaGuardia was directorgeneral of the United Nations Relief

and Rehabilitation Administration. In lateryears, he also visited Germany and could-n’t believe the horrific evidence of Germanevil that he saw there. So, while manyAmerican soldiers were good to theGermans, LaGuardia, was totally unfor-giving. It was then that he told the worldto remember what the Germans haddone. It was then, that he truly realized allthat the Jews of Europe had suffered.

P.S. – While LaGuardia’s mother wasJewish, he considered himself anAmerican Protestant of Italian descent.

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor of Mediaand Communication Arts at Pace University.

FIORELLO H. LAGUARDIA: A FRIEND TO EUROPE’S JEWS?

Fiorello H. LaGuardia

BY SHERRI DAY, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES

As a child, Brendon Rennert alwaysknew his grandfather was special.

Strangers would wait outside his grand-father’s Brooklyn apartment to talk. Hishouse teemed with “aunts” and “uncles”who constantly enveloped him in hugsand kisses. A memorial in Brooklyn borehis name.

Rennert’s mother told him his grandfa-ther was famous, but Rennert was ateenager before he fully understood. Hisgrandfather, Tuvia Bielski, was aHolocaust survivor. But more than that,Bielski and two of his brothers were part ofa fascinating but little-known chapter ofWorld War II when they hid 1,200 Jews ina forest in Belarus for more than twoyears. Together, they evaded the Nazisand likely avoided certain death.

Although the Bielski brothers’ story hasbeen told in two books and a documen-tary, it remains widely unknown. But notfor long.

In January, the Bielski brothers’ storymakes its big-screen debut in Defiance,directed by Ed Zwick, who also directedBlood Diamond and Glory. Daniel Craig,the British actor and reigning JamesBond, has the lead role of Tuvia Bielski.

And in November, an exhibit that focus-es on the brothers’ exploits opened at theFlorida Holocaust Museum in St.Petersburg. Museum officials say theexhibit, Courage and Compassion: TheLegacy of the Bielski Brothers, is the onlyone of its kind.

Rennert, who lives in Tampa and helpedengineer the St. Petersburg exhibit, canbarely contain his excitement. Finally, theworld will know about his grandfather’sheroism.

“To me, it’s one of the greatest storiesthat have ever been told,” said Rennert. “Ialways get the same look from peoplewhen I tell them about it. Jaws open.”

Although Rennert, 40, says his grandfa-ther talked little about what happened inthe forest, he remembers his stories well.As told by Rennert, his uncle and the

Holocaust Museum’s curator, the taleunfolds this way:

Tuvia Bielski was one of 11 children in afamily of millers in what is now known asBelarus. The family’s farm bordered athick forest. As the Nazis made their waythrough Belarus, they hauled off Bielski’sparents and two of his brothers to a ghet-to. Bielski later learned his family hadbeen executed.

Fearing the same fate for themselves,four of the Bielski brothers — Tuvia, Zus,Asael and 12-year-old Aron — fled to theforest. The land seemed dense and unin-habitable to outsiders, but it had beentheir childhood playground. After learningtheir family’s fate, thethree older brothersdecided to save asmany Jews fromextinction as theycould by harboringthem in the woods.

Tuvia, whosefluency in sev-

eral languages andphys i ca l appear -ance allowed him topass as a non-Jew,made frequent tripsto ghettos where heimplored Jews to fleeto the forest. Later,when visits becamemore difficult, he sent notes telling of free-dom beyond the ghetto. His was a fightingforce. But any Jew — the old, infirm,women and infants — was welcome. Theycalled it Jerusalem in the woods.

In the forest, the brothers had built acommunity blanketed by dense foliageand invisible by air. There was a bakery, ablacksmith shop, a tannery, an ammuni-tion workshop and a bath house to wardoff typhus. The inhabitants slept in under-ground dugouts.

They made their living repairing weaponsand providing other services for Russian par-tisans, who paid them in arms. They tookother necessities by force.

The alliance with the Russians pro-tected them from the Nazis, who had no

idea how many people were in the for-est or their fighting strength. When theGermans did attack, the Bielskis andtheir allies fought back and retreateddeeper into the forest.

In the summer of 1944, German sol-diers came upon the encampment as

they fled from Russian soldiers. In thestandoff, a handful of Jews died, but morethan 1,200 walked out alive. The Bielskisemerged as well: Asael joined theRussian army and later died in battle.Tuvia and Zus eventually came to theUnited States and settled in Brooklyn.Rennert’s grandfather, Tuvia, died in1987, Zus in 1995.

Last year, Rennert and his relativestraveled to Lithuania to see Defiancebeing filmed. On the way home, thegrandson got the idea to create an exhib-it to share his grandfather’s story withanother generation.

The Florida Holocaust Museum washappy to oblige.

“The Bielskis are such a unique storybecause they weren’t only focused onfighting back,” said Erin Blankenship,museum curator. “They were focused onsaving as many people as they could, andthey took in anybody, the old, the sick,children. A lot of other partisan groupsturned those people away.”

Rennert, who is in telecommunicationssales, reached out to family for artifacts.

Everybody had a little something — ashirt, a book. The collectibles, along withartifacts unearthed in a dig in Belarus,make up the 50 items in the display. Thereare also photographs and video testimonyfrom survivors, 29 of whom are still alive.

Robert Bielsky, Tuvia’s son andRennart’s uncle, who has a differentname spelling, has seen Defiance sixtimes. He organized the Lithuaniaexcursion and a side trip to Belarus totrace their ancestors’ journey. He keepsthe names of each person who lived inthe forest. They are family.

He appreciates the film and takes pride inhis father’s heroics, but Bielsky suspects he

wouldn’t have soughtthe spotlight.

“What wasvery impor-

tant to my father wasto see those babiesand those children ofthe descendantsbeing born and grownup because of hisfeats,” said Bielsky,50, who owns a com-mercial real estatefirm in New York City.“When (he) attendedparties, like weddings

and bar mitzvahs, hissatisfaction was to see

the children and the grandchildren of thesurvivors — the regeneration of familiesthat never had the chance to survive.”

Hollywood being Hollywood, the movietakes liberties. Tuvia, for instance, didn’tdie penniless and was not a cab driver,but owned a trucking company, Bielskysaid. Still the film lives up to the family’sexpectations by telling the truth aboutwhat happened in the forest.

Now that his grandfather isn’t around totell the tale, Rennert wants to ensure itlives on.

“It’s a really great story in everyaspect of it,” Rennert said. “It’s notabout death and destruction. It’s aboutlife and living. To me, that’s the greateststory that’s around.”

