July 3



POLAND:

Cornerstone laid for Museum of Polish Jews


The cornerstone of the long-awaited Museum of the History of Polish Jews,
a major step towards reviving Poland's Jewish heritage after the
Holocaust, was laid in Warsaw on Tuesday, organisers said.

In the works for a decade, the long-awaited multi-million dollar,
multi-media facility is expected to open its door in 2011.

"Prior to the Holocaust, the Shoah, Warsaw was one of the world's main
centres of Jewish life where politics, culture, publishing and Jewish
theatre thrived -- in fact it was the leading centre, surpassing other
cities in the US and Europe," project director Jerzy Halbersztadt told
guests at the site.

During the Holocaust, the district was inside the infamous Warsaw Ghetto,
where all told Nazi Germany imprisoned more than 400,000 Polish Jews, many
of whom died of starvation or disease or were sent to death camps.

The bricks used as the cornerstones came from the World War II-era
foundations of the last headquarters of the Council of Jews of the Warsaw
Ghetto, the scene of a famous wartime uprising, Halbersztadt said.

"So we have come full circle and beginning the construction of the museum
is also an element of closing this circle," he added.

Led by the Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB), the doomed World War II
rebellion was among the first armed insurgency by partisans against the
Nazis in all of occupied Europe.

The museum will face the imposing monument dedicated to those who died in
the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Cantors, or Jewish liturgical singers, from around the globe sang at the
foot of the black marble monument Tuesday as part of the ground-breaking
ceremonies.

"It's surreal to be here -- this (Warsaw) was the epicentre of cantorial
music in the early 1930's and 40's," president of the international
Cantors Assembly, David Propis, from Houston, Texas, told AFP.

Around a hundred cantors from the United States, Canada, various European
states and Israel will sing in the Polish National Opera in Warsaw Tuesday
evening, reviving the art of Jewish liturgical song nearly wiped out in
Poland by the Holocaust.

Designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaeki and Ilmari Lahdelma, the
faade of the future museum will be symbolically ruptured, opening onto
undulating walls in an allusion to the Biblical parting of the Red Sea.

The museum's virtual arm -- the "Virtual Shtetl" web portal was launched
in June -- is aimed at giving it a head start online before its doors
open.

Prior to World War II, Poland was home to some 3.5 million Jews, roughly
10 percent of it's pre-war population with nearly a millennium of Jewish
settlement within its borders.

Some three million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust which claimed six
million of pre-WWII Europe's estimated 11 million Jews.

A third -- 350,000 -- of Warsaw's pre-war population was Jewish. Today,
out of an overwhelming Roman Catholic population of 38 million, various
sources peg Poland's Jewish population at just 3,500 to 15,000.

Slated to cost a total 144 million dollars (102 million euros), the museum
is being co-funded by the Polish government, the city of Warsaw and funds
raised from private and institutional donors world-wide.

(source: Agence France-Presse)

******************


At age 88, Mich. man forced to deal with war past


An 88-year-old man living in Michigan who is now the subject of a
criminal investigation in Poland into allegations he shot Jews while
working in a Nazi-controlled police unit during World War II insists he
did nothing wrong.

Polish officials are investigating what happened nearly 70 years ago in
what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. The U.S. Justice Department has
also agreed to help by questioning John Kalymon about murder, death camps
and other atrocities against Jews there in 1942.

"I don't feel guilty," the white-haired, retired auto engineer told The
Associated Press during a brief visit Monday to his suburban Detroit home.

His lawyer is resisting the investigation.

"He guarded a stack of coal from looters. He didn't expend any rounds of
ammunition and didn't commit any atrocities," Elias Xenos said of his
client's work for the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police when Kalymon was in his
early 20s. "He's disappointed that one or more governments are still
trying to pursue him based on flimsy evidence."

The U.S. government became aware of Kalymon after the fall of the Soviet
Union in 1991. World War II-era archives that had been inaccessible
revealed people who may have concealed their Axis allegiance when they
entered the United States decades ago.

