March 20


FRANCE:

French railroad's Holocaust role
Son of Jewish victims seeks company's admission of guilt


In Paris, six decades after his parents were arrested and deported from
German-occupied France, an Austrian-born French Jew went to court here
Wednesday to demand that France's national railroad company accept its
responsibility and express remorse for transporting Jews to Nazi death
camps.

Kurt Werner Schaechter, 82, is seeking just one euro as symbolic
compensation from the National Railroad Service, known by its French
initials of SNCF. But he hopes the court will require the company to
acknowledge that it played an active role in the deportation of some
76,000 Jews from France between 1942 and 1944. Of those sent to death
camps, only about 2,500 survived.

At the hearing Wednesday, the company's lawyer, Yves Baudelot, said the
case should be dismissed since a 10-year statute of limitations applied.
Schaechter's counsel, Joseph Roubache, responded that the statute of
limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity. Further, he added,
crucial new evidence was discovered within the last 10 years. A ruling is
expected May 14.

This case dates back to 1991 when Schaechter, a retired musical
instruments salesman, was searching in France's National Archives in
Toulouse for information about his parents, both of whom were killed by
the Nazis. Shocked by the evidence he found of French cooperation with
the Germans, he violated regulations by removing documents to be
photocopied, then returning them to their files. Over nine months, he
copied more than 12,000 documents.

Among these was a letter written by the SNCF and dated Aug. 12, 1944,
nine weeks after Allied troops landed in Normandy, demanding payment of
200,000 francs from the regional government of the Haute-Garonne
Department in southern France for transporting Jewish detainees from
concentration camps to the French border with Germany. In the letter, the
SNCF warned that interest would be charged if the payment were not made
on time.

This was just one of the myriad documents that Schaechter used in his
long, and to date unsuccessful, campaign to have France open up its
wartime archives, most of which remain sealed. The SNCF document,
however, prompted the company to commission a historian to study its
wartime role. His report was eventually released at a colloquium in 2000.

Roubache said new documents confirmed that 77 train convoys between March
27, 1942, and July 31, 1944, deported 76,000 Jews to the East. He noted
that Schaechter's father, Emile, was on Convoy No. 50 of March 4, 1943,
which took him to Sobibor in Poland, where he was immediately killed.
Schaechter's mother, Margarethe, was on Convoy No., 75 of May 30, 1944,
destined for Auschwitz, where she was gassed.

He said that other documents revealed a series of meetings in mid-1942 at
Vichy, headquarters of the collaborationist regime of Marshal Petain,
where SNCF officials made detailed preparations for the deportation of
Jews from regions of southern France that were still officially called
"free zones" and were ruled by Vichy and not directly by the German
occupiers.

These documents, he said, showed the company was eager to hide its
activity because the convoys were referred to by the code name of "IAPT,"
the French initials for Israelites, Germans, Poles and Czechoslovaks.

(source: New York Times)






BULGARIA:

Holocaust Day commemorated

Velina Nacheva


A PRAYER in the Sofia synagogue on Saturday officially noted the
beginning of events commemorating Holocaust Day and the sixtieth
anniversary of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from deportation to Nazi
concentration camps.

"Bulgaria has reason to be proud of the rescue of its Jews, but this is
not an isolated event, it is part of a consistent, decades-lasting policy
of ethnic tolerance in Bulgaria," said President Georgi Purvanov on
Friday at the beginning of former Israeli President Yitzhak Navon's visit
to Bulgaria.

"The rescue of the Bulgarian Jews has profound historical and political
meaning," Vice President Angel Marin said at a rally in Plovdiv. He added
that the ethnic model in Bulgaria, which fills Bulgarians with pride
today, goes back to the time when the nation saved the lives of its
citizens of Jewish descent.

Navon expressed gratitude to all social groups in Bulgaria who had
supported the Bulgarian Jews - the Orthodox Church, politicians, and
professional associations. Purvanov reminded the public that this was yet
another occasion to recall that the Bulgarian people, in their entirety
of political parties, non-governmental structures and individual cultural
figures, unanimously backed the defence of Bulgarian Jews.

Kyustendil hosted a national ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day. The
city in Southwestern Bulgaria is the birthplace of Dimiter Peshev, who
was deputy chairman of the 24th and 25th National Assemblies during World
War Two. Tribute was also paid to other locals who assisted him - Peter
Mihalev, Ivan Momchilov, Vladimir Kourtev, and Assen Souichmezov.