THREE BROTHERS DEFIED TERROR

Three Bielski brothers - (from left to righr) Tuvia, Asael, and Zus – used a thick forest inBelarus to conceal about 1,200 Jews during World War II.


BY ETGAR LEFKOVITS, THE JERUSALEM POST

A94-year-old Holocaust survivor, themother of the prominent Israeli busi-

nessman Yossi Maiman, has reconnectedwith the Polish family who saved her lifeand that of her own mother by shelteringthem from the Nazis in Poland duringWorld War II.

The story of life and bravery amid deathand destruction begins nearly a centuryago in Poland.

Esfira Maiman was born in 1914 in thecentral Polish city of Lodz, where her fam-ily was in the textile business.

After the German invasion of Poland in1939, she and her parents made their wayto Warsaw, where they were incarceratedin the Warsaw Ghetto.

In 1942, she managed to escape theghetto, where her father had died of aheart attack, due to her job as a steellaborer, which afforded her the rare privi-lege of leaving the restricted zone.

Abetted by her husband’s contacts withthe underground, Maiman quickly con-nected with a Polish woman, StanislawaSlawinska, who lived in the rural commu-nity of Grodzisk Mazowiecky, about 30km. from Warsaw.

Slawinska, a Polish Catholic, vehement-ly opposed the Nazis even though herown father was German, and readily tookMaiman in.

“From the minute we entered her homewe became friends,” Maiman recountsfrom her home in an upscale retirement

complex in Herzliya Pituach. A week later, Maiman was able to get

her mother smuggled out of the ghettoand into Slawinska’s home, as well.

Her husband was caught and murderedby the Nazis on one of his undergroundmissions.

Maiman and her mother spent the nexttwo years in the safety of Slawinska’shome, which she also opened to other

Jews hiding from the Nazis. The home was situated in a rural area,

with train tracks one side and a bloc ofGerman soldiers on the other, she said.

“Every day I would see the trains goingby, taking the Jews from their homes andvillages to their death, and on the otherside, the German soldiers drawing waterfrom a well,” Maiman recalled.

To avoid detection, Maiman rarely leftthe home for the next two years, too fear-

ful to even venture to a small bathroomoutside the house. The residents placed apiece of spoiled meat at the entrance tothe hiding place to repel the dogs of theGerman soldiers if they ever searched thehouse.

Though at one point she was black-mailed by a Polish neighbor who knewshe was hiding Jews, Slawinska, who waschildless, never turned them out, despite

the danger to her own life.

After the war ended,Maiman remarried,

and spent the next yearand half in a DP camp inGermany, where her sonYossi was born.

In 1948 she and her hus-band and mother movedto Peru, where she had acousin who survived thewar, and where they livedfor the next two decades.

Over the years, shewould send packages ofrice and flour – along withsome money – to herPolish savior, but never

got a reply, she said, and contact betweenthe two women was lost.

The Maimans moved to Israel in 1972;today, Yossi Maimon is chairman of theMerhav Group, which is known worldwidefor project development, contracting andfinance.

Despite the passage of time, the nona-genarian never forgot the woman whosaved her life.

Six months ago, Michele approached an

Israeli official with the New York-basedInternational Raoul WallenbergFoundation and recounted her mother’sstory.

The decade-old organization, whichseeks to identify stories of Holocaust res-cue that have not been previously uncov-ered, rushed into action.

Maiman was sure that Slawinska, whowas about seven years older than shewas, was no longer alive, but she remem-bered her nephew, Roman, who was aboy during the war, and who kept thesecret of the hidden Jews.

Within weeks the Foundation was ableto locate Roman Slawinska, who was stillliving in the same Warsaw suburb, andfound documentation of his aunt’s coura-geous deeds.

Maiman and Slawinska were soon onthe phone, sharing stories of their linkedpast, crying tears of joy.

In September, Yad Vashem posthu-mously bestowed the HolocaustMemorial’s highest honor on StanislawaSlawinska, said Danny Rainer, the vicepresident of the International RaoulWallenberg Foundation .

“We feel that the rescuers have to berecognized – especially by the youngergeneration,” Rainer said.

“I am very happy that my mother is withus to live this moment of joy,” YossiMaiman said.

“Now she feels at peace,” her daughterMichele added.

“It is the realization of a dream,” EsfiraMaiman said, adding, tearfully, “Sheshould have gotten the award herself.”

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR RECONNECTS WITH FAMILYTHAT SAVED HER LIFE

Esfira Maiman (center) with daughter Michelle and son Yossi.

NAZI VICTIMS IN GAZA REGION RECEIVE AID

The Claims Conference is allocatingmore than $428,000 to assist Nazi

victims, living in areas under missileattack from Gaza, who may be especially

traumatized by the current conflict. Thesenew grants build on the ClaimsConference’s support over the past yearsto help Nazi victims in southern Israelcope with the additional distress evokedby their present situation.

Claims Conference assistance includes:$268,000 to pay for full memberships in

2009 for Nazi victims in “supportive com-munities.” Supportive communities pro-vide emergency life buttons, enabling eld-erly residents to easily contact (withoutuse of a telephone) emergency medicalassistance directly. Additional services

also include home modifications, counsel-ing, security, and socialization programs.The Claims Conference allocated$250,000 for this program in 2008.

The Claims Conference has enhanced itsongoing support of AMCHA, the NationalIsraeli Center for Psychological Support ofNazi Victims, with a $50,000 grant for 2009,specifically to provide psychosocial supportto Nazi victims living near Gaza. In 2008, theClaims Conference funded a new AMCHAbranch in Sderot.

Special emergency allocations in 2009 of$36,000 to provide shatter-proof glass win-dows in three nursing homes – Beit AvotAshdod, Association for the Welfare of theAged in Beersheva, and Neve Oranim inGedera – in southern Israel. A total of 290Nazi victims live in these nursing homes.

Hunger relief programs in Ashkelon andAshdod. For 2009, the Claims Conferenceallocated $74,088 to Eshel Ashdod and$32,256 to Eshel Ashkelon for food pro-grams that include hot meals for Nazi vic-tims, a program that can be of great comfortin a traumatic time. For 2007 and 2008,these agencies received a combined$268,000 for hunger relief for Nazi victims.

PAYMENTS FOR SURVIVORS OF NAZI SIEGE OF LENINGRAD

NOW LIVING IN WEST

In an historic breakthrough, the ClaimsConference has negotiated one-time

payments from Germany for certain Jewishvictims of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In recent negotiations, the German gov-ernment hasagreed toinclude theseJewish vic-tims in theC l a i m sConferenceH a r d s h i pFund, provid-ed they meetthe program’sother eligibili-ty criteria.The programissues a one-time paymentof €2,556.

