August 21



USA/NEVADA:

Holocaust survivor pays tribute to American paratroopers who freed him


As George Lucius Salton watched 118 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne
Division parachute Thursday morning into Stead Airport, he recalled the
first time he met American paratroopers.

It was spring 1945, and Salton, then 14, had survived internment in 10
Nazi concentration camps in his native Poland. He was a prisoner in the
Wobbien camp and had almost lost his will to live.

"I had survived up until that time through luck, first and foremost," he
said. "It was luck and help from a few special, kind people that kept me
alive. So many people, stronger and smarter than I, did not survive."

But Salton, a Polish Jew, was starving, exhausted and ready for death that
day six decades ago. He heard gunshots in the distance and asked God to
forgive his sins and punish the Nazis who killed his family and millions
of others. The shooting stopped and he saw prisoners running towards the
center of the camp where the bodies of prisoners were piled like logs.

"A small group of soldiers stood near the bodies and around them hundreds
of skeletal and half-dead prisoners were dancing, embracing, laughing and
shouting with joy," he said. "Americans! The Americans were here."

He wept, he said.

"This was the impossible dream come true," he said. "I had lived with the
Angel of Death and now I stood among the angels of life. I shouted until
my voice was hoarse: The Americans are here! My God, we are free."

The American angels were soldiers of the 504th Parachute Infantry
Regiment, a part of the 82nd Airborne. Salton, author of "The 23rd Psalm:
A Holocaust Memoir," is in Reno to attend the 58th annual convention of
the 82nd Airborne Division Association at Circus Circus Hotel Casino.

"In those days I didn't know what unit they were from," Salton said.
"There were Americans, that was good enough."

Salton came to the United States, joined the Army and went to universities
on the G.I. Bill. He worked in the defense industry and never forgot the
dirty, tired men who cut the barbed wire and set him free.

"I've waited a lifetime to thank them," he said. "The 82nd Airborne saved
my life and they continue to save other lives. I came here to say thank
you
and God bless you."

Salton's book, recently released in paperback, tells the story of his
ordeal. He said although he has tried to put the Holocaust behind him, it
has always been in his thoughts, just under the surface.

"I haven't allowed it to dominate my life, but there's no way I can ever
forget it," he said. "I wrote the book because I feel a responsibility to
tell people about it, what human beings are capable of. History forgotten
is history repeated."

He said several World War II veterans will be at the convention, including
one of the soldiers from the 504th who cut the barbed wire at the
concentration camp.

"I'll be meeting him and that will be an emotional moment," Salton said.
"But they are all liberators and all deserve the credit. They were a
generation fated to leave their homes and free others from slavery."

The men and women jumping from the planes today are their successors.

Many of the 82nd Airborne troopers in Thursday's jump were veterans of the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The troopers have the weekend off to join
the veterans.

"It's good to be home again; I'm glad to be back," said Spc. Justin
Verbarendse of Suquamish, Wash., who served in Afghanistan and was at the
battle of Fallujah in Iraq. "It's going to be a fun weekend in Reno at the
convention. I've got some family members in Phoenix who may come up to see
me."

As Verbarendse and 117 other troopers, including division commander Maj.
Gen. William B. Caldwell, jumped from C-130 transport planes, the crowd in
the bleachers yelled and cheered.

"It makes me proud to see them," said Kimmy Porta-Garcia of Fernley, who
said her late father was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne in World
War II. "My dad can't be here, so I'm here for him. The tradition
continues."

More than 2,000 veterans and family members are scheduled to attend the
82nd Airborne Association convention. Membership is open to all airborne
and glider unit veterans, including Army Rangers and Special Forces. Many
of the veterans attended Thursday's jump, a part of the 82nd's regular
proficiency exercises.

"All these young guys you see here make the hair on the back of my neck
stand up," said Jim Evanoff of Phoenix, a division from 1953 to 1956. "So
many of them are just back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I wouldn't have
missed this for anything."

"I'd travel the length of the country to see these guys."

(source: Reno Gazette-Journal)




USA//FLORIDA:

Holocaust museum finds new home in old Hollywood nightclub


In Hollywood, amid the shops, clubs and restaurants of this city's
revitalized downtown will someday be a space for the solemn remembrance
and quiet study of a bitter time in human history.

A defunct South Beach-style nightclub will, in little more than a year,
become the first permanent home of a respected Holocaust museum and
educational center. The 24-year-old Holocaust Documentation and Education
Center has purchased and will be moving into a renovated three-story Art
Deco building on Harrison Street.

The center will be an important addition to the city's burgeoning arts and
culture district.