In 2007, after a civil trial, a federal judge in Detroit stripped Kalymon
of his citizenship, saying his two years in the Ukrainian police resulted
in the persecution of civilians.

The government produced a handwritten document in which "Iv Kalymun"
reported firing four shots, killing one Jew and injuring another. Kalymon
admits he spelled his last name both ways when he was a young man but says
he did not go by "Kalymun" when he was a Ukrainian officer. He denied
shooting Jews and claimed the record was a forgery.

Lviv was part of Poland until 1939. In May, the Justice Department
disclosed that Poland's Commission for Prosecution of Crimes Against the
Polish Nation wanted U.S. prosecutors to interview Kalymon.

The commission's questions are numerous: Where was the Jewish ghetto
located in 1942? Who was the commander? Did Kalymon witness murders? If
so, how many and who were the killers? Can he remember the names of other
officers?

In Poland, prosecutor Grzegorz Malisiewicz said the commission was
investigating the role of Ukrainian police in the deaths of Jews.

"The crimes include murder of at least 39 Jews and attempted murder of
another 17 Jews, detaining and bringing to a gathering point at least
3,458 Jews and convoying an unspecified number" to a labor camp,
Malisiewicz said.

He declined to say whether Poland wants to file charges against Kalymon. A
Justice Department spokeswoman, Laura Sweeney, said she was not aware of
other pending court cases in which the government is helping Poland with a
war crimes investigation.

Xenos, Kalymon's lawyer, said he would ask U.S. District Judge Marianne
Battani to quash a subpoena for his client's testimony. If that fails,
Kalymon has a right under Polish law to remain silent.

Kalymon entered the United States in 1949 after being classified as a
"displaced person" following the war. He said he lied about his police
work because he feared being sent to the Soviet Union.

Kalymon became a naturalized citizen in 1955 and worked as an engineer at
Chrysler. Xenos said he has an award from auto icon Lee Iacocca on the
wall of his ranch-style house.

Kalymon told the AP he has physical problems and can't walk without
assistance. "I'm forgetting a lot of things. I let my lawyer handle all
this," he said, declining further comment.

His wife said Kalymon has told her that his best friends in Europe were
Jews.

"They're accusing him of murder it's not true," said Luba Kalymon, 83.
"Is he worried? Who wouldn't be?"

(source: Associated Press)








GERMANY:

ALL CLEAR FOR NAZI WAR CRIMES CASE----Doctors Declare Demjanjuk Fit to
Stand Trial


Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk has been deemed fit to stand
trial by doctors in Munich. The 89-year-old could appear in court as early
as this autumn in what will most likely be Germany's last big Nazi war
crimes trial.

The final hurdle to what is expected to be the last major Nazi war crimes
trial in Germany has been cleared. On Friday prosecutors said that doctors
had given the all clear for John Demjanjuk to stand trial on charges
related to the deaths of 29,000 Jews in a World War II death camp. The
retired auto worker had recently been deported to Germany from the United
States after his family failed to prove that he was too frail to stand
trial.

The doctors determined that Demjanjuk, who has been held in custody in
Munich since May 12, was fit to stand trial. However, they imposed one
condition -- saying that his court appearances be limited to two 90-minute
sessions a day. State prosecutors said Friday that formal charges could be
expected this month and that a trial could commence as early as the
autumn.

The 89-year-old, who was born in Ukraine, had fought bitterly to stay in
his home in Ohio despite the fact that he had already been stripped of his
US citizenship. His health became a key issue after images taken by the US
government showed him walking unaided to his car even though he had
claimed to be too ill to travel. In May he was finally put on a plane to
Germany by US immigration officials and was arrested on his arrival. He
has since been held in the Stadelheim prison in Munich, where Adolf Hitler
served time after his failed 1922 coup.