It is expected that this agreement willlead to the payment to thousands ofJewish victims of Nazism from the formerSoviet Union now living in Israel, theUnited States, Germany and otherWestern countries. It is the first time thatthe persecution of Jews who lived throughthe 900-day siege of Leningrad has beenrecognized by Germany.

Because of the Claims Conference negoti-ations, certain Jewish persons who stayedin Leningrad at some time betweenSeptember 1941 and January 1944, orfled from there during this period, may

receive a one-time Hardship Fund pay-ment, if they meet the other requirementsof the Hardship Fund.

CLAIMS CONFERENCE SECURES €12 MILLION

FOR JEWISH BUDAPESTHOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

In negotiations with the German gov-ernment, the Claims Conference has

secured payments for certain Jewish sur-vivors of the Nazi occupation of Budapest.In recognition of the incarceration and suf-fering of Budapest Holocaust survivors,certain Jewish survivors of Nazi-eraBudapest, who currently reside in EasternEurope and previously did not receive anypayments from certain major compensa-tion programs, will receive a one-timepayment of €1,900 from the ClaimsConference Budapest Fund.

Payments totaling approximately €12.3million will be issued to approximately6,500 survivors living in Hungary.

To streamline the process and distributethe funds as quickly as possible, theClaims Conference has reviewed over25,000 files to identify eligible survivors.Brief and simple waiver forms, as requiredby the German government, are proac-tively being sent by the ClaimsConference to 5,790 survivors who itbelieves may be eligible for this payment.

A HELPING HAND FOR NAZI VICTIMSThe Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as Claims

Conference, works to secure compensation and restitution for survivors of the Holocaust. Since 1951, the Claims Conference – working in partnership with the State of

Israel – has negotiated for and distributed payments from Germany, Austria, othergovernments, and certain industries; recovered unclaimed German Jewish proper-ty; and funded programs to assist the neediest Jewish victims of Nazism.

More than 500,000 Holocaust survivors in 75 countries have received compensa-

tion payments as a result of the work of the Claims Conference. Payments to Holocaust survivors as a result of the work of the Claims

Conference have come to more than $60 billion. The Claims Conference has allocated approximately $1 billion to organizations

meeting the social service needs of Holocaust survivors, and engaging in educa-tion, research, and documentation of the Shoah.

Today we publish the latest news on the accomplishments of Claims Conference.


(Continued from page 13)Zhytomir provides an example of such a “set-tlement.” Dieter Pohl, of Munich’s Institute ofContemporary History, describes how the firstmass killings by the Einsatzgruppen and theWehrmacht, accompanied by Ukrainian auxil-iaries, were followed by a planned, systemat-ic murder, robbery and destruction of Jewishcommunities.

The Jewish existence in WesternWolhynia from 1921 to 1945 in gen-

eral, and in the typical village of Kolky inparticular, is described in depth byTimothy Snydor of Yale. There was notmuch love lost between the local Jews,Ukrainians and Polish settlers. Each com-munity lived more or less according to itsown agenda. Poles sought to “polonize”the area; Ukrainians fought for their inde-pendence and were largely responsiblefor violence. The Soviet occupation ofSeptember 1939 offered Jews compara-tive safety and new opportunities, but theGerman invasion of June 1941 turnedtheir lives into burning inferno.

Frank Golczewski, of HamburgUniversity, presents Galicia as an impor-tant case study of mutual German-Ukrainian relations. Ukrainians knew that

they were cheated by Germans, but thisdid not stop them from serving in variousGerman military detachments, robbingand killing Jews, and being described as“the worst” by Holocaust survivors. TheUkrainian auxiliaries were often assignedthe bloodiest tasks, and their collaborationmade a significant contribution to theJewish genocide.

Dennis Deletant, of London UniversityCollege, examines the deportation of Jewsfrom Bessarabia and Bukowina toTransnistria, which Romania occupied afterthe joint German-Romanian attack on theSoviet Union. Transnistria became thegraveyard of more than 250,000 Jews, theprincipal victims of Romanian dictator IonAntonescu and his deputy Mihai Antonescu.Both subscribed to the “ethnic purification” ofRomania, free of Slavs and Jews, sharing acommon border with Nazi Germany.

It was only after Stalingrad thatAntonescu put a stop stop to the Jewishdeportations and turned down theGerman request to send the remainingRomanian Jews to the exterminationcamps in Poland.

Andrei Angric, of the Hamburg Foundationfor the Promotion of Science and Culture,

writes about the Thoroughfare IV, Hitler’sgrandiose plan to build a highway acrossUkraine, which was expected to support boththe conquest and the German settlement.Soon, however, the Germans realized thatthe anticipated large numbers of Jews andSoviet POWs needed for the heavy laborhad already been murdered. German civilianauthorities, who badly needed slave labor,often vainly tried to persuade the SS that itwould be more convenient to murder Jewsby hard labor, hunger and exhaustion.

Martin Dean, a scholar from the USHolocaust Museum’s Center for AdvancedHolocaust Studies, describes how the eth-nic Germans who settled in Russia beforethe October Revolution served Hitlerrather well, with few exceptions.

Alexander Kruglov, a writer fromKharkov, provides us with detailed statis-tics of the Jewish losses during those cru-cial years of 1941-1944.

Karel Berkhoff, of the Center forHolocaust Studies of the University ofAmsterdam, comments on the story ofDina Pronicheva, one of the few survivorsof the Babi Yar massacre.

Omer Bartov, of Brown University in his“White Spaces and Black Holes”

describes Galicia’s past and present. The“white spaces” illustrate the omissionsand poverty of the Ukrainian Holocaustmemory, while the “black holes” note theselective marginalization of the past.

An extensive index accompanies thiswell-edited, printed and bound vol-

ume. Ukraine has almost completelyerased its Jewish past. In the town ofKosiv, for instance, where once 2,400Jews lived, the house which belonged to alocal rabbi was turned into a museum inmemory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army(UPA), which murdered Jews. We findalmost no traces of shame or regret.

Bitter memories and the specter of theHolocaust continue to haunt Jewish-Ukrainian relations. However the fact that1,200 Ukrainians were awarded the title ofRighteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem testi-fies that there must have been many moreUkrainians who helped Jews in hiding. Butonly a full admission of the disturbing factsof the past and a full respect for the per-petuation of the memory of the formerJewish communities may at least partlyexorcise the guilt and open a new page ofthe mutual relations. Perhaps this bookmay serve as one of the guiding lights inthis direction.

ANATOMY OF THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE

DR. RAFAEL MEDOFF, THE JERUSALEM POST

The invitation to members of theTuskegee Airmen, the all-black

units of World War II pilots, to attendthe presidential inauguration, is animportant reminder of the long roadAmerica has traveled from the era ofsegregation to the election of the firstAfrican-American president.

