Sept. 2



POLAND:

Poland Buries Remains Believed to Be Jews


The remains of 11 people believed to be Jews killed in the 1943 Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising against Nazi occupiers were buried Thursday in a ceremony
hailed by Jewish leaders as a sign of the rekindled relationship between
their community and other Poles.

The victims' bones were laid in a simple pine coffin and lowered into the
ground, along with bags containing the clothes and shoes of the men, women
and children, in the capital's Jewish cemetery. Members of Warsaw's tiny
Jewish community and Israeli Ambassador David Peleg then shoveled earth
over the remains.

A second pine coffin, with the remains of about ten other Holocaust
victims recently discovered in a mass grave in a town outside Warsaw, was
also buried.

"This is an important event in that it enables us to pay further respect
to the victims of the Nazi terror," said Warsaw's main Rabbi Michael
Schudrich before the ceremony.

"It is also an example of Polish-Jewish cooperation - that our mutual
experience of World War II is binding us more together as we build
together toward the future."

Some six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, largely in German
death camps operated on Polish soil. Almost all of pre-World War II
Poland's population of 3.5 million Jews were wiped out, with the community
numbering only some 20,000 today.

The plight of the Jews was largely ignored in the postwar decades under
communist rule, with the community only beginning to reassert itself after
the return to democracy in 1989.

The remains were found several weeks ago during the renovation of a
building that stood in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation
of Poland, and also in a mass grave in the nearby town of Nadarzyn,
Schudrich said.

The age of the bones and witness testimony suggest they most likely were
Holocaust victims, he said.

When the Germans moved to deport the 60,000 Jews who remained in the
Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943, which held some 450,000 Jews at its peak
two years earlier, some fought back valiantly against overwhelming odds.
They eventually succumbed and the Nazis razed the ghetto.

"For more than 60 years these remains were buried in an unholy way, today
we are fulfilling our obligation to lay them to rest in a religious way,"
Schudrich said in his observances.

Peleg on Wednesday honored two gentile families in Poznan, in western
Poland, for their actions during the war saving a 9-year-old Jewish boy
who escaped a transport to the Auschwitz death camp. He awarded them
"Righteous Among the Nations" medals from Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust
memorial institute.

Some 6,000 Poles have been given the honor - the most of any single
nation.

(source: Associated Press)





USA//OREGON:

Oregon's Holocaust memorial opens


For years, Chella Kryszek had nightmares about the dark, crowded cattle
cars that shuttled her from concentration camp to concentration camp as a
Dutch Jew during the Holocaust.

She remembers stepping out of one such car in 1943 outside the notorious
Auschwitz-Berkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Smoke and flames
painted the sky.

"