April 7


USA///WISCONSIN:

George Lucius Salton 'Takes Five'---- Survivor defied evils of the
Holocaust


George Lucius Salton has a breathtaking survivor's story. A Jewish victim
of the Nazi Holocaust, Salton survived captivity in not one but 10
concentration camps in sites from Poland and Germany to France. He was the
only member of his family to live through the war years. Salton emigrated
to the United States, served in the Army and earned degrees in physics and
engineering. He had a successful career in the Department of Defense. He
is the author of "The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir" (University of
Wisconsin Press). Salton will speak about his experiences at 2 p.m. April
18 as part of the Yom Hashoah Commemoration (Holocaust Remembrance Day) at
Congregation Sinai, 8223 N. Port Washington Road, Fox Point. He talked
with Journal Sentinel reporter Jackie Loohauis.

Q. Having lived the nightmare yourself, are you concerned today about
young people forgetting or doubting the Holocaust?

A. My concern is a little broader. I'm concerned that the story of the
Holocaust and the lessons of the Holocaust be remembered by good people -
older people, younger people. Hopefully the promise of "Never again!" will
be fulfilled. I do have confidence in the younger generation. I believe
they are well-informed. If they are told by people like me and the
children of survivors, they will learn. And they will learn that history
can be repeated.

Q. You chose the 23rd Psalm as the title for your book. What meaning does
it have for you, and what is your faith today?

A. The 23rd Psalm is something that meant something to me after I survived
in the camps. I did believe in God. I did hope God would have mercy to
help us, and I did wonder if God had forgotten us. But after the war,
especially with the passage about "the shadow of death," I felt that
David, who wrote the psalm, must also have gone through some terrible
experience. I wanted to acknowledge the psalm had special emotional
meaning for me.

Clearly, given my experiences and the fact that of the family I loved I
was the only one to survive, I have many questions of God for which I have
no answer. But my personal handle on religion is strong enough not to
collapse because I have questions. People sometimes ask me if I believe I
survived because of some divine protection and I say I cannot claim that.
I must ask, "Why only me?" I have no answer.

Q. To what do you ascribe your ability to survive in all those horrendous
places?

A. Being three years in one camp wasn't easier than being three years in
10 camps. But first and foremost, one needed luck to avoid the gun, to
avoid the gas chamber. One had to struggle to be committed to get some
acts of kindness from some other people and deal with survival one day at
a time and never worry how long it would take. My father was a lawyer, and
he sent my older brother to high school and I was only 11 when the war
started. I had no skills, but one had to have the courage to say "I have
skills." If the job (that the camp commanders wanted workers for) seemed
easier than the one I was doing, I said: "Yes, I can do that."

Q. Was there anything at all good that could be gleaned from your war
experience?

A. No. The camps produced nothing good, only evil. And it took terrible
strength not to be infected by it.

Q. Given that you were basically a child when you came here, how did you
create such a successful life in the United States?

A. When I came here, I came by myself. I had no money, no skills. I made a
commitment to myself that I would try to make my life as it could have
been if the war didn't happen as kind of an act of defiance. Not doing it,
I would have yielded another victory to the forces of evil. In 1951, I was
drafted and served for two years in the U.S. Army. I still felt strange in
a strange land, but I had wonderful American friends in the Army, and I
had the GI Bill.

(source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)



USA//ALABAMA:

Concentration camp survivor in Anniston has many scars


Some remain hidden, consumed by the darkness of memory, where the delicate
suffering of hope serves only as a constant reminder of a pain once
endured but never forgotten. These are the scars that never completely
heal. Max Steinmetz has many scars.

As a Holocaust survivor, Steinmetz has witnessed evil and dropped his eyes
from its hateful stare. His body has withstood the depths of human cruelty
that destroyed his will to live. His mind has spent the past 50 years
struggling to find reason amid the insanity of the Nazi's "Final Solution"
that included the torture and mass murder of 6 million Jews - two-thirds
of the European Jewish population - his entire family among them during
World War II.

Steinmetz, 79, who now lives in Birmingham where he is retired from the
retail business, knows the only way to ensure the atrocities of the
Holocaust never happen again is to reveal his scars and the scars of all
the survivors to the world.