"We see it as a positive," said Jim Edwards, executive director of the
city's Downtown Community Redevelopment Agency. "It's a regional
attraction that will draw people from great distances."

The Holocaust center has amassed a collection of about 1,800 documents,
photos and artifacts related to the murder of about 6 million European
Jews by Nazis during World War II. The highlight of its collection,
however, is 2,000 oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Those stories are
being videotaped and transcribed in English and Spanish.

"It's been a dream of the survivors to have an actual place they can go,
where their stories can be told," said Rositta Kenigsberg, the center's
executive vice president. "It's a home."

And it will be the center's first home. Since it was established in 1980,
the nonprofit, nondenominational center hasn't had a place to call its
own. Its collection has traveled around the region in temporary exhibits
but never had an exhibit under its own roof.

The new home was once a nightspot called Deco Drive, which closed late
last year. The city bought the deco-styled structure, built in the 1940s,
for $1.2 million. It sold the building to the Holocaust center for the
same price but will earn interest after financing the deal.

For Edwards and other redevelopment officials, the center is a perfect fit
with downtown Hollywood's new image, which includes an ArtsPark to be
developed in nearby Young Circle, an art academy and a playhouse soon to
be relocated there.

"Downtown Hollywood is developing an arts and cultural orientation. The
Holocaust center is another component of that," Edwards said.

"The Hollywood community has been extremely warm and helpful and desirous
of our presence," Kenigsberg said.

But the center will be more than just a museum. It has a strong academic
bent and provides teaching materials for Florida's public school
instructors, who are mandated by law to teach about the Holocaust. The
center's research materials can also be a valuable source for scholars.
"All of these will be available for research and study," Kenigsberg said.

Besides a museum, the center will have a bookstore, library and classrooms
where it will continue its popular "prejudice reduction" program, in which
Holocaust survivors share heart-wrenching stories with students.

Rather than emphasizing the horror of the Holocaust, the center will take
a more intellectual approach, teaching about how the Holocaust developed,
how people survived, how they were aided by friends and rescued by
liberators, and, ultimately, what lessons it imparts about prejudice.

"We have been very meticulous about how we tell the story. It's not a
story of victims," said Kenigsberg, who was born to Holocaust survivors in
an Austrian displaced persons camp. "The Holocaust is not about death. The
Holocaust is about the resilience of life."

For now, the center's eight staffers operate out of a North Miami Beach
office crammed with boxes and bookshelves full of Holocaust material. They
plan to start moving to their new home in December, with the center to
open in early 2006.

Among all the documents and histories will be a Nazi flag seized and
signed by American soldiers during the liberation of a concentration camp.
"Let's not forget the misery this flag brought the world" begins the
soldiers' inscription.

The center will also display a grouping of 12 life-size statues by
Holocaust survivor Isaac Weinstock, 74, of Lauderhill. The sculptures
depict his family being rounded up by Nazi soldiers in 1941 Romania. Stark
figures, faces filled with fear, raise hands in supplication or cower on
bended knee.

Weinstock, who also lectures on the Holocaust, said he's honored to have
his work in the new center. "It makes me happy that I'll be able to
contribute," he said, "because people will be able to see what hatred has
done to others."

(source: Sun-Sentinel)




USA//PENNSYLVANIA:

Feds: More Suspected Ex-Nazis in the Area


The head of a federal agency that hunts down ex-Nazis for deportation
says Anton Geiser, a retired Mercer County steelworker accused
of being a German death camp guard during World War II, isn't the only
Pennsylvanian suspected of such activities.

Eli Rosenbaum heads the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, created in 1979 by President Carter to track down Nazis
who emigrated to the United States.

Rosenbaum said his agency has active investigations in Pennsylvania
including "promising investigations" in western Pennsylvania.

Rosenbaum's group has accused 131 people of being since it was formed and
has proven its case against 94 of them.

Geiser, a 79-year-old from Sharon, hasn't commented on the accusations
which were first leveled last Monday, nor has his attorney.

Geiser is accused of being an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp in 1943. If that's proven, he would be deported and lose his
citizenship and Social Security benefits.

(source: Associated Press)





USA//MICHIGAN:

Six Michigan museums check collections for works stolen by Nazis


Six Michigan museums are participating in an online service to publicize
works they own that may have been looted by the Nazis in the 1930s and
1940s.

Government and private agencies have been laboring since 1945 to identify
and return Nazi-looted art to its rightful owners, but the mission is
still woefully incomplete.

The six are Cranbrook Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Flint
Institute of Arts, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Kresge Art Museum (at
Michigan State University) and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

They are among the 113 museums listed in the online service called the
Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org). Established by the
American Association of Museums in September 2003, the portal is a
national registry of museum objects that may have a questionable
provenance, or history of ownership.