It also offers an opportunity to reflect on alittle-known episode involving the TuskegeeAirmen and the Holocaust – and on thequestion of how the new president willrespond to genocide in our own time.

Defying racist War Department officialswho regarded them as inferior and did notwant them to fly, the Tuskegee Airmenscored extraordinary achievements in bat-tle. Tuskegee squadrons shot down morethan 100 German planes and repeatedlywon Distinguished Unit Citations andother medals for performance in their mis-sions over Europe. They were so admiredby their fellow pilots that bomber groupsoften specifically requested the Tuskegeeunits as escorts for their bombing raids.

One of those raids took place in theskies over Auschwitz.

On the morning of August 20, 1944, agroup 127 US B-17 bombers, calledFlying Fortresses, approached Auschwitz.They were escorted by 100 P-51 Mustangfighter planes. Most of the Mustangs werepiloted by Tuskegee Airmen of the 332ndFighter Group. The attacking forcedropped more than 1,000 500-poundbombs on German oil factories less thanfive miles from the gas chambers. DespiteGerman anti-aircraft fire and a squadronof German fighter planes, none of theMustangs was hit, and only one of the USplanes was shot down. All of the unitsreported successfully hitting their targets.

On the ground below, Jewish slavelaborers, including 15 year-old ElieWiesel, cheered the bombing. In his best-selling memoir, Night, Wiesel describedtheir reaction: “We were not afraid. Andyet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks [the

prisoners’ barracks], it alone would haveclaimed hundreds of victims on the spot.But we were no longer afraid of death; atany rate, not of that death. Every bombthat exploded filled us with joy and gaveus new confidence in life. The raid lastedover an hour. If it could only have lastedten times ten hours!”

But it did not. Even though there wereadditional US bombing raids onGerman industrial sites in theAuschwitz region in the weeks andmonth to follow, thegas chambers andcrematoria werenever targeted.

The Rooseveltadministration

knew about the massmurder going on inAuschwitz, and evenpossessed diagramsof the camp that wereprepared by twoescapees. But whenJewish organizationsasked the Rooseveltadministration to orderthe bombing of thecamp and the railwaysleading to it, therequests were reject-ed. US officialsclaimed such raidswere “impracticable”because they would require “consider-able diversion” of planes needed for thewar effort.

But the Tuskegee veterans know thatclaim was false. They were right therein the skies above Auschwitz. No“diversion” was necessary to drop a fewbombs on the mass-murder machineryor the railways leading into the camp.Sadly, those orders were never given.

The decision to refrain from bombingAuschwitz was part of a broader policy bythe Roosevelt administration to refrainfrom taking action to rescue Jews from theNazis or provide havens for them. The USdid not want to deal with the burden of

caring for large numbers of refugees. Andits ally, Great Britain, would not open thedoors to Palestine to the Jews, for fear ofangering Arab opinion. The result was thatthe Allies failed to confront one of history’smost compelling moral challenges.

Today, America again faces thechallenge of responding to geno-

cide. The Darfur genocide continues,yet the Arab League, China and Russiaare trying to prevent the prosecution ofSudanese President Omar al-Bashir for

his role in the slaughter. What will theUnited States do? Iranian leaders havethreatened genocide against Israel, andSyria is developing nuclear weapons togo along with its other weapons ofmass destruction. How should Americarespond? The Roosevelt administrationhad the opportunity to send theTuskegee Airmen and other pilots tointerrupt the Nazi genocide, but it chosenot to do so. The Obama administrationwill face comparable moral challenges.

The writer is director of the David S.Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies,which focuses on issues related toAmerica’s response to the Holocaust.

TUSKEGEE AIRMEN OVER AUSCHWITZ

This aerial view shows the layout of the largest concentration camp anddeath camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II at Auschwitznear the Polish town of Oswiecim, Poland, Aug. 25, 1944. Auschwitz isthe main camp and Birkenau is the nearby extermination center.

The Jewish museum that opened inSan Francisco is unlike almost

every other such institution in the world: Itis a light-filled place focused on the future,not the darkness of the past.

The Contemporary Jewish Museumdoes not contain permanent space dedi-cated to remembering the Holocaust,housing Jewish artifacts, or recording thegenealogy of the Jewish diaspora.

Instead, it is a fresh, happy site thatasks the Jewish people to create newexpressions of who they are, in a citywhere Jews have always thrived.

“This is a museum of life,” DirectorConnie Wolf said. “It’s not that we aren’tembracing the Holocaust, that incrediblyimportant and pivotal moment in worldhistory. We just always want to be thinkingabout other issues as well.”

The new building is designed by famedarchitect Daniel Libeskind.

Libeskind is best-known for designingBerlin’s Jewish Museum, where visitorsare asked to acknowledge that the hor-ror of Jewish and German histories arelinked forever.

“Despite all the things that have hap-pened, life is about celebrating,” saidLibeskind, also the master planner for theWorld Trade Center memorial in New YorkCity. “This museum is not in the shadow ofthe history that will always be part ofEurope. The optimism of this museumand America are intertwined.”

The sentiment could not be more wel-come in San Francisco, a city foundedpartly by Jewish pioneers like Levi Straussand the forefathers of Wells Fargo Bank,said Marc Dollinger, professor of JewishStudies at San Francisco State University.

“To Jews, California was the new Zion,and San Francisco was the newJerusalem,” Dollinger said.

As a result, Jews were largely assimilat-ed: The San Francisco and Oakland areahas the third highest number of Jews ofany U.S. metropolitan area, after NewYork and Los Angeles. But there are nodistinctly Jewish neighborhoods, andinter-marriage rates reach 90 percent,Dollinger said.

This reality is also reflected in the muse-um, which has taken a decisively pluralis-tic approach to its exhibits.

JEWISH MUSEUM BREAKSGROUND IN SAN FRANCISCO


(Continued from page 7)was designated for other victims of Nazipersecution, including refugees and slavelaborers.

The European cases led Israeli schol-ars in 2000 to publish research

showing heirs had been having difficultyrecovering assets in the Jewish state. Therevelations led to a parliamentary investi-gation, and, in 2006, the law creating theCompany.

The Israeli law sets up a process similarto the one in Europe. Verified heirs aresupposed to get paid first, with needyHolocaust survivors getting the rest. Butthere’s a crucial difference from earliersettlements: The Company must targeteach institution over each asset that itallegedly held. As with Bank Leumi, thisgives the targeted institutions a chance tofight claims case-by-case, then shekel-by-shekel within each case.

Company investigators have traveled toPoland, Latvia and Lithuania to dig upschool report cards, birth records andmarriage documents to try to make theircases. They also check Holocaustarchives in Israel, Germany and else-where to try to prove account holders diedin the tragedy.

