June 15



FRANCE:

French neo-Nazis deface holocaust site


Police in France Monday sought suspected neo-Nazi vandals who defaced a
1942 mural by Jewish children being sent to Holocaust death camps.

The attack was discovered by a historian who visited the camp near
Perpignan in southwestern France Friday night. A protective grille had
been dismantled and the scenes painted along 20 feet of a wall inside a
hut by 110 Jewish children in 1942 had been defaced.

Police said the vandals used hammers and sharp tools on the happy
countryside scenes, animals and smiling people, The Independent reported.

The wall was going to become the focal point of a Holocaust museum at the
Rivesaltes transit camp, near Perpignan.

Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin called for intensive efforts by
police to discover the culprits in the attack, which bears the hallmarks
of anti-Semitic acts in the country, widely linked to young Arabs
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the newspaper said.

(source: Big News Network)



ISRAEL/GERMANY:

Yad Vashem Urges Rejection Of Combined Memorials


The Yad Vashem Holocaust Authority protests a German parliamentary motion
to equate the victims of the Nazis and those of Communism.

In a letter to Angela Merkel, leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in
the German Bundestag, Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev urged
reconsideration of a motion equating the Nazi dictatorship and the
Communist regime. The motion, entitled "Funding of Memorials of the
History of Dictatorships in Germany - A General Concept for a Dignified
Commemoration of all Victims of the two German Dictatorships," was
submitted by the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union to the
Bundestag. The motion, which comes up for vote two days from now, aims to
fundamentally change the policy towards memorial museums in Germany
dealing with the Nazi period, and is likely to blur the distinction
between the crimes of Nazism and those of the communist era.

"If adopted," Shalev wrote, "this policy will eventually lead to obscuring
the uniqueness of the Nazi persecution and the minimization of the
Holocaust, and will offset much of the German contribution in the fields
of Holocaust remembrance and education. The proposed bill is an affront to
the historical truth. The crimes of the communist totalitarian regime need
to be remembered. This, however, should not lead to a simplification and
misrepresentation of the past, which border on historical revisionism.
Memory needs to be firmly rooted in an accurate representation of the
past. Unless the historical distinctions are upheld, the present motion
may contribute to the distortion of the way in which young Germans
perceive their past."

(source: Israel National News)




USA:

US to deport ex-Nazi camp guard----Millions of Jews were systematically
slain under Nazi rule


An 80-year-old New Yorker who worked as a guard at a Nazi-run labour camp
is to be deported to his native Ukraine.

A judge ruled that Jakiw Palij must leave the country for his part in the
Nazi plan to exterminate Jews in what was then occupied Poland.

Palij denies any role in the atrocities at Trawniki camp where some 6,000
prisoners were killed in one night - one of the Holocaust's worst
massacres.

Palij has already been stripped of the US citizenship he has held since
1957.

A court in 2003 found him guilty of taking part in the planned murder of
Jews in the camp and of lying about his Nazi past when he moved to the US
in 1947.

'Coerced'

"During a single nightmarish day in November 1943, more than 6,000
prisoners of the Nazi camp that Jakiw Palij had guarded were
systematically butchered," Eli Rosenbaum, a justice department official,
told the Associated Press agency.

He said Palij played an "indispensable role" for the Nazis by helping to
prevent the prisoners from escaping.

Palij has not commented on the deportation order but maintained, in an
earlier interview, that he was coerced into working for the Nazis.

"We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused," he told the New
York Times newspaper last year.

Palij has 30 days to appeal the deportation order.

A Ukrainian government spokeswoman said she had no information about the
case.

(source: BBC News)





POLAND:

Some Jews survived Holocaust in caves


On a moonless October night in 1942, a desperate group of Jews fled the
village of Korolowka, Poland, and literally went underground to
escape the Nazis.

While World War II raged above them, they hid from the Holocaust in two
vast caves 50 feet beneath the rolling wheat fields of what is now western
Ukraine.

For about two years, dozens of them lived in almost total darkness,
cooking by kerosene light. When the men ventured out for food and
firewood, it was only at night.