The objects changed hands in Europe from 1933-45, when the Nazis illegally
confiscated vast quantities of art. Eventually, many of the stolen works
were sold or donated to U.S. museums.

Traditionally, museums carefully trace the provenance of all paintings.
But tracking such changes in ownership for the Nazi-era paintings has
become more compelling because museum accreditation by the American
Association of Museums depends on it.

Accreditation provides museums with national recognition and shows that
the institution is operating "on all levels according to the highest and
most professional standards and practices," according to a statement on
the AAM Web site.

The AAM has 16,000 members, including 3,100 institutions.

Museum directors also say that the restitution of stolen art is a guiding
ethical issue.

"As a public museum we simply must aim for the highest standards," said
James Steward, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Through the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, participating museums
make available to potential claimants information about works with
pertinent gaps in their ownership histories. Titles, artists' names and
descriptions appear together with links to museum pages containing
additional data. Claimants must have clear proof of ownership -- wills,
records, photos -- to reclaim stolen art or settle equitably with museums.

The Michigan museums represented in the portal have holdings in European
painting, sculpture and decorative arts -- items in which Nazis
trafficked.

"It's similar to the Native American repatriation issues that museums with
Native American art had to deal with maybe 10 years ago. That was U.S.
law, and this is international law," says Susan Bandes, Kresge Art Museum
director, who is hiring a part-time person for up to eight months to
research the collection. "Ethically it's something we have to do. If you
have a collection, there are complications that come with having it."

The AAM in 2000 formulated procedures for identifying possibly looted art
in a joint agreement with the Association of Art Museum Directors and the
Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

The portal today lists 9,854 art objects submitted by 64 museums.

Only two museums -- the Detroit Institute of Arts and Cranbrook Art Museum
-- list specific works and provide links. The DIA lists 373 items from its
Department of European Painting, and furnishes links to a "Provenance
Research" page. Historically, the DIA has compensated original owners and
heirs for two stolen works: a Monet landscape, "The Seine at Asnieres," in
1950; and a 17th-century seascape, "A Man-O-War and Other Ships off he
Dutch Coast" by Ludolf Backhuysen, in 2002.

The Backhuysen compensation, completed before the portal was created,
involved cooperation between the DIA and Trafalgar Galleries, the London
dealer through which the museum bought the work. Suspicions about its
provenance, first voiced by curator George Keyes, were confirmed by
London's Art Loss Registry, a private, international database of stolen
art.

The registry determined that the painting had been stolen from a
Dutch-Jewish collector in 1942, and located the collector's heirs. The DIA
purchased the painting from the heirs for an undisclosed sum.

"We are delighted with the outcome," DIA Director Graham W. Beal said when
the acquisition was completed.

Cranbrook lists four questionable paintings, and links computer users to
an illustrated "WW II Provenance Research" page. The page was honored as a
model for smaller museums at the AAM's annual meeting in Milwaukee in
2003, said museum Director Greg Wittkopp.

Grand Rapids is assessing its entire collection in conjunction with its
move to a new downtown facility in November 2006. The Kresge and U-M
museums have secured university money for provenance research. At the
Flint Institute of Arts, staff members spend one day each week surveying
objects.

(source: Michigan Live News)





GERMANY:

Germans draw blank in Holocaust art hunt


It was meant to bring some comfort to the survivors of the Holocaust and
the many other groups who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

But a high-profile German government initiative to track down the real
owners of thousands of valuable artworks and cultural artefacts looted by
Hitlers troops has met with resounding failure.

Five years after a government pledge to track down and return valuable
pieces of art seized from Jews and other "enemies" of the Third Reich,
just 12 out of more than 70,000 items posted missing are back in the right
hands.

Of the 6,000 museums across the once-divided country that were contacted
to check their collections for stolen art, only 165 have so far responded.

Michael Franz, head of the Co-ordination Office for Lost Art, a government
run agency in the east German city of Magdeburg, says bureaucratic red
tape and the unwillingness on the part of museums to check archives has
hindered efforts to track down so-called "Holocaust art".

"Only 165 museums have reported to us since the government signed a
declaration to track down looted artwork in 1999. And most of those said
they had found nothing suspicious about the origins of the artwork in
their collections," said Franz.

Over the past four years the co-ordination office has posted its findings,
along with descriptions of items people are trying to locate, on an
internet database.

The website, www.lostart.de now has a listing of around 70,000 missing
cultural objects, from paintings by famous artists such as Van Gogh and
Monet and priceless books and porcelain, to smaller objects which, Franz
said, are precious to the families who have lost them.