Making matters more complex, many ofthe dormant bank accounts the Companyhas tried to recover have been transferredfrom one institution to another or from abank to the government, and, in somecases, back again.

Some of the contested accounts haveeven been paid out to heirs. These casesget at a particularly contentious issuebetween the Company and the banks.The heirs may have gotten the face valueof the accounts, but the law provides a for-mula to calculate what the account shouldbe worth when factors such as inflation,currency revaluations and accrued inter-est are taken into account.

For example, suppose a European Jewwho would later perish in the Holocaustopened a bank account in 1936 with theequivalent of $1,000. If heirs eventually iden-tified the account and recovered the moneythis year from the bank or government cus-todians, Mr. Roet says they most likely gotonly the face value of the original investment,or minimal interest on top of it. But the legal-ly mandated formula the Company uses cal-culates the “lost value” in that account overthe years. Under that formula, the $1,000deposit in 1936 would be valued today at theequivalent of about $23,000.

And Mr. Roet says the banks — eventhose that have already paid out at facevalue — still owe the difference for thatlegally defined lost value. Without any ofthe international pressure that Europeanfirms faced, however, many Israeli institu-tions are offering stiff resistance.

Aviram Cohen, a Bank Leumispokesman, says the bank’s own investi-gation shows 600 accounts identified byMr. Roet belonged to people who couldn’tbe Holocaust victims, since there wasactivity in the accounts after the war.

The Company’s lawyer, Nadav Haetzni,acknowledged that about 100 of the 1,300cases were submitted to the bank by mis-take. They involved Holocaust survivors,rather than confirmed victims, he says.However, Mr. Haetzni also says the errorwas quickly corrected, that the accountsin question had little value and that thesum of the claims against Bank Leumiwon’t be materially diminished.

In addition, he says the Companyrecently slapped a second round of claimsagainst Bank Leumi seeking an additional$31.5 million.

On the issue of lost value, Mr. Haetznisaid the law is clear. It appears the dis-pute is headed for the Israeli courts.

From the beginning, Israeli banks havehad an uneasy relationship with those cam-

paigning to recover dormant accounts. Aftera nearly five-year parliamentary investiga-tion, lawmakers identified up to 9,000 bankaccounts investigators suspected belongedto victims.

Banks implicated in the report rejected2005 findings as speculative. So lawmak-ers established the Company in 2006.

A $3.15 million claim the Company hasprepared against Mizrahi Tafahot BankLtd. grew out of a faded banker’s memothat drew attention during the Knessethearings. Dated Oct. 29, 1939, eightweeks after the Nazis blitzed Poland, thedocument pledges deposits held byEuropean Jews, mostly in Poland, as col-lateral on a loan from another bank.

“The depositors cannot claim theirdeposits now because they are abroad orwe foresee that they won’t claim themoney for other reasons,” the memoreads in Hebrew. A representative ofMizrahi Bank declined to comment.

Mr. Roet has proved to be a doggedadversary. He was chosen as theCompany’s chairman because he had leda group that helped secure a series ofHolocaust settlements in the Netherlandsvalued at more than $300 million.

After the arrest of his two sisters in 1943and their deportation to Auschwitz, heshuttled among more than a dozenChristian homes, finishing out the war pre-tending to be the son of a Catholic coupleon a dairy farm in southern Holland. “Ilearned to milk cows,” he says.

He came to Israel alone in 1946 at age17, then went on to build successful busi-nesses, including one importing rawmaterials for Israel’s booming pharmaceu-tical industry. But he has dedicated hisretirement to Holocaust victims.

Last year, Mr. Roet began assemblinghis team. Accountants, archivists and self-styled gumshoes occupy workspaces thatoffer few hints about the task at hand.

Holocaust-related records are hiddenbehind the covers of blue and red bindersshelved near a Homer Simpson poster.

Although the parliamentary findingsmade banks natural targets when theCompany opened, there were few cluesabout land in Israel purchased by thosewho were later killed in the Holocaust.Jewish academics documented a morethan threefold increase in Jewish landpurchases in British Palestine from 1914to 1940. Parcels were sold in Europe bytraveling Zionist salesman.

Across Israel, the Company so farhas title to about 480 individual

parcels, 300 of which were handed overby the government. They are in some ofIsrael’s hottest areas, including trendy TelAviv. The Company values the lands itholds so far at about $86.7 million.

Based on evidence uncovered thus far,Mr. Roet believes there are scores of still-hidden parcels across the nation.

While the quest for assets is under way, sois the hunt for heirs. While trying to piecetogether records in Europe and listing recov-ered assets on its Web site, the Companyhas reached into the country’s Holocaustlegacy to seek out victims’ families.

The Company’s Elinor Kritoru appearsregularly on an Israeli radio show calledHipoos Krovim, which means “searchingfor relatives” in Hebrew. It first aired in1945, broadcasting the pleas of Holocaustsurvivors looking for lost loved ones. Itlater went off the air, but returned in 2000as a more generic reunion show.

Ms. Kritoru’s appearances echo bygonebroadcasts, as she calls out the names ofthe dead.

“We’re looking for the heirs of YitzhakMeir Abeliov, from Bialystock, Poland,”she said earlier this year. “We’d be veryhappy to find the descendents of DavidTishanski....We’re also looking for heirs ofLazar Abeleff from Kononov, Ukraine.”

BATTLE FOR HOLOCAUST ASSETS ROILS ISRAEL

In the November/December issue ofM & R, a story, “Romance in theHolocaust,” about Holocaust survivorsHerman Rosenblat and his wife Romawas published on page six. Same storywith slight variations appeared innumerous other newspapers, maga-zines, and Internet editions. As it turnsout a big part of that story is not true.Many Holocaust experts and survivorscame forward with proof ofRosenblat’s lies, which eventuallyforced Herman Rosenblat to recant hisown story. Below, we are offering youan article published by AssociatedPress about Herman Rosenblat’s hoax.

“Herman Rosenblat and his wife arethe most gentle, loving, beautiful

people,” literary agent Andrea Hurst said,anguishing over why she, and so manyothers, were taken by Rosenblat’s story oflove born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration campin Germany.

“I question why I never questioned it. Ibelieved it; it was an incredible, hope-filledstory.”

Last month, Berkley Books canceledRosenblat’s memoir, “Angel at the Fence.”Rosenblat acknowledged that he and hiswife did not meet, as they had said foryears, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald,where she allegedly sneaked him applesand bread. The book was supposed tocome out in February.

Rosenblat, 79, has been married to the for-mer Roma Radzicky for 50 years, since meet-ing her on a blind date in New York. In a state-ment through his agent, he described himselfas an advocate of love and tolerance who fal-sified his past to better spread his message.

