March 26



HUNGARY:

Hungary builds memorial for Holocaust victims


Hungary is putting the finishing touches to an artfully restored disused
synagogue in downtown Budapest that will be a memorial to the more than
500,000 Hungarian Jews who perished during World War Two.

The synagogue has been restored at a cost of 1.75 billion forints ($8.49
million) from state funds, and the inner wall of its yard is already
partially covered with marble plates inscribed with the names of 40,000
victims.

"This is not a Jewish institution," Andras Daranyi, director of the
memorial and documentation centre, told journalists on Friday. "This is a
Hungarian institution intended to present the Holocaust as a Hungarian
national tragedy."

Before World War Two, Hungary had a Jewish minority of more than one
million, whereas now it numbers less than 100,000. Nevertheless, it is
still central Europe's biggest Jewish community.

In 56 days in May-June 1944, Hungarian authorities deported 437,402 Jews
according to German records in what was named the "Hoess operation", named
after Rudolf Hoess, the creator of Auschwitz who served as its commander
until November 1943.

Daranyi, himself a Jew, said the Holocaust was far more for him than a
page in history books.

"Some 20-25 members of my family - we don't even know exactly how many --
were deported to Auschwitz and died there," he said. "In our family this
is living history."

The memorial will be officially opened on April 16.

(source: Reuters)




GERMANY/SWITZERLAND:

IG Farben seeks Swiss money for Holocaust compensation


IG Farben, the former German chemical giant that used thousands of slave
laborers at the Auschwitz death camp, said Friday it intends to pay
further compensation for Holocaust victims - if it gets money it claims
from a Swiss bank.

IG Farben was broken up after World War II and ordered into trusteeship by
the Allies. It continued operating as a trust to pay Nazi-era compensation
claims, but the firm said last fall it was filing for bankruptcy.

The latest effort is separate from a U.S. lawsuit by shareholders of IG
Farben, who are suing Swiss bank UBS for billions in assets related to the
bank's acquisition of a former Swiss subsidiary of IG Farben after World
War II.

Representatives of a foundation set up to run the fund said Friday they
are laying claim to the same money, though they would first try to
negotiate a settlement. The Swiss bank said the claim is groundless.

"I believe we can help those who until now have not been helped or have
fallen through the net," IG Farben lawyer Matthias Druba told a news
conference.

Possible recipients would be New York-based Blue Card, which has provided
assistance to Nazi victims since the 1930s, and the Israeli Center for
Psychological Support for Survivors of the Holocaust.

IG Farben's war-related factories included a synthetic rubber plant at the
Auschwitz death camp complex where 30,000 inmates worked until they died
or were deemed unfit for work and sent to the gas chambers.

It also owned 42.2 percent of Degesch, which produced the Zyklon-B poison
used to gas death camp inmates.

The new fund is "a general effort to try and salvage something out of this
before Farben, finally, after 50 years, is interred," said Gary Osen, a
lawyer for IG Farben.

He said it's also an effort to point up alleged "Swiss corporate and
political complicity."

IG Farben employed an estimated 350,000 prisoners at its chemical
factories during the war. Under a 1957 deal with the Jewish Claims
Conference, the IG Farben trust agreed to pay US$7 million in
compensation, mostly to Jewish former prisoners.

Former IG Farben slave laborers are also eligible to claim compensation
from a 10 billion mark (US$5.9 billion) German fund that began
compensating surviving slave laborers and camp inmates in 2001.

IG Farben's German successor companies _ BASF, Bayer and Hoechst _ were
founder members of the industry-government fund.

In Frankfurt, former slave laborers delivered a protest to the IG Farben
building on Friday saying they "are the only legitimate claimants of the
IG Farben breakup."

"We reject any attempt by the IG Farben foundation to act in the name of
the survivors," said Freddie Knoller, a former slave laborer at IG
Farben's Monowitz plant. "That is absolutely unacceptable."

Osen would not say how much IG Farben is seeking from UBS. The shareholder
suit in a U.S. district court in New York is seeking between US$1.8
billion and US$35 billion.

A company founded by IG Farben in Switzerland and later acquired by UBS
received the disputed money as compensation in 1962 from the U.S.
government for assets confiscated in the United States during World War
II.

Osen said that because the Swiss firm, IG Chemie, was a "shell company" of
IG Farben, the former parent company should get that money.

UBS spokesman Christoph Meier said the case has been investigated in the
past and IG Chemie was judged to have been separate from IG Farben.

"There is no basis for any claim against UBS," Meier said in a telephone
interview from Geneva.

(source: Associated Press





CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czech survivors praise British Holocaust saviour


Vera Gissing was just 10 years old when in July 1939 British stockbroker
Nicholas Winton whisked her and some 700 other Czech children away from
almost certain death at the hands of Germany's Nazis.

She knows that she and the others directly owe the man dubbed Britain's
Schindler their lives and estimates that at least 5,000 others do so
indirectly in the shape of the children and grandchildren of the rescued
refugees.

"By doing what he did, Nicky saved the greater part of my generation of
Czech Jews who survived," she told Reuters at the opening of an exhibition
of pictures by child victims of the Czech Holocaust at the Jewish Museum
in north London.

"He not only saved us, he gave life to our children and their children.
That is some achievement," the 75-year-old said.

On September 3, 1939 Britain declared war on Adolf Hitler's Germany,
bringing Winton's rescue trains to an end and ushering in Hitler's plans
to exterminate all Jews in Europe.

In Czechoslovakia the occupying Germans turned the garrison town of
Terezin into the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, building from an
initial population of 3,700 Jewish men, women and children in 1940 to some
60,000 at its peak in late 1942.

"About 143,000 people passed through the camp, of whom 33,000 died there
and 88,000 were sent to the extermination camps," said Susannah Alexander,
historian at the museum.

Barely 100 children survived of the more than 15,000 who passed through
the camp.

To mark the tragedy, the museum is mounting an exhibition of some of the
thousands of drawings the children of the camp made.

The exhibition opened on Thursday and runs to June 20.

The images in pencil, crayon and watercolour by children aged from seven
to 11 range from happy memories of life before the war to daily life in
the camp the Germans tried to show off as a model of correctness to the
outside world.

On loan from the Jewish Museum in Prague, one shows a multicoloured
butterfly by nine year old Margit Koretzova who was shipped to Auschwitz
on October 4, 1944 where she died.

Another in pencil by 11-year-old Josef Novak shows a hanging. Josef went
to Auschwitz on May 18, 1944 where he too died.

Gissing knows that had it not been for Winton she would have gone to
Theresienstadt and, like every member of her family except one aunt, would
have died there or in one of the death camps.

But Winton, who turns 95 in May and who was knighted belatedly in 2002 for
his actions, is completely self-effacing.

Winton kept silent about his actions for 50 years. It was only when his
wife Greta was clearing out their attic one day and came across some old
papers which she asked him to explain that the remarkable story ever
became known.

"I did what I could. I wish I could have done more. But I could not," he
told Reuters at the exhibition.

He also rejects angrily the media association with Oskar Schindler, the
German industrialist who saved some 1,100 Jews.

"It infuriates me. There is nothing similar between what I did and what
Schindler did. The only thing we have in common is that we both were given
the same ring inscribed 'Save One Life, Save The World,'" he said
indicating the gold band.

And he rather revels in his new-found family of 5,000.

"All my contemporaries are dead, but now I have this new and very large
family. It is very nice. They keep on ringing up and taking me out to
lunches and dinners," he said.

(source: Reuters)