"Some of the items we have on our list are very valuable in terms of cost,
but all of them are valuable on a personal level to those families that
lost them," he said.

Among those objects missing is the famous Van Gogh work Painter on His Way
to Tarascon, which would be worth tens of millions of pounds. Painted in
1888 by the great Dutch master, it hung in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in
Magdeburg until the Second World War and then disappeared.

Most of the missing items were seized by the Nazis before the war or later
by the Soviet army, but others were looted from museums, libraries and
archives during the war, many destined for Hitlers private museum. More
than 50 years on, many may have made their way back into public
collections.

So far, however, only 12 restitutions have been recorded by the
co-ordination office that have come about as a result of their work. They
include a wooden statue of St George and also a painting by Van der
Velden.

But while art experts believe a handful of German museums may knowingly
try to avoid returning stolen works, the overwhelming majority simply do
not have the staff to handle time-consuming, labour-intensive provenance
research.

Another problem is time. With the passing of almost 60 years since the end
of the war, survivors who have first-hand knowledge of art stolen are
passing away.

"It is a race against the clock," says Monica Dugot from the Holocaust
Claims Processing Office. She added that claims made for looted family
treasures were often hard to follow up as little hard documentation
showing rightful owners survived the war.

"A general description, or even a title, usually does not suffice for a
claim," she said. "What is necessary is paper documentation showing
ownership, or a photo that researchers can use in their search, and even
then its not certain the artefact can be found."

German museums are not alone in hanging on to what they have got. The US
Supreme Court ruled in June that Maria Altmann, a Jewish woman living in
California, can sue the Austrian government for the return of a series of
Gustaz Klimt works, valued at $150m, that belonged to her family.

Altmann, 88, who fled Vienna during the war has fought a four-year legal
battle to win the right to sue for the return of the paintings, which were
looted from the family home in the Austrian capital and are now held in
the national Austrian Gallery in Vienna. The Austrian government argues
the paintings belong to the state.

Last month, the veteran British actress Elizabeth Taylor went to court to
defend herself against claims that a 10m Van Gogh adorning the walls of
her Bel-Air mansion belongs to a Canadian lawyer and his family who say
the Nazis took the masterpiece from their German great-grandmother. The
two-time Oscar winner argues that her father legitimately bought the
115-year-old painting - View of the Asylum of Saint-Remy - at a London
auction in 1963.

Despite the wrangles and the disappointments, those involved in the
restitution of artwork say they are not going to stop trying to track down
the looted art.

"We have a duty to pursue these cases. There are a lot of survivors who
are just trying to achieve closure on a terrible time in their past," said
Dugot.

But while Franz admitted the task was an immense one, there was always
hope. "As long as we do not know that something has been destroyed we
still have hope for it," he said.

"Experience has shown that some of these objects have popped up in
different places all over the world."

(soure: The Scotsman)





AUSTRIA:
31% of Austrians favorably reflect on Nazis


More than a third of Austrians believe that the Nazi era was in some ways
positive, although pro-Nazi sentiment in Austria has dropped over the past
two decades, according to a poll published Thursday.

But Peter Uhlram of the Fessel-GfK Institute, which conducted the survey,
cautioned against inferring from the poll results that anti-Semitism is
widespread in Austria.

Most who believed life was in some ways good under Hitler likely looked
back at developments other than the Holocaust as the positive sides of
Nazi rule, such as construction of the first Autobahn and sharply lowered
unemployment, he said.

Uhlram said 31 percent of 4,000 respondents over 15 agreed with the
statement that the Nazi era had "good and bad" elements, compared to 47%
in 1987.

Twenty-seven percent of Austrian respondents questioned in the survey said
the period had been "exclusively bad," 40% said it was "mostly bad," and
1% said it had been "mostly good or almost exclusively good," said Uhlram.

The survey, conducted between March 9 and June 1, had a margin of error of
1%. Excerpts were published Thursday by the Austria Press Agency.
In the past two decades, Austria has largely turned away from depicting
itself as a victim of Hitler and begun acknowledging its major role in the
Holocaust.

Political and church leaders now routinely speak out against anti-Semitism
and other forms of intolerance that fed the rise of Nazi rule in this
country and Germany.

The government has also paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in
compensation claims to Nazi victims or their offspring.

Still, Joerg Haider powered his rightist Freedom Party into the government
in 2001 with populist rhetoric that was sometimes tinged with
anti-Semitism.

Although he has toned down his comments in recent years and the Freedom
Party, has lost much of its support, it still has an extreme right-wing
element known to admire Hitler.

(soure: Associated Press)