“Iwanted to bring happiness to peo-ple,” said Rosenblat, who now lives

in the Miami area. “I brought hope to a lotof people. My motivation was to makegood in this world.”

Rosenblat’s believers included not onlyhis agent and his publisher, but TV talkshow host Oprah Winfrey, film producers,journalists, family members and strangerswho ignored, or did not know about, thewarnings from scholars that his story didnot make sense.

Other Holocaust memoirists have devisedgreater fantasies. Misha Defonseca, author

of “Misha: A Memoire of the HolocaustYears,” pretended she was a Jewish girl wholived with wolves during the war, when shewas actually a non-Jew who lived, withoutwolves, in Belgium.

Historical records prove Rosenblat wasindeed at Buchenwald and other camps.

“How sad that he felt he had to embel-lish a life of surviving the Holocaustand of being married for half a cen-tury,” said Holocaust scholarMichael Berenbaum.

The damage is broad.Publishing, the most trusting ofindustries, has again been burnedby a memoir that fact-checkingmight have prevented. The dam-age is deep. Scholars and otherskeptics, as well as fellow survivorsfear that Rosenblat’s fabricationswill only encourage doubts aboutthe Holocaust.

“I am very worried because manyof us speak to thousands of students eachyear,” says Sidney Finkel, a longtimefriend of Rosenblat’s and a fellow survivor.“We go before audiences. We tell them astory and now some people will questionwhat I experienced.”

“This was not Holocaust education butmiseducation,” Ken Waltzer, director ofJewish Studies at Michigan StateUniversity, said in a statement.

“Holocaust experience is not heart-warm-

ing, it is heart-rending. All this shows some-thing about the broad unwillingness in ourculture to confront the difficult knowledge ofthe Holocaust,” Waltzer said. “All the moreimportant, then, to have real memoirs that tellof real experience in the camps.”

Among the fooled, at least the partiallyfooled, was Berenbaum, former direc-

tor of the United States Holocaust ResearchInstitute at the U.S. Holocaust MemorialMuseum in Washington. Berenbaum hadbeen asked to read the manuscript by filmproducer Harris Salomon, who still plans anadaptation of the book.

Berenbaum’s tentative support —“Crazier things have happened,” he toldThe Associated Press last fall — was citedby the publisher as it initially defended thebook. Berenbaum now says he saw factu-al errors, including Rosenblat’s descrip-tion of Theresienstadt, the camp fromwhich he was eventually liberated, but didnot think of challenging the love story.

“There’s a limit to what I can verify,because I was not there,” he says. “I canverify the general historical narrative, butin my research, I rely upon the survivorsto present the specifics of their existencewith integrity. When they don’t, theydestroy so much and they ruin so much,and that’s terrible.”

“I was burned,” he added. “And I have toread books more skeptically because Iwas burned.”

NEWS OF FABRICATED HOLOCAUST MEMOIR SPARKS ANGER, SADNESS

Herman and Roma Rosenblat.


(Continued from page 4)manifold experiences as a leading mem-ber of the U.S. Holocaust MemorialCouncil and the National Polish American-Jewish American Council; both groupshave had disputes over the precise defi-nition of “Holocaust,” as it relates to Nazipersecution of the Poles. Regrettably,Father Pawlikowski criticizes the attitudesof some Polish participants without provid-ing the background information needed tounderstand their positions.

This part concludes with AntonyPolonski’s reflections on his participationin Polish-Jewish relations since the con-ference on “Polish-Jewish Relations inModern History” at Oxford in 1984; heforesees a “normalization” in relations.

None other than Michael Schudrich, thechief rabbi of Poland, wrote the introduc-tion to the third part on contemporaryPoland, describing how Poles of Jewishorigin recovered their heritage after thefall of Communism. On the Poles, hewrites, “To view Poles today as beingmostly antisemitic is false and unfair.”

One can see how things have changedfor the better in articles by StanislawKrajewski on “a new atmosphere” inCatholic-Jewish relations in Poland since1989, thanks to major contributions byPope John Paul II, and by Joanna B.Michlic on anti-Semitism in contemporaryPoland. She finds that opposition to anti-Semitism “has succeeded in gaining influ-ence in mainstream politics and culture,especially in the last decade.”

The publication of Neighbors by Jan T.Gross, on the Jedwabne massacre,

became a turning point in Polish-Jewishrelations. Natalia Aleksiun considers theimpact of the book on Polish historians,producing a permanent change in the waythey approach the Polish-Jewish past.Polish-Americans, who have long beenconcerned about the negative stereotypespromoted by the March of the Living, willappreciate how Carolyn Slutsky confrontsthe problems with this organization, whichbrings Jewish teenagers to Holocaustsites in Poland. One outrageous examplewas the Jewish leader who showed hisgroup the houses next to the Majdanekconcentration camp and claimed, “thesepeople were just sitting in their backyardsbarbecuing while this mass murder wastaking place.” Of course, the houseswere built after the war, German foodrationing did not allow for barbecuing, andPoles too were murdered at Majdanek.And as Annamaria Orla-Bukowska notesin the final article, Jewish visitors toPoland will find that from the mostly non-Jewish people of Poland, — and notfrom Jews from abroad — will arise thescholars and curators who will researchthe Jewish heritage of Poland, and protectits artifacts.

In their preface, the editors state theirgoal: “to make an intellectual contributionto a field that is often emotional.” In this,they have succeeded.

Charles Chotkowski, a member of theexecutive board of the National Polish-American Jewish-American Council, isDirector of Research for the HolocaustDocumentation Committee of the Polish-American Congress.

RETHINKING POLES AND JEWS

(Continued from page 10)Mengele sent his mother and grandfatherto the left (i.e., to death in the gas cham-bers), but what about his 20-year-old sis-ter and his 29-year-old aunt Etel? Whenmore Bad Arolsen material arrived at YadVashem in early 2008, I discovered a doc-ument with his aunt’s personal details andsignature in one of the files. She had beensent from Auschwitz to Stutthof.

In February 1945, when the Gross-Rosen camp was liquidated and occu-pied by the Russians, Halivni wastransferred to Ebensee, part of theMauthausen complex in Upper Austria.The original Mauthausen prisoneradmission cards are at Yad Vashem, soI photocopied his card for him, as wellas that of his parents, which include thenames of his grandparents. (No tracehas yet been found of his sister Channa

Yitte.) These cards track Halivni fromWolfsberg in Gross-Rosen to Ebenseein Mauthausen and then to Munich afterliberation. The Wolfsberg Labor CampMachzor, published by Yad Vashem,features his moving article on prayer.