They slept for 22-hour stretches. They lived on thin barley or potato
soup. They kept sane by retelling biblical tales of King David and Ruth,
by reciting Polish poetry and Ukrainian folk tales.

"We also talked a lot about food," said Sol Wexler, a 74-year-old Bronx
grandfather, who Americanized his last name from Weichselblatt. "I would
dream about eating a raw potato."

And they survived.

"I saw the sun April 12, 1944," said Shunkale Hochman, 70, now a
grandmother of three living on Long Island. "There was still snow on the
ground, and I was blinded by it. After being in the darkness for so long,
it was very frightening to go out."

Their amazing tale remained buried for nearly 60 years until an intrepid
cave explorer from Queens named Chris Nicola stumbled upon the story in
the two hideouts - known as Verteba and the Priest's Grotto - and tracked
down the survivors.

Their story appears in this month's issue of National Geographic Adventure
magazine (www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure) and stands as a testament
to the Stermer, Dodyk, Weichselblatt and other cave families - and their
will to live.

"It was time," said Hochman, whose maiden name was Dodyk and who was 9
when she went underground. "We wanted to survive and tell the story to the
world. In the cave, we thought we were the only survivors because they
were killing everyone above."

Nicola said it's a human triumph as well.

"Until now, the longest recorded time that a human survived underground
was 205 days," he said. "The women and children hiding in the Priest's
Grotto didn't leave for 344 days straight. That is amazing."

Before it became a killing ground, Korolowka was part of Poland. Most of
the people who lived there in 1939 were Ukrainian peasants or Jews.

When Nicola, an investigator at the State Education Department's Office of
Professional Discipline, started exploring the vast underground
labyrinths, the Ukrainians were still in the area, but the Jews were
ghosts.

They lived on in the stories of the peasants, who spoke of the Jews who
hid in the gypsum caves and emerged after the war - covered in yellow mud.

On his first forays into the Priest's Grotto in 1995, Nicola saw campsites
and other signs of human habitation. He began to wonder whether the
stories were true.

"They did not look like the campsites of cavers who go down for a day,"
Nicola said. "So it became for me a quest."

Nicola searched libraries and scoured the Internet for information about
the Korolowka Jews. Then two years ago, he found Wexler's son-in-law, Ed
Vogel, and the Jewish ghosts came back to life.

Guided by the survivors' memories, Nicola explored their first hideout,
the Verteba cave, and returned to the Priest's Grotto, where they spent
much of the war.

There Nicola found proof of their past existence - tin cups, rotting
shoes, a 150-pound millstone and their names written in charcoal on the
walls like prehistoric cave dwellers.

It was Esther Stermer, the matriarch of one of Korolowka's leading
families, who led the Jews to safety, Nicola said.

"We are not going to the slaughterhouse," Stermer said after the Nazis
ordered all the Jews to the town square.

Instead, the families gathered up supplies they had been hoarding and
descended into the Verteba cave. But it was not much of a refuge. Poorly
ventilated and full of bats, it was also known to the Ukrainians, some of
whom were helping the Nazis.

Six months later, the Germans raided the cave. Most of the Jews fled
through an escape hatch. But Wexler's mother and 9-year-old brother were
caught and executed.

That winter, the Jewish escapees hid in a bunker behind a barn. When
spring came, they had to run again.

Stermer's oldest son, Nissel, sought out a Ukrainian he could trust, a
forester named Munko Lubudzin. He led them to a sinkhole in a field where
peasants left dead livestock to rot.

The sinkhole contained a portal to one of the world's biggest caves, a
pitch-black sanctuary where the temperature was a damp but constant 50
degrees. It was the salvation for the 38 Jews who found their way inside.

Hochman said she was never afraid in the cave, and whenever she feels
anxious, she sits quietly in a darkened room. Wexler, however, said he
remains haunted by the ordeal.

"I try to sleep it off," he said. "It works sometimes. You don't feel
nothing when you sleep."

(source: Omaha World Herald)