June 16


POLAND:

Holocaust hotline anger in Poland


Simon Wiesenthal survived the Nazi death camps of World War II
An international organisation dedicated to hunting down Holocaust war
criminals has opened a telephone hotline for potential informants in
Poland.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is the group behind the move.

It is offering financial rewards for information leading to the successful
prosecution of collaborators in the murder of Jews during World War II.

The move is part of a campaign to bring them to justice before they, or
witnesses, die of old age.

'Hundreds alive'

Launched two years ago, Operation Last Chance initially targeted
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Nearly all Jews living during the war in the lands which are now the three
Baltic states were wiped out in the Holocaust.

Ever since the Baltic states gained independence more than a decade ago,
there have been no new cases against suspected war criminals there.

But Efraim Zuroff - the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, based in
Jerusalem - says there are still hundreds of them alive.

Operation Last Chance has been extended to include Austria, Romania and
Poland, and will soon also take in Germany, Hungary, Ukraine and
Argentina.

The campaign offers rewards of $12,000 for information leading to a
conviction.

'Disgusted'

Within its pre-war borders, Poland was home to up to five million Jews.

Many Poles complain that they have been disproportionately blamed for
Holocaust crimes committed during the war, and maintain that other
nationals in Eastern Europe were far more active collaborators in war
crimes against Jews.

The inauguration on Wednesday, after a long delay, of the information
hotline in Poland, has sparked a political controversy.

A prominent politician and historian, Bronislaw Geremek - well-known for
his stance against all forms of discrimination, including anti-Semitism -
has said he is disgusted by the initiative, and by the idea of offering
money for information.

He said the world should first know how much good the Poles did during the
war saving many Jews from the Nazis.

The deputy head of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which
oversees the prosecution of war criminals, Witold Kulesza, said Poland
should not be included in Operation Last Chance.

He says the country has been consistently committed to prosecuting war
criminals since the end of the war, and has successfully convicted a
number of perpetrators of the Holocaust.

(source: BBC)




HUNGARY:

Hungary: A Time To Reflect

The opening of a state-sponsored Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest
inspires surprising political unity after years of bickering.


For its opening weekend, Hungarys new Holocaust Memorial Center asked
prominent public figures to take part in reading aloud the names of
Hungarians who perished during the Holocaust. Although the reading lasted
for almost 72 hours straight, only 60,000 names could be read during the
span.

The number of Hungarians victims of the Holocaust is almost 10 times that.

Detail of the new museum and documentation center.

Sixty years in the making, the Holocaust Memorial Center quickly turned
into a reverential site on that mid-April weekend. Sober music lingered in
the closed courtyard, where it mixed with the incessant and heartbreaking
litany of the names of all of the Hungarian men, women, and children who
died in the Holocaust.

Despite the emotionally draining atmosphere, throughout the weekend almost
15,000 people showed up to remember, witness, and reflect--and to
participate in the largest Holocaust commemoration in Hungarian history.
They stood in lines to see the opening exhibits, search the victims
database, or just stand quietly as day turned into night. Many of the
visitors--including some of the politicians and celebrities participating
in the recital of names--appeared to be visibly and genuinely shaken.

But as the intensity of the opening weekend slowly fades, those
responsible for the institution stress that the Holocaust Memorial Centers
mission--to research, document, educate, and ensure remembrance of the
Holocaustis only now underway.

Alone, each of those tasks could itself be overwhelming, but in Hungary,
Holocaust research and documentation is also hamstrung by the neglect and
lack of funding of the pre-1989 era. Holocaust experts hope that the
impetus provided by the centers opening will boost both academic research
and the collection of original artifacts, many of which are still held by
survivors or victims families.

One challenge is that remembrance activities will repeatedly have to
engage not only survivors and their descendants but also those not
personally affected by the Holocaust, in a setting that is both worthy and
inspiring. The biggest challenge by far remains the creation of a moving
and comprehensive permanent exhibit--slated to open next April--and the
development of a wide-ranging educational program that will fulfill its
mission of providing young Hungarians with a comprehensive understanding
of the Holocaust and the plethora of dilemmas it raises, as the centers
mission statement declares.