After showing him all the information Ifound, Halivni asserted that, “the credit foranything we have uncovered goes firstand foremost to Yad Vashem. Had it notbeen for Yad Vashem, I never would havehad what I now know. I lost my entire fam-ily, and from 1944 until I married Tziporain 1953, I was totally alone. The recordswe found provide some consolation. Theirnames are recorded for posterity.”

The author, ordained by the JewishTheological Seminary, is a Jerusalem res-ident, researcher, and Deputy Director ofthe Jacobi Center of the InternationalInstitute for Jewish Genealogy.

PIECE BY PIECE

BY ARI B. BLOOMEKATZ, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Gilberto Bosques Saldívar has neverbeen the subject of a major motion

picture by Steven Spielberg. Americanhistory books seldom, if ever, mention hisname, and he does not have his ownWikipedia page, in Spanish or English.

But the former Mexican diplomat, stationedin France during World War II, helped saveas many as 40,000 Jews and other refugeesfrom Nazi persecution.

“It is still a chapter of the Holocaust that hasnot been written,” said Abraham Foxman,national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “I believe thatthere are a lot of other cases that wedo not know about that are surfac-ing little by little.”

At a reception held inSaldívar’s honor in BeverlyHills, the ADL presented hisdaughter with a posthumousCourage to Care Award, whichwas created in 1987 to recog-nize non-Jews who helped res-cue and hide refugees duringthe Holocaust.

Foxman noted that, otherthan industrialist OskarSchindler and Swedish diplo-mat Raoul Wallenberg, mostnon-Jews who defied the Nazisand helped Jews during theHolocaust are not well-known.Even Schindler’s efforts were largelylost to history until Spielberg made themovie, “Schindler’s List.”

Calling Saldívar the “MexicanSchindler,” Foxman said, “Bosques’ life isa shining example of human decency,moral courage and conviction, and hisactions highlight the less well-known ini-tiatives of Latin Americans who helped tosave Jews during the Holocaust.”

Foxman reflected on others whoreached out to Jews in need. Their gen-erosity, he said, is “difficult to comprehendbecause they frequently risked every-thing, including the lives of their families,to help people who, very often, they didnot know at all. Difficult also because —apart from their willingness to help others— they do not seem to have had much incommon. They were Catholic, OrthodoxChristian, Evangelical, Baptist, Lutheran,and also Muslim.”

Foxman owes his own life to such a person.“I stand here before you because of

someone like Gilberto Bosques

Saldívar,” he said.As a young boy in Poland during the

war, Foxman was sheltered by a Catholicwoman in an “overwhelmingly unfriendly”Europe.

“Were it not for her, I would not be alivetoday to bear witness,” he said.Foxman described Saldívar’s efforts whenhe served as Mexican consul general inMarseilles in 1939: He rented twochateaux to house European Jews andother refugees, including leaders of theSpanish Republic, who were defeated inthe Spanish Civil War by the Fascistforces of Francisco Franco.

In two years, he issued about 40,000visas, and chartered ships to take

Jews and other refugees to variousAfrican nations, where they then went onto Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.

Saldívar was arrested, along with hisfamily and about 40 consular staff mem-bers, by the Germans in 1943, and washeld for about a year near Bonn untilMexico reached an agreement with theNazis for his release.

According to the ADL, in 1944,Saldívar wrote that he had implemented“a policy of help, of material and moralsupport to the heroic defenders of theSpanish Republic, to the relentlessbrave people who fought against Hitler,Mussolini, Franco, Petain and Laval.”(He was referring to Philippe Petain andPierre Laval, French leaders who coop-erated with the Nazis.)

Saldívar later served as an ambassadorto Cuba, Finland, Portugal and Sweden.He died in 1995 at the age of 103.

THE “MEXICAN SCHINDLER” IS HONOREDBY THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE

Laura Bosques Manjarrez, 83, is presented with the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage to Care Award on behalf ofher father, Gilberto Bosques Saldívar. She called the cere-mony a “symbol of human solidarity.”

Sixteen violins used by JewishHolocaust victims — including an

instrument whose case was used tosmuggle explosives that blew up a Nazibase — were played in September in aconcert in Jerusalem.

“Each violin has its own story,” saidAmnon Weinstein, 69, who, together withhis son has spent over a decade restoringthe violins collected from across Europe.

Weinstein, a violin maker, said hereceived the instruments in various statesof disrepair, many of them decorated withstars of David, a testimony to their formerJewish owners.

“By restoring their violins, their legacy isborn again,” said Weinstein, who lostmost of his family in the Holocaust.

They were played together for the first timein a concert entitled “Violins of Hope” bymembers of Israel’s Raanana Symphonetteand the Philharmonia Istanbul Orchestra.World-renowned Israeli virtuoso ShlomoMintz will play one.

One of the featured instruments, calledMotele’s Violin, belonged to a 12-year-oldJewish boy who played it for Nazi officersfrom Hitler’s SS in Belarus in 1944.

Motele, with his violin, had joined otheranti-Nazi partisans in a village near theborder with Ukraine and managed to infil-trate a Nazi building there.

“The German officers heard him play inthe streets one day and later brought himto perform every night in their compoundin town,” said Sefi Hanegbi, whose fatherplayed alongside Motele in a partisancamp in a forest during World War Two.

After each performance, Motele hid hisviolin in the building and walked out withan empty case. He would return with theviolin case full of explosives, stuffing theminto cracks in the walls, and eventually

setting them off, Hanegbi said.Motele was later killed in a German

ambush, and Hanegbi’s family brought hisviolin to Israel where it sat in a closet fordecades. Weinstein first restored it abouteight years ago.

The oldest violin in the collection,Weinstein said, had been donated

to the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra byrevered 19th-century Norwegian violinistOle Bull.

Ernst Glaser, a Jewish musician, wasset to perform with that violin in theGerman-occupied Norwegian city of

Bergen in 1941, but the concert was inter-rupted when local pro-Nazi youth beganrioting and threatened to lynch Glaser for“befouling” the famed instrument.

Only when the conductor instructed theorchestra to play the Norwegian nationalanthem, prompting the rioting youth tostand at attention, was Glaser able toescape, Weinstein said.

“The violin was our savior,” said HelenLivnat, 68, who donated the instrumenther father used to earn food for her starv-ing family in a ghetto in Ukraine in theearly 1940s.

“It’s an honor knowing the violins thatwere once played in a time of hunger andsuffering will be heard again with pride inthe country that we love,” she said.