The ceremony was attended by Foreign Minister Solomon Passi, who is on
the national memorial committee for the Holocaust, Interior Minister
Georgi Petkanov, who chairs a Bulgarian-Jewish friendship association,
MPs, former Israeli ambassador to Bulgaria David Cohen, Israeli Embassy
officers, and members of an association of Bulgarian Jews in Israel.

The Cabinet set March 10 as the Day of Holocaust Victims. On that day in
1943, the country's leaders halted the implementation of a governmental
decision dispatching the first groups of Bulgarian Jews to fascist
concentration camps. The commemoration of the Holocaust was in line with
the decision of the Council of Europe and took place under the patronage
of Purvanov.

"Fifty thousand Bulgarian Jews, many of them and their descendants now
living in Israel, have been rescued. From them, we have very warm and
cordial feelings for Bulgaria and Bulgarians," Navon said.

(source: Sofia Echo)






USA//MINNESOTA:

Attorney to defend Holocaust denialist
A Marshall, Minn., attorney will represent Minnesota state representative
Arlon Lindner at no cost in the lawmaker's defense against a complaint by
colleagues who say Lindner's recent comments--questioning whether gay
people were persecuted during the Nazi Holocaust--have offended
African-Americans and gay people. Democratic lawmakers filed an ethics
complaint against Lindner last week, alleging that his remarks,
questioning whether homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis, have
brought disrepute to the state house of representatives.

"These phony ethics charges don't even rise to the level of silly," said
the attorney, James R. Anderson. "This misuse of the house ethics process
is intended solely to intimidate Arlon into dropping his defense of
Minnesota Christians who oppose liberal efforts to promote the homosexual
agenda, which targets certain Christian religious beliefs."

Lindner first made the remarks about homosexuals while discussing a bill
of his that would repeal a state's human rights amendment protecting gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Minnesotans from discrimination in
employment, housing, education, and other areas. His bill also would
remove sexual orientation as a protected classification in hate-crimes
laws. Lindner defended his statements about gay people on the floor last
week, then offended the house's two black members when he said he didn't
want to "sit around here and wait until America becomes another African
continent" concerning AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The ethics complaint alleges that Lindner's words violate house rules
prohibiting conduct that "violates accepted norms of house behavior" and
"tends to bring the house into dishonor or disrepute."

(source: The Advocate)








USA:

Holocaust-Era Insurance Deadline Extended


The deadline has been extended to Sept. 30 for people who want to
recover money from unpaid Holocaust-era insurance claims.

The International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims said
Friday the extension will provide enough time to publish additional
policyholder names, allowing more people to file claims.

The previous deadline was March 30.

Holocaust victims and their heirs could soon see $280 million under an
agreement signed last October by the commission, which was established in
1998 to settle insurance claims with German and other European companies.

The commission and Germany's Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility
and the Future, agreed on the funds for claims, claims-related expenses
and humanitarian programs that benefit Holocaust survivors.

The German foundation, a joint effort between the German government and
private companies, promised the agreement would be fully implemented
before the end of 2004.

* _

On the Net:

International Commission of Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims:
http://www.icheic.org

(source: Associated Press)


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



Music of composers silenced by Holocaust gets revival


He died at Auschwitz and his music almost died with him.

But thanks to a little bit of foresight and a great deal of luck, the
music of Viktor Ullmann survived the Czech composer's 1944 death and will
be showcased in a concert series conceived by the American conductor
James Conlon.

The maestro's aim? To introduce into the musical mainstream the forgotten
works of an entire generation of composers silenced by the Holocaust.

``There were many alternative voices in the first half of the 20th
century that would have made an impact on our perception of classical
music in a very different way had they lived, had their work not been
interrupted,'' he said in an interview from Paris, where he has spent the
past eight years as the principal conductor of the Paris National Opera.

The effort comes as Roman Polanski's Oscar-nominated film ``The Pianist''
has similarly helped revive interest in the life and music of Wladyslaw
Szpilman, a Jewish pianist and popular composer who survived the war in a
Polish ghetto but whose music was largely forgotten.

Audiences in New York City will have the chance to hear Ullmann's music,
including an opera that satirizes Adolf Hitler called ``The Emperor of
Atlantis,'' in a trio of concerts this month that kicks off on Sunday at
the Central Synagogue.

The concerts - the first in a multi-year project that will visit other
U.S. cities and focus on five different composers - will be performed at
venues including Carnegie Hall and feature ensembles such as the
Juilliard School's Juilliard Orchestra.