Demjanjuk claims that he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941, became a
German prisoner of war and never harmed anyone. However, documents
obtained by the US justice authorities and shared with the German
prosecutors include a photo ID that seems to identify him as a guard at
the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
welcomed the doctors' decision that should pave the way for a trial. "This
has been a very complicated case," he told the Associated Press. "But it
is important that Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the
implementation of the Final Solution, finally receive an appropriate
punishment." Demjanjuk has been at the top of the Wiesenthal Center's list
of 10 most wanted war criminals involved in the Holocaust, in which the
Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The Jerasulem-based center claims that he
pushed men, women and children into the gas chambers at Sobibor.

In the 1970s Demjanjuk was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a
notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp. He was extradited
to Israel and sentenced to death but the conviction was then overturned
when new evidence pointed to another man's guilt.

(source: Spiegel)



*********************************


Suspected Nazi Said Fit to Stand Trial


John Demjanjuk moved one step closer to another trial after German
prosecutors said Friday that doctors had deemed the 89-year-old fit
to go to court on charges of being accessory to murder at the Sobibor Nazi
death camp.

A Dutch group representing members of victims' families who hope to serve
as co-plaintiffs in the trial welcomed the decision to try the retired
auto worker, who was recently deported from his suburban Ohio home. They
expressed hope in a statement that "the truth is found and justice is
done."

Munich prosecutors accuse Demjanjuk of being a guard at the death camp in
Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. They allege that he was an
accessory to murder in 29,000 cases and said they expect formal charges
later this month.

But his son, John Demjanjuk Jr. vowed to "vigorously dispute" the
doctors' decision, saying they have given him only 16 months to live, due
to his incurable leukemic bone marrow disease.

"This has nothing to do with bringing anyone to justice or fitness for
trial. My father will not live to fairly litigate the matter as (he) has
successfully done before," Demjanjuk Jr. said in a statement.

Prosecutors said that Demjanjuk's time in court must not exceed two
90-minute sessions daily.

"We are very pleased that this will pave the way for him to be prosecuted
in Germany," said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center.

"This has been a very complicated case, but it is important that
Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the implementation of the Final
Solution, finally receive an appropriate punishment," Zuroff said by
telephone from Jerusalem.

Demjanjuk has been in custody in Munich since arriving there May 12 after
losing an extended court battle to stay in the United States when his
citizenship was revoked. His health was a key issue in that battle.

Photos taken in April showed Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk) wincing
as immigration agents removed him from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio,
during an earlier aborted attempt to deport him to Germany.

Images taken days before his deportation and released by the U.S.
government showed him entering his car unaided.

Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi
prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

But Nazi-era documents obtained by U.S. justice authorities and shared
with German prosecutors include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a
guard at the Sobibor death camp and say he was trained at an SS facility
for Nazi guards at Trawniki, also in Poland.

The more than 30 potential co-plaintiffs in the Netherlands said in the
statement released through the secretary of their advisory group that they
hoped the trial would serve to bring attention to Sobibor and other death
camps.

"It is less important for them whether he goes to jail," Johannes
Houwink ten Cate, said.

Efforts to prosecute the Ukrainian native began in 1977 and have involved
courts and government officials from at least five countries on three
continents.

Charges of accessory to murder carry a maximum sentence of up to 15 years
in prison in Germany.

(source: Associated Press)





USA//MISSOURI:

Holocaust denier in town for fundraising talk


The world's most notorious Holocaust denier kicks off his U.S. tour in the
Kansas City area tonight.

On his Web site, British writer David Irving has announced a month-long,
17-city tour of the West and Midwest, during which he will speak on the
topic "Hitler, Himmler and Enigma, Rewriting WW2 History using Nazi
Messages Decoded by the British Secret Service."

The first stop is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday, July 3, at an (sic) hotel
by the airport in Kansas City, Mo., according to an e-mail from Irving,
who promised to inform those who paid the $15 reservation fee the exact
location of the meeting shortly before it occurred.

Despite his having authored many books, Irving's reputation as a historian
was shattered when he lost his libel suit against "Denying the Holocaust"
author Deborah Lipstadt in 2000. Lipstadt had identified Irving in her
1994 book as a denier, and he objected, hoping to use Britain's stricter
libel laws against the American academic.