Simply because he is willing to do so doesn't mean that speaking about his
survival in two of the most infamous extermination camps - Auschwitz and
Dachau - has gotten any easier. Steinmetz says that he has only recently
begun to talk with his three children about what happened to him.

"I just can't. It's very emotional to talk about because talking about it
means reliving it," he says in a voice thick with regret, his eyes darting
and distant. "But the reason that I finally did start to speak to people
was because I wanted to make sure they knew, that everybody knew, what
happened to us so that nothing like that is ever allowed to happen again.
We have to make sure that these kids learn the truth because they are the
future. They are the ones that must stand guard."

Dan Napolitano, deputy director of education for the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., says many people don't
really know what took place between 1933 and 1945.

"Most people are not aware of the facts," he says. "People have a media
pop-culture sense that something did happen, but the level of accurate
discourse is severely lacking. There's a multiplicity of levels of
understanding and most people only have a very, very general knowledge."

The Holocaust, taken from the Greek word meaning "sacrifice by fire," was
the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of more than 11
million people. Along with the Jews, 5 million were homosexuals, mentally
or physically handicapped, Soviet POWs, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Slavic people, socialists and communists. According to the Holocaust
Museum, the genocide essentially began when the Nazi Party came to power
in Germany in January 1933.

According to the museum's Web site, the Nazis believed that Germans were
"racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were "life
unworthy of life." During the "Final Solution" of the Holocaust, which
took place between July 31, 1941, and April 29, 1945, millions of Jews
were imprisoned in concentration camps where they were ritualistically
starved, beaten, murdered with poisonous gasses, shot and burned.

"It changed me in so many ways. I don't have much trust for humanity,"
Steinmetz says. "If it happened once, it can happen again. That's why we
must remember."

In the fall of 1943, Steinmetz, along with his family and thousands of
Jews, stood on the wooden ramp of a Polish railway station waiting in line
for "the selection." In the background hung a steel sign that mockingly
welcomed the starving, confused prisoners to Auschwitz, the largest and
most infamous of the extermination camps. Arbeit Macht Frei, it read -
"Work Makes You Free."

"We were completely misled," Steinmetz remembers. "We didn't know where we
were going or what would happen to us when we got there. We were told only
that we were going to labor camps as a whole family and would be given a
chance to start a new life."

Born in what would become Hungary, Steinmetz and his family were
sequestered with other Jews in ghettos before German soldiers forced them
onto train cars. They spent three days riding in freight cars packed with
people, and with only a third of a loaf of bread to eat apiece during the
entire trip. When the doors opened in Poland, they were thankful to
breathe fresh air again.

But as they stood on the railway platform, German doctors stalked the
crowd, pointing some prisoners to the left and others to the right. Right
was life in the concentration camp, left was death in the gas chambers,
but none of them knew that at the time, Steinmetz says. On the platform,
Steinmetz came face-to-face with Dr. Josef Mengele, "The Angel of Death"
who was known for wearing white leather gloves and whistling Wagner operas
while he worked.

After looking the 16-year-old Steinmetz over, with a wave of his hand
Mengele sent the teenager, along with his younger brother, to the right.
Steinmetz's mother, father and baby sister were sent to the left. He would
never see them again.

Later that night, sick with worry, he grabbed the attention of a passing
prisoner, a man who knew a great deal about the prison, including the
horrible stench that hung heavy in the air, which Steinmetz describes as
"smelling like burning meat:"

"I asked him what it was," Steinmetz says.

'You don't know?'

"No," I said.

'When did you come here?'

"This morning."

'What about your parents, did they come with you?'

"Yes."

'Where did they go when you got off the train?'

"To the left."

'That's what you smell. That's the crematorium. Your parents are dead and
that's them being burned.'"

Prisoners sent to the left were urged quietly forward into "shower rooms,"
where they were stripped of their clothes and told that they were about to
be bathed and given fresh clothes. There were water pipes and sprays along
the ceiling, but no drains on the floor. Instead of water, Zyklon B gas
spewed from the showerheads, killing all inside within a matter of
minutes.

During his time at Auschwitz, Steinmetz and his brother worked from 5 a.m.
until dusk. They were beaten if they moved too slow or didn't work hard
enough for the guards' satisfaction. They were fed barely enough to keep
them alive - 1,300 calories a day, 1,700 for those working hard labor.

In some cases, it wasn't enough, and many starved.