Conlon, who has spent the last two decades in Europe but is returning to
New York next year, is clearly passionate about the series, called
``Recovering a Musical Heritage.''

``It bothered me that the vast majority of music lovers don't get a
chance to hear any of this and they don't even know that it's there,''
said 53-year-old Conlon.

``It's not their fault. No one has ever taken a long view of it and said
this needs to find its place amongst the rest of music that gets played
by classical music artists and appreciated by audiences.''

Ullmann's story is a poignant one. He was interned outside Prague at the
Theresienstadt ghetto, which was set up by the Nazis as a ``model''
settlement to show the world while they hid the existence of the
concentration camps and gas chambers.

Miraculously prolific at Theresienstadt, Ullmann in his two years there
wrote more than 20 pieces, including ``The Emperor of Atlantis'' and a
string quartet. Aware that he might die at the hands of the Nazis,
Ullmann safeguarded his manuscripts with the Theresienstadt librarian,
along with the name of a friend who could take the papers after the war.

Ullmann died, but his friend and the librarian survived. And so the
manuscripts did too. But they were ignored for 30 years, until 1975 when
a British conductor discovered them and immediately recognised their
importance.

Conlon himself learned of Ullmann fairly recently through his interest in
Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who wielded tremendous influence
over Ullmann while conducting in Prague before World War Two. Zemlinsky
fled the Holocaust only to die in obscurity in New York in 1942.

The music of Ullmann and his contemporaries - performed only
sporadically, if at all, over the years - deserves to find its place in
the standard repertoire of classical musicians, Conlon said, likening the
concert series to correcting an injustice.

``Every composer's story is different, and I am not trying to defend
music that I don't think is worthy of being there,'' he said. The works
of Zemlinsky and Czechs Pavel Haas and Hans Krasa will also be performed
in the series.

Born and bred in New York City and a graduate of Juilliard, Conlon went
to Europe early in his career and has worked with the Rotterdam
Philharmonic and in Cologne, Germany.

He will return home next year to New York, to the city where he learned
from his parents, both union activists, the importance of equality and
justice.

``You can't give these men's lives back to them. You can't undo history.
But the least you can do is bring to people's attention the thing that
they most valued, which was their own works of art,'' he said.

``You give the Nazis a posthumous victory if you allow this music to
remain buried.''

(source: Reuters)

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



Academy Awards Often Shine For Holocaust-Themed Films


This Sunday, documentary film directors Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender
will don their tuxedos, smile for the paparazzi and sit anxiously in the
Kodak Theatre, waiting to see if their names will follow the words, "And
the Oscar goes to..."

In the 2002 Academy Awards Best Documentary Feature category, Clarke and
Sender face tough competition. They're up against Michael Moore's popular
"Bowling for Columbine," which was recently named Best Documentary of All
Time by the International Documentary Association. But if history is any
indicator, "Prisoner of Paradise" has a distinct advantage when it comes
to the Oscars: The film detailing the demise of German-Jewish actor and
director Kurt Gerron, who was forced to make a Nazi propaganda film while
imprisoned at Theresienstadt is about the Holocaust.

During the last seven years, a Holocaust-related documentary has garnered
the golden statuette five times. Back in 1997, when Spike Lee's acclaimed
film "Four Little Girls" lost to "The Long Way Home," the director
infamously said, "I'd have rather been the New York Knicks in the fourth
quarter, down 10 points, a minute left in the United Center, than have
the odds we faced of winning the Oscar against the Holocaust film."

Wim Wenders, too, in 1999, saw his hugely successful "Buena Vista Social
Club" lose to "One Day in September," a virtually unseen film about the
murder of the Israeli delegation to the 1972 Olympic Games a film that
makes numerous, explicit Holocaust connections. "I was disappointed, but
not because we lost," Wenders told The Nation. "Only because we had not
really had a fair chance to win."

Is it just sour grapes, or is there really favoritism for Holocaust films
in the Academy?

During interviews by the Forward with film insiders, immediate reactions
to the question were glib, responses like "Look, there are a lot of Jews
in the industry," and "Everyone knows Jews control the media."

But the serious answer, for some, is simple. "The Holocaust is an
incredibly important topic it looms over the 20th century," said Owen
Gleiberman, film critic at Entertainment Weekly. "A sizeable percentage
of what I know about the Holocaust is from documentaries it's the single
most powerful, truthful way to learn about that time in history."