JERUSALEM CONCERT FEATURES VIOLINSSAVED FROM NAZIS

Martyrdom & ResistanceEli Zborowski, Editor-in-Chief

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*1974-85, as Newsletter for the American Federation of JewishFighters, Camp Inmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased

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BY MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Habbo Knoch, who runs the newBergen-Belsen Memorial at the for-

mer concentration camp, invited variousscholars and museum directors to a four-day conference called “Witnessing: Sitesof Destruction and the Representation ofthe Holocaust.” He asked a question oneevening during a break: “Will people in 20years look back and say we built a muse-um that focuses on Nazi genocide whileDarfur was happening? Will they askwhether anyone raised this issue?”

Consider it raised. The new memorial is an immense con-

crete and glass museum emerging from acopse of trees beside the cemetery ofmass graves (there are more than 70,000bodies buried there), which had been thecamp site. The permanent exhibition is amodel of its kind, focused on the meticu-lous and sober reconstruction of the past.

From time to time, the present literallyintrudes with a bang, though, when practicerounds of tank fire from the British militarybase next door boom over the treetops.

Otherwise, you might be struck by howordinary the whole area seems. Duringthe war, prisoners — at first Soviet sol-diers, later Jews — used to be marchedseveral miles from a railway terminalbeyond the base, which was then for theWehrmacht, and past fields, farms andhouses. Some survivors have said theywere struck by the pretty scenery.

At the camp, corpses lay in piles andthousands were dying of starvation anddisease, from genocide by neglect. Thefarmers and villagers who had watchedthe prisoners go by afterward mostlyclaimed they knew nothing about it.

Times change. Some of the children of

those farmers and villagers recall onvideotaped interviews the endless lines ofwalking dead. It was impossible not to seewhat was plainly in front of them.

Videos are only one form of evidence, aFrench researcher ventured, inadequateby themselves as history.

True.

That said, the Holocaust has becomewhat one expert here called the

“master narrative” for suffering, shapingdiscussions about every present conflictover genocide and human rights, even ascomparisons distort history and can servethe purposes of propaganda as often asthe truth. “Every generation gets the sto-ries it wants to hear,” is how HeidemarieUhl, an Austrian scholar, put it, which is tosay that the master narrative of the Shoahitself has evolved to suit different eras.She pointed out that the memorial at theformer Mauthausen concentration campin northern Austria was for several yearsafter the war controlled by the Soviets,

who put up a monument toCommunist resistance butnone to the Jews.

Today the message atMauthausen has come toreflect Austria’s “negativememory,” Ms. Uhl said, refer-ring to the collective sentimentof Austrians (many of them,she might have added, butalas, still not enough) whoadmit their country willinglycommitted genocide. As atBergen-Belsen, the perma-nent exhibition there nowspeaks to a kind of post-ideo-logical, post-cold-war worldthat prizes victimhood andindividual resilience, just as the

Communist memorial spoke to Soviet priori-ties.

History keeps moving, in other words.Here at Bergen-Belsen, after liberation inApril 1945, the military training barracksbecame a camp for displaced persons.Jews awaited transport to America,Australia and to the new Israel, a flash-point with British authorities who also con-trolled Palestine. Some Jewish survivorsinaugurated a theater company calledKazet (the name played on the GermanKZ, for concentration camp). Life startedover in other ways, too. Henri Lustiger-Thaler, who helped organize the confer-ence, recalled that his mother, a formerprisoner, returned from Paris to give birthat the camp hospital because her friendswere here.

Then Bergen-Belsen fell into neglect.Ronald Reagan was responsible (inadver-

tently) for its revival. The announcementthat he would visit Nazi graves at Bitburgin 1985 resulted in an uproar that forcedhis staff to scramble, and Bergen-Belsenwas suddenly added to his itinerary.Embarrassed Germans, who preferred to

forget the site, threw together a small doc-umentation center. It soon became inade-quate to the accumulating archives, to thegeneral liberalizing process of Germanidentity building after the wall fell, and tothe growing public appetite abroad forHolocaust museums, along with thetourist economy they generated.

Nothing about the present museumdramatizes information for visitors theway, say, the United States HolocaustMemorial Museum in Washington appar-ently feels it needs to. Divorced as it isfrom the sites of persecution, it turns relicsof genocide, like a Zyklon B canister anda cattle car that transported Jews toAuschwitz into props.

Bergen-Belsen has the camp as evi-dence, or what’s left of it. After liber-

ation, the British burned down the prison-ers’ barracks to stem the spread oftyphus, and hired an architect to turn bull-dozed graves into a pastoral cemetery.The architect turned out to be a favorite ofthe Nazis, adding insult to injury, but bythe time that scandal broke, it was alreadytoo late, and the graves today look likeTeutonic mounds, covered in lavender.

In the absence of original buildings, theaura of Bergen-Belsen now, as at allhaunted places, can be linked to thesuperstition people tend to bring to it —the vague hope that our presence mightsomehow help renew the ground.Meanwhile the sheer emptiness of thelandscape, never mind the graves,speaks clearly to loss.

Of course, there are still the photo-

graphs and films made by arriving Britishtroops to show what once was here.Various camps liberated before Bergen-Belsen had been evacuated ordestroyed, but the Germans turned thisplace over as it had been. Circulated

worldwide in newspapers, magazinesand movie theaters, the pictures madeunconditional surrender obligatory andthe site forever synonymous with theworst Nazi atrocities.

In a sense, the images have become toofamiliar, too loaded. The museum stressesthe survivor testimonies instead. These runsilently on monitors throughout the galleries,accompanied by subtitles in German andEnglish. As Geoffrey Hartman, the literaryscholar who helped start the Fortunoff VideoArchive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale,remarked after walking through the museum,the quiet promotes a space in which “to thinkthat thinking is important.”

But you can also wear headphones tohear the voices. Mr. Hartman borrowedPaul Celan’s famous phrase about bot-tles in the ocean tossed at “the shorelineof a heart” to describe the effect.

One survivor is Robert Rijxman. “I wassitting on a rock,” he recalls on screen.“It was sunny, in winter. I just prayed todie, but it didn’t work.”

Without sound, he’s the picture of defi-ance, elfin and smiling, clutching a pipelike an old Swiss mountaineer after awalk in the Alps. But listening to him, youhear that he needs a moment to collecthimself and it suddenly becomes clearthat Mr. Rijxman wishes to convey athought darker and more complicatedthan simple defiance.

Praying for death “didn’t work,” is whathe said.

“Not to this day,” he added. Another reminder of history’s relentlessness.

THE HOLOCAUST, VIEWED NOT FROM THEN BUT FROM THE HERE AND NOW

The new Bergen-Belsen Memorial museum in Germany, locatedbeside the former camp site, is focused on the meticulous andsober reconstruction of the past.

In the permanent exhibition there, testimonies by Jewish survivors.

UN MARKS THE HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

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