The Holocaust Memorial Center opened its doors with three temporary
exhibits. The main exhibit, The Auschwitz Album, showcases a series of
photographs taken by SS officers documenting the arrival and selection
process of a transport of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia. The
photos in the exhibit are accompanied by original film footage showing the
everyday life of Jews in prewar Carpatho-Ruthenia.

One of the other two exhibits is titled The Memory of Pharrajimos and
deals with the Roma victims of the Holocaust through an inventive
audiovisual presentation of survivor testimonies. The other, called The
Trace Has Gone Cold, uses enormous flags to list the names of Hungarian
cities, towns, and villages that lost their Jewish communities partially
or entirely as a result of the Holocaust.

The inauguration of the new institution prompted praise at home and
abroad, not the least because of the political elites ability to find a
common platform on this still-thorny and overly politicized issue. But the
belated chance to commemorate the tragedy of 1944--when the Nazi
occupation began--also brought to the surface long-buried conflicts and
unfinished business.

The presence, degree, and type of anti-Semitism plaguing Hungary have been
constant topics of public debate both inside and outside the country.
Abroad, the subject had for several years almost dominated foreign
coverage of Hungary. Whether Hungarian manifestations of anti-Semitism are
qualitatively or quantitatively different from those elsewhere is
debatable. However, the use of implied or coded anti-Semitism--especially
around election times--is well documented.

For anyone wishing to be immersed in the murky waters of alternative
historical narratives in Hungary, the best place to start would be the
Terror House, an ultramodern and darkly stylish museum in the center of
Budapest. Here, visitors are confronted with 60 years of blood-soaked
history, but with a somewhat tendentious interpretation of the period. The
Terror Houses officially stated mission is to present the fate of Hungary
in the successive clasps of two foreign dictatorships, Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union. The museum deals with the period between the German
occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 and the March 1963 general amnesty,
which signaled the end of the retributions that followed the 1956
Hungarian revolution.

While the museum covers almost 20 years of Hungarys postwar communist
period--bringing home the inhumane monstrosity of the early Stalinist
period--it shows the fate of Hungarys Jewish and other Holocaust victims
through a suspiciously narrow lens. Indeed, if one were not familiar with
the increasing severity of anti-Semitic legislation and general social
climate in Hungary starting in the early 1920s, it would be easy to
conclude--based on the museums presentation--that responsibility for the
murder and wholesale robbery of Hungarian Jewry rested solely with the
countrys German occupiers and a handful of Hungarian thugs from the
pro-Nazi Arrow Cross militia.

Theres no mention of the four Jewish Laws, which between 1938 and 1944
first marginalized Jews politically, economically, and socially, and then
eventually facilitated their ghettoization and destruction. And Terror
House is conspicuously silent on the efficient and often enthusiastic
assistance of the Hungarian authorities in the rapid collection and
deportation of the more than 437,000 Hungarian citizens categorized as
Jews under the countrys racial laws. Survivors testified with unsettling
regularity that they didnt see a single German soldier until they arrived
in the camps.

The opening of the Terror House--or more precisely, the flurry of harsh
criticism it received in the opinion pages of liberal newspapers and
magazines--gave an unexpected boost to efforts to build a Holocaust
memorial and museum. Those efforts had until then appeared to progress
with painful slowness since the early 1990s as successive Hungarian
governments--even left-wing ones--showed little enthusiasm for the
project.

SUPPORT FROM A SURPRISING SOURCE

The right-wing government of Victor Orban and his Fidesz party, which was
often accused of tolerating or even encouraging the anti-Semitic fringes
of its political followers, surprised many by becoming the first
post-transition government to take concrete steps toward creating a
Holocaust institution. (Its commitment to the Terror House, however,
appeared to be much more serious, given the breathtaking speed with which
the project went from idea to completion.)

By early 2000, the government and the Jewish community had agreed to use a
derelict synagogue building and the surrounding plot as the site for a
Holocaust center. The Jewish community donated the plot, and the
government agreed to fund the construction of the new building complex. In
November 2000, the winner of the invitational architectural competition
was announced.