"It's kind of a faultless subject," said Gleiberman's colleague at the
magazine, Lisa Schwarzbaum. "It moves you just by saying the word. If you
have a humanitarian bone in your body, it's going to come out on this
subject.

"It's maybe so clearly good and evil it's right in front of you," she
continued. "Maybe those stories inspire a kind of passion in the people
making them that gets translated into the film."

Charles Taylor, a contributing writer at Salon, said: "The Academy tends
to go for big, epic movies that they think are on important historic
topics. Topics that are serious, worthy, virtuous. It's almost always an
issue that's decided in terms of subject matter, as if importance of
subject matter is the only thing that determines whether a movie is good
or not."

"With documentaries, there's sort of an assumption that it's a worthy
subject," he said. "If you're looking at a documentary, you judge its
worth by the importance of the subject matter rather than how well-made
the film is. Which isn't to say that some aren't well made; which isn't
to say if it's a fantastic subject, who cares if it's well made or not?"

The same principle often holds true for feature films, of which
"Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful" have been recent
Holocaust-themed success stories at the Oscars. This year, Roman
Polanski's "The Pianist," based on the memoir of a Warsaw Ghetto
survivor, is nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. "Nowhere
in Africa," the story of a Jewish family that flees Nazi persecution and
resettles in Africa, is favored to win the Oscar for Best Foreign
Language Film.

"I think 'The Pianist' this year has been over-praised because it's a
Holocaust movie," Gleiberman said. "I think if the exact same escape saga
had been set somewhere else it wouldn't have the same kind of power
people are ascribing to it."

The Holocaust, in general, said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust expert and
director of the Zigi Ziering Institute at the University of Judaism, "is
an expression in the most extreme of what is present in the mainstream."
As such, he said, it exemplifies "the human capacity for good, the human
capacity for evil, the human capacity to lose, the human capacity to
rebound."

Most of the recent winning Holocaust films were "a specific genre of
Holocaust movies," Berenbaum said. "What the films have in common in
addition to the Holocaust is the riveting, compelling story of survivors
speaking in their own words.

"I don't think it's a shoo-in for the Holocaust; it's the compelling
narration of these extraordinary witnesses who are really in the final
stages of their lives," he added.

Some have suggested that certain Holocaust documentaries have benefited
from the Academy's complicated rules for the Best Documentary category,
such as requirements that the voter must see all five nominated films in
a theatrical release. Arthur Cohn, the producer of "One Day in
September," was accused by Wenders of limiting screenings of his film
thereby "stacking" the audience and targeting voters.

Adding to the tenuous nature of Oscar prediction is the mysterious
identity of Academy members leaving many to wonder whether the 75th
anniversary of the Academy Awards also commemorates the average age of
its members. According to Dawn Newell, a spokeswoman for the Academy, "We
don't have ages on people it's definitely a cross-section."

But Cy Feuer, 92, a veteran composer and movie producer, describes his
fellow New York-based Academy members as "an older crowd."

"I'm going to sound like Spike Lee: Clearly there are a lot of aging
Jewish people in the Academy. It's just a fact," Schwarzbaum said.

The demographics of the Academy have led some to speculate that Holocaust
films speak to the voters particularly strongly. Still, even if the
Academy is chockablock with elderly Jews as per popular perception "If
a movie wins an Academy Award, it got a lot of votes from a lot of
people," Gleiberman said. "Holocaust movies speak to issues that
transcend Judaism."

Oscar hopefuls Sender and Clarke, on the other hand, worry about the flip
side of Holocaust favoritism: Holocaust fatigue. "People are sick of
films about the Holocaust," Sender said. "When we decided to tackle this
subject we were cognizant of it; we thought it might hurt us. People were
reluctant when we were fundraising, they said, 'Oh, another Holocaust film.'"

It's hardly a given that "Prisoner of Paradise" will carry the night.
Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" has won countless awards and is enjoying
a wide distribution across the country. Also in the running are the
critically acclaimed "Daughter from Danang," about an adoptee's search
for her mother, the bird epic "Winged Migration" and "Spellbound," which
profiles competitors in the National Spelling Bee. Clarke estimates his
film's chance of winning at 20% an even shot for any single nominee in a
field of five.

"I don't think our film would have been nominated if it hadn't been
well-made," said Sender. "It's not a good Holocaust movie it's a good
movie."

(source: Forward)