But Irving lost, big time. The judge ruled he has for his own ideological
reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is
anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists
who promote neo-Nazism.

Lipstadt's book about the case, "History on Trial," (HarperCollins, 2005)
was optioned as a major motion picture by the producers of The Soloist,
Variety reported April 23.

Political Prisoner

Since 2000, Irving has led a peripatetic existence, including a nearly
year-long incarceration in an Austrian jail in 2006 for having violated
that country's law against trivialising, grossly playing down and denying
the Holocaust. He tempted fate by traveling to Austria, knowing he was
wanted on charges first leveled in 1989.

At tonight's event in KC, Irving will no doubt hawk copies of his latest
self-published book, a memoir of the Austrian episode: "Banged Up:
Survival as a Political Prisoner in 21st Century Europe."

It's not known whether he'll shill for any of Hitlers bones, as U.K. press
reports had him doing back in March. The London Telegraph quoted Irving as
saying his online store is the only way he can make money after being
declared bankrupt in 2002.

Items up for sale on the site include Hitler's walking stick - and a
goblet and spoon given as a christening present by Heinrich Himmler to
Hermann Goering's daughter - Irving authenticates the goods, which are
offered by other sellers, and takes a 15 per cent commission. The
70-year-old says he is currently trying to confirm the authenticity of
bones said to be from Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun. Strands of the
Fuhrers hair are also expected to go on sale.

First visit to KC

Kenneth S. Stern, the American Jewish Committees New York-based expert on
extremism and anti-Semitism, said Irving does fund-raising tours of the
U.S. from time to time.

"This guy was discredited years ago," Stern said. "Everybody understands
he
lies about history to promote Holocaust denial."

Stern, an attorney, was a key member of Lipstadt's defense team in the
British libel case. Irving figures prominently in the chapter about
Holocaust denial in Stern's most recent book, "Anti-Semitism Today: How It
Is Different, How It Is the Same, and How to Fight It" (AJCommittee,
2006).

Kansas Citian Leonard Zeskind, author of the new book "Blood and Politics:
The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the
Mainstream" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), said Irving has never before
visited the Kansas City area. He suspects members of the local National
Socialist Movement chapter have invited Irving.

"I hear that attendance at some of his events lately has been very small
20 or 30 people," Zeskind said. "But he's the highest-status guy who has
come into Kansas City from the white-nationalist, anti-Semitic world in
some time - since Bo Gritz came here in the middle of the militia
madness."

In the 1980s, Irving established formal connections with the American
fountainhead of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review a
pseudo-scholarly body based in California. The IHR was controlled by the
late Willis Carto, who is a major figure in Zeskind's book.

Jean Zeldin, executive director of the Midwest Center for Holocaust
Education, issued the following written statement:

"David Irving may present himself as a general historian of the WW II era,
but courts in the United Kingdom have ruled on this matter and found him
to be simply another Holocaust denier. Speaking for the community of
Holocaust survivors and MCHEs educational program, we know that the truth
is the truth and cannot be trifled with, no matter what the propagandists
have to say."

(source: KCJC News)





ISRAEL:

Holocaust scholar says Yad Vashem divided over commemorating Bergson Group


The refusal of Yad Vashem to commemorate in its museum Americans who
helped save Jews from the Holocaust is creating an internal rift in the
ranks of the museum's leadership, according to a leading Holocaust scholar
from the U.S. This rift, according to Rafael Medoff, director of the David
Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C., concerns the
honoring of the Bergson Group.

Under the leadership of Hillel Kook, a Revisionist Zionist politician also
known as Peter Bergson, the ten members of the group pressured the U.S.
administration to save 200,000 Jews in the 1940s. All 10 members belonged
to the Irgun, a right-wing underground movement operating in pre-state
Israel.