The project languished then, until the opening of the Terror House in
February 2002 and the increasingly harsh accusations aimed at Fidesz for
nationalistic campaign rhetoric combined to create a momentum that seemed
to push Fidesz into taking the next step by creating the Holocaust
Documentation Center and Memorial Collection Public Foundation, a
state-sponsored nonprofit organization. The public foundation was a legal
and, to a large extent, organizational successor to the Hungarian
Auschwitz Foundation, which in turn was a private organization composed
mainly of elderly survivors and a handful of historians and archivists who
had been collecting Holocaust-related documents since the early 1990s.
This new organization would manage a new Holocaust museum.

After the elections, Hungarys new Socialist government carried on the
previous governments plans to complete the new institution. Peter
Medgyessy, the new Hungarian prime minister, laid the buildings
cornerstone in December 2002, and the opening date was set for 16 April
2004--the 60th anniversary of the wholesale ghettoization of the Jews in
Hungary. That date has also served as the official Holocaust Memorial Day
in Hungary since its designation in 2002 by the Fidesz education minister,
Zoltan Pokorni, regarded as one of the partys true moderates.

But with the details in place, some in liberal and Jewish circles began to
voice their opposition to the buildings place and aesthetics. For these
critics, the ideal place for the building would have been the center of
downtown Budapest, where the citys old Jewish district was located. It was
there in late 1944 that the Jewish quarter was surrounded by makeshift
walls and became the Budapest ghetto. While the historical accuracy was
ideal, the necessary agreements among the Jewish community, the district,
and the government were too difficult to navigate.

Focusing on the actual building, critics expressed fears that the
incorporation of a former synagogue into a Holocaust museum would send the
wrong messages. The synagogue--built in 1923 and derelict since the early
1980s--would implicitly designate the place as something reserved for
Jews, taking away the possibility of catharsis from those not directly
afflicted by the Holocaust. Much criticism was aimed at the 9-meter-high
wall surrounding the complex, saying it closed the Holocausts memory in a
ghetto.

Yet more criticism was reserved for the restoration of the synagogue
building, which now displays most of its original glory but is designated
as exhibition space both on its floor and its galleries. Questions about
the limitations of the available exhibition space--less than 1,700 square
meters--completed the barrage of complaints that were often suffused with
heavy-handed demands for particular kinds of symbolism deemed appropriate
for a Holocaust institution.

SENSE AND POLITICAL SENSIBILITY

Concerns also centered on the potential reactions of Hungarys right-wing
electorate and whether the hoped-for political show of unity on the
importance of the institution would come to pass. In November 2003, the
polling firm Sonda Ipsos published its representative study on the
knowledge and attitudes of Hungarians on the Holocaust. The results were
decidedly mixed.

In terms of awareness and knowledge, the survey concluded that more than
half of the Hungarian population is ill-informed about the Holocaust. The
belief that Jewish people try to turn their persecution into gain became
significantly more widespread in Hungary between 1995 and 2003, rising
from 26 to 33 percent. The percentage of those who question the number of
Jewish Holocaust victims also grew.

On the positive side, more Hungarians than ever accepted that their
country bears some kind of responsibility for the Holocaust, and
three-quarters thought that it is important to preserve the Holocausts
memory. Most encouragingly, the number of those who believed the topic
should be taken off the agenda fell dramatically. While in 1995 73 percent
of the population held this view, only 42 percent did so in 2003.

In the end, fears that the kind of Jew-bashing and Holocaust-revisionism
that dominate right-wing Internet chat-rooms would appear in some kind of
diluted form in the conservative media proved largely unfounded. The
conservative media covered the events objectively--and the presence of
Fideszs entire leadership at the centers inauguration along with the
participation of two prominent party leaders in the reading of
names--cemented the sensible expulsion of daily politics from this years
Holocaust commemorations. In addition, Terror House showcased its own
temporary Holocaust exhibits, which were launched by the Socialist speaker
of parliament, Katalin Szili, and liberal Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky,
providing the liberal sides symbolic crossover.

Overall, and perhaps surprisingly, the Hungarian political elite made a
commendable show of unity on the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian
Holocaust and the opening of the museum. It came as a pleasant surprise to
those who feared that the occasion would fail to lift the topic out of the
overly politicized context that has for so long defined its fate in the
public discourse.

(source: Transitions Online)