"You lose all hope because there's no future," he said. "We thought we
were all doomed, that we were all going to die."

After only a few weeks, Steinmetz and his brother were again packed into
freight cars and taken to Dachau in Germany, the oldest concentration camp
and known as "murder school" because it trained troops that went to other
concentration camps. At Dachau, Steinmetz would grow even more comfortable
with death on Feb. 4, 1945, the day his brother finally let go after
holding on for so long.

"He starved to death," he says. "He actually starved to death. He became
so weak that he couldn't walk."

On May 2, 1945, American troops liberated Steinmetz. At the time, he
weighed less than 80 pounds even though he's more than 6 feet tall. He was
eventually taken to a hospital to recover.

He applied for U.S. citizenship and, the application was granted in 1948.
After living in New York and Colorado, Steinmetz has spent the past
20-or-so years in Birmingham. He is the father of three and grandfather of
six.

Though it has taken him five decades to come to terms with the horror of
the Holocaust, he says he has yet to find closure. It didn't come even
after he visited Auschwitz - now a museum - in 2002. He has never returned
to his home in Hungary.

Almost every day, he wrestles with that most basic question - why?

"I can't answer to why I survived when so many others died," he says. "It
wasn't fate or destiny, maybe a miracle. I don't know. I just survived.
That's all I know and for that I'm grateful. There's no real reason for
it. It just is."

(source: Sarasota Herald Tribune)




AUSTRIA:

Adolf Hitler loses honorary status in Austria after 66 years!


Adolf Hitler's honorary citizenship of an Austrian town has been
cancelled, 66 years after it was originally granted.

According to a report in Ananova, the small town of Haslach in Upper
Austria was the last Austrian town to have kept the honorary status for
Hitler.

The honorary status was granted to Hitler in March 1938 and finally
scrapped this week when the town's council decided unanimously to strip
the late dictator of his title.

"This was a democratic cleansing act, and more than necessary," said Mayor
Norbert Leitner of the Social Democratic Party.

(source: Webindia123)



USA//COLORADO:

Bariloche mayor decries book, controversy


The mayor of Bariloche has harsh words for the guide book that has
jeopardized its Sister City relationship with Aspen by bringing attention
on his town's alleged links with former Nazi officials.

Mayor Alberto Gabriel Icare responded to a letter from Aspen Mayor Helen
Klanderud last week, but he wrote it in Spanish. City officials have been
working on the translation and follow-up questions to Icare.

"I wish to confirm the vows and trust and friendship exchanged between
Aspen and Bariloche communities," he wrote, asking Klanderud to assure
Aspenites that there are no Nazis residing in the Argentine town today and
that Bariloche repudiates war crimes.

Klanderud said Monday she continues to support the Sister City
relationship between the two cities.

"I have no reason not to support it at this time, but there are obviously
people in this community who have concerns, and I intend to address those
concerns," she said.

City officials in Bariloche apparently condemned Nazism in 1994 and
reconfirmed that stance in 2003. Aspen was still seeking copies of those
pronouncements yesterday.

Aspen and San Carlos de Bariloche formalized their Sister City ties last
year. Recently though, publicity about a guide book, "Bariloche Nazi" by
Abel Basti, put Bariloche's past in the spotlight and ultimately spawned
controversy in Aspen over the relationship between the two communities.

"Barilocheans painfully endure the repetition of scandalous publications
of this type that have neither historical nor journalistic support, and
are printed only for the personal monetary gain of its author," Icare
wrote.

The book has caused "great indignation" in Bariloche, he added.

"Personally, I am very pained by the damage that the sensationalist press
is causing us," Icare wrote.

The book apparently offers directions to the former residence of Nazi SS
officer Erich Priebke, who was extradited from Bariloche, and suggests
Adolf Hitler came to Bariloche, as well.

Wrote Icare: "The fact is that after the Nuremberg trials by courts which
the USA was also part of, the world learned that after the war Adolf
Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, while Mr. Basti says that he came
to live in San Carols de Bariloche; I must say that I have no doubts
whatsoever as to which of these historical versions is the most reliable."

In a letter to the editor, the book's author claims Icare has avoided
taking a stand on the subject of Nazism and the individuals who arrived in
Bariloche after World War II. Basti's letter appears on page 11.

(source: Aspen Times)