Feb. 9



POLAND:

Polish Jews fear Holocaust tours inflame race tensions

NICHOLAS WALTON


THEY come to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust in increasing
numbers, but Jewish visitors to Poland are not being welcomed by many of
their fellow believers.

Instead, they are being accused of treating the country like a theme park
and inflaming simmering historical tensions between the few thousand Jews
who live in Poland and their gentile neighbours.

Henryk Halkowski, one of the 8,000 remaining Polish Jews, from a pre-war
population of almost three-and-a-half million, said: "Unfortunately most
people know about Poland only that it was the country of the Holocaust."

Halkowski speaks quickly, between mouthfuls of his lunch at Krakows
Jewish cultural centre. The centre is in Kazimierz, the old Jewish
quarter of this handsome old city. It was a centre for central European
Jews for much of the 1,000 or so years that they can trace their history
in the region. More recently Kazimierz was the home of the Jews who
escaped the Nazis thanks to Oskar Schindler. After the war it became a
slum. But now its a fashionable district of hip bars and restaurants,
full of restored synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and kosher restaurants.

Some of the funding is Polish, but an increasing amount is Jewish,
normally from Israel or the United States. As well as investors and
businessmen, Poland is attracting more Jewish visitors than before. Most
of them are in Poland for one reason: the Nazi Genocide.

" They know about Krakow only that it was a town 60km from Auschwitz.
Warsaw is for them the city of the uprising in the ghetto, and its not so
far from Treblinka. I am really upset that nobody knows about the real
Jewish history of Poland, and nobody cares about it."

Halkowski said the visits had more to do with nationalism and justifying
the Israeli state than with Judaism. And, he said, the open hostility of
many of them to the Poles, seen as willing accomplices to the Nazis, does
nothing to help the Jews that continue to live in Poland.

In the freezing depth of the Polish winter, the town of Oswiecim is a
haunted place: colourless, dirty, and economically destitute. It is also
home to the camp that is a by-word for evil across the world. Auschwitz
and its horrifyingly rationalised Birkenau complex attract a slow stream
of sombre visitors. The most striking are the coachloads of
schoolchildren, carrying defiantly enormous Israeli flags, and
accompanied everywhere by their own security guards.

Professor Pawel Spiewak, a Polish Jew who works at Warsaw University,
said these Marches of the Living not only miss out much that is important
in Jewish history. He said their insularity allows the Polish authorities
to ignore the long Jewish heritage of their country.

" If you go to a small city you will never find any signs, for example,
that this building was before the war owned by a Jewish organisation, or
that here was standing a synagogue," he said.

Poland has had a long and troubled history, and even today there is a
widespread distrust of foreigners. Recent surveys continue to place Jews
near the top of the list of Polish bogeymen, and casual anti-Semitism is
rife.

(source: The Scotsman)




GERMANY:

Painful past has few reminders -- Buildings from the Nazi era have largely
vanished, but a few can be found.


"The bunker is right over there," says the guide, pointing to an empty
plot behind a new high-rise in the no-man's land that once surrounded
the Berlin Wall.

But gaining access to the underground warren where Adolf Hitler killed
himself at the end of World War II - the same bunker featured in so many
television documentaries - proves impossible.

On our first trip to Berlin, my wife and I decide to seek the remnants of
the Nazi presence in this city. Just south of the Brandenberg Gate, we
stand beside a playground, known to be the site where Hitler's and Eva
Braun's bodies were cremated near a bunker entrance in April 1945.

According to reports, East German border guards uncovered another
entrance in 1986, during preparations to construct apartment buildings.

In 1990, the bunker was opened briefly to allow a visit by a group of
journalists, then sealed again. In 1995, the Berlin parliament decided to
lock up what remains .

Still, the guide suggests that the government has "kept a few rooms" for
historians.

After the war, Soviet leadership feared making a martyr of the former
Nazi leader. In recent years, Germany has tried to obliterate sites
connected to Hitler to prevent them from becoming rallying points for
neo-fascists.

We learn that many Berliners are reluctant to talk about the Nazi period.
A Holocaust Memorial being built between the bunker site and the famous
gate stirs controversy. Many citizens do not want this conspicuous
reminder of the war's evils. Others dislike the projected tomblike
design.

While many examples remain of the splendid residences and palaces once
occupied by the city's Prussian rulers, few buildings from the Nazi era
have endured.

Allied bombings account for much of the destruction.

A notable exception is the former air force headquarters where
Reichsminister Hermann Goering kept his office. Now the German Finance
Ministry, it runs nearly the length of Wilhelm Strasse.

Walking down from Goering's fortress-like edifice, and a block south of
the presumed Hitler bunker site, we come to the open-air "Topography of
Terror." This exhibit reveals some Berliners' willingness to face their
history head-on.

The terror display is laid out in the remains of torture cells in the old
Gestapo headquarters along Niederkirchner Strasse, formerly the infamous
Prinz-Albrecht Strasse.

The free exhibit, accompanied by recorded commentary in several
languages, consists of photographs and papers documenting the secret
police's arrests, interrogations and murders of communists, dissidents,
Jews and anyone who defied the Nazis.

Just above the terror exhibit stands one of the last stretches of the
Berlin Wall, running about 50 yards and pierced with holes where citizens
from both sides tried to dismantle it in 1989.

We find a major exhibition, chronicling the resistance to National
Socialism, in the old Bendlerblock on Stauffenberg Strasse. The street
was renamed for Count Claus von Stauffenberg, chief conspirator in the
July 1944 bomb plot to assassinate the Führer.

The display extends through numerous rooms in a former Wehrmacht
building, where the conspirators reportedly laid their plans. Each room
describes the mostly unsuccessful efforts of various groups to oppose the
Nazis: communists, the Catholic Church, labor-union members,
intellectuals and, in the largest area, the military.

Besides a few students, we are the only visitors this day. The
information, all in German, makes clear that, despite popular belief,
there was much resistance. It also makes clear that the Nazis stopped at
nothing to crush it.

We had read that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, held a
spectacular party just before the 1936 Olympics on an island called
Pfaueninsel, southwest in the Havel River. Getting to Pfaueninsel, or
Peacock Island, by train, bus and a short ferry ride takes about an hour.

The area is a weekend playground for Berliners. The Havel River feeds
into several lakes that offer boat rides, sailing, swimming and beaches.

The island features a tiny white wooden castle, now a gem of a museum
with eight rooms that remain much the way they were when King Friedrich
Wilhelm II built the castle in 1797.

Goebbels turned it into a cloakroom for his guests. Walking along paths
beside manicured gardens, we imagine the tents of Goebbels' party spread
across the meadow near the castle, lanterns hanging in trees.

We travel to the Ploetzensee Memorial north of the city center. At the
nearby prison, the Nazis held dissidents and resisters, ultimately
hanging or guillotining about 2,500.

The memorial, established in 1952, consists of a stone wall inscribed "To
the victims of Hitler's dictatorship during the years 1933-1945," an urn
with soil from the concentration camps and the brick execution building,
half of which displays documents.

The chamber used for most of these executions, including those of the
unsuccessful July 1944 conspirators to assassinate Hitler, takes up the
building's other half. Five sinister hanging hooks remain across one end
of the small room, about 20 by 30 feet. A vase of flowers and a wreath,
in memory of those who spent their last moments here, lie placed on the
reddish concrete floor.

The only sounds are birds singing and the wind blowing through the small
building.

(source: Associated Press)