Unlike the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Yad Vashem's
permanent display bears no mention of the Bergson Group. Medoff says that
Yad Vashem has until now largely ignored its efforts. Yad Vashem denies
ignoring the Group, noting that it is honored in non-museum activities.
Mentioning it in the permanent display while "ignoring context and other
influences, would be misleading, exaggerating and out of proportion,"
according to Yad Vashem.

But while on a visit to Israel last month, Medoff told Anglo File that
some of Yad Vashem's top figures have been warming up to the idea of
honoring its members, known as "Bergsonites." This has caused Yad Vashem
to speak with "two voices," according to Medoff.

He says the inauguration of Rabbi Israel Meir Lau in November as chairman
of the Yad Vashem's council has brought new hope for recognition of the
Bergsonites - who in 1943 formed the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of
European Jewry to lobby the president and Congress to save the remnants of
Europe's Jews from the Nazis.

"Lau tells us privately that he's sympathetic to our cause," Medoff said.
In contrast with his predecessor, Lau has begun mentioning the Bergson
Group in speeches, most recently before the UN General Assembly in
January.

Public pressure and political lobbying by the Bergson Group begot a
proposal to admit more refugees into the U.S., which the Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations ratified. This, in turn, compelled President Franklin
Roosevelt to order the establishment of the War Refugee Board, which in
1943 took in 200,000 European Jews.

"The speeches [by Lau] are an important and positive development," said
Medoff, who recently delivered a lecture on the matter at the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs. "But Yad Vashem's ongoing refusal to add the
Bergsonites to the permanent display is unacceptable."

While Lau praises the Bergsonites, other prominent figures from Yad Vashem
- including chief historian Yahuda Bauer and editor-in-chief David
Silberklang - have downplayed its significance. Bauer is quoted as saying
in 2005 in Yad Vashem that Kook "saved no one."

This duality, according to Medoff, indicates Yad Vashem is experiencing
-an internal debate. Ultimately, he says that Yad Vashem "will not be able
to ignore the Bergson Group because their actions are just too important,
and because not mentioning them is telling only a part of the story of the
reaction to the Holocaust in the Free World."

Yad Vashem spokesperson Iris Rosenberg commented that Medoff has a
-fundamental misunderstanding of what Yad Vashem is - because
commemoration at Yad Vashem is done through a myriad of ways. Rosenbeg
noted that Yad Vashem translated and published David Wyman's book
highlighting the Group's activities. "Yad Vashem has employed such means
to discuss the group's activities."

(source: Ha'aretz)





FRANCE----new book

'Do not cry over me' ----By Gaby Levin

(Letters from the Drancy Camp), edited by Antoine Sabbagh, with an
introduction by Denis Peschanski (translated into Hebrew from the French
by Adina Kaplan); Matar Publishing House, 292 pages, NIS 89

--

There was seemingly nothing that destined Drancy to become the site of the
terrible drama that began in the summer of 1941 and ended in August 1944.
The La Muette neighborhood, only four kilometers from Paris, was supposed
to be a modest residential quarter along the lines of those "garden
neighborhoods" that popped up in the early 1930s in the suburbs of other
large French cities.

But in September 1939, when World War II broke out, construction had not
been completed yet on the housing complex intended for gendarmes and their
families - four high-rise buildings surrounding a lower, horseshoe-shaped
structure. The fact that several families of gendarmes had already taken
up residence in the towers aided the decision to turn the U-shaped
structure, which remained without doors and windows, into a detention
camp. It was easy to surround the structure with double barbed-wire fences
and guard towers.

One hundred and thirty letters from inmates at the Drancy transit camp
appeared in a collection published in France in 2002, and were recently
translated into Hebrew. The letters call forth 130 chilling voices that
express astonishment, anxiety, courage and the hope of returning home,
mixed with a naivete that is surprising in view of the determination of
the killing machine that would soon destroy them. The selection of letters
was edited by Antoine Sabbagh, a professor at the Sorbonne and acting
director of the National Archives of France. The letters were somehow
preserved by the families and later entrusted to the Center of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation (founded in 1943 and today part of the
Shoah Memorial, a Paris Holocaust museum). The book's introduction,
placing Drancy in the context of the period, was written by Prof. Denis
Peschanski, an expert on 20th-century social history.

Only 2,500 survived

The first transport left for Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1942,
carrying 1,112 prisoners. Under the command of Heinz Rothke, Dannecker's
former assistant, Drancy became France's primary concentration camp, to
which prisoners were shipped from elsewhere. Between 1942 and 1944, 67
transports departed from Drancy, taking 76,000 Jews to their deaths.

In July 1943 the camp came under the command of Alois Brunner - an
enthusiastic disciple of Adolf Eichmann's - but his eagerness to speed up
the pace of transports was thwarted by a wartime shortage of trains. On
August 16, as the Allied forces advanced, Brunner set fire to the camp and
sent another 51 inmates to their deaths, although 39 managed to escape
(including the aviation industrialist Marcel Dassault and the businessman
Jean Frydman).

Out of some 80,000 Jews who were sent from France to the death camps, only
2,500 survived. Simone Veil, later one of France's most outstanding
politicians and the first elected president of the European parliament,
was a 16-year-old girl when she was brought from Nice to Drancy with her
family. She was taken to Auschwitz together with her mother and sister;
her father and brother were sent to Kaunas (Kovno) in Lithuania, where
they were murdered. Veil's mother did not survive the death march. Veil
went on to become one of the most prominent figures in France, heading a
Holocaust survivors organization and becoming honorary president of the
Shoah Memorial Foundation.

There were indeed inmates who managed to secure their release thanks to
connections. Such was the case with the writer Tristan Bernard, who had
claimed before his detention that "they don't arrest someone whose name
appears in the encyclopedia," and who was freed with the help of his
friend and fellow playwright Sacha Guitry, who was said to have "warm"
relations with the occupation authorities.

A jar of preserves

The letters, which are arranged chronologically, contain numerous details
about living conditions in Drancy: the hunger, the cold and the
intolerable hygiene. Most inmates took advantage of their right to request
goods in return for coupons. One woman asked her sister to send her a jar
of preserves, in a letter describing the circumstances of her arrest on
July 16, 1942 - the first day of the Paris roundups of Jews who held
French citizenship, which came to be known as "La Rafle du Vel d'Hiv"
("The Great Raid of the Velodrome d'Hiver," a winter cycling stadium in
Paris).

There are also letters of another sort in the collection, from individuals
outside Drancy. The wife of a French soldier imprisoned in Germany, for
instance, wrote in April 1942 to the Vichy commissioner for Jewish
affairs, Xavier Vallat, to suggest that Jews be sent to the camps in
Germany in exchange for her husband. A letter signed "M.D." and dated
September 10, 1941, instructed Marshal Petain: "Sentence them [the Jews]
to eternal hard labor, under the conditions of an animal, obedient,
submissive, without money ... Confiscate all of their property for the
poor!" But there is also a letter from a French Catholic demanding that
Petain stop persecuting Jews and free those who had been arrested.

The style of inmates' letters varies according to the period of
incarceration, since those who were brought to Drancy in 1941 did not know
what those arrested in 1943 could already guess. They filled pages from
school notebooks in cramped handwriting, using every inch to convey
messages, sometimes in code.

It is heartbreaking to read the letter of a 12-year-old boy who asks the
director of the prisons organization for a little bread in exchange for
the coupons entitling him to receive packages, since he no longer has
parents to send him packages. The boy and the three younger siblings left
in his charge were later killed in the gas chambers.

Another boy, identity unknown, wrote on July 18, 1942: "Dear Marshal of
France, don't let them take my mother. I am a small boy of 10 and today is
my birthday. I am French and a Catholic, my mother's parents were Jews. I
salute you as though I were your soldier."

In the collection's final letter, Marc Moise Blum writes to his family on
August 11, 1944: "Dear ones, I am on the Vittel train to where? I do not
forget you ... Courage and faith. I shall see you all God willing ... Vive
la France."

(source: Ha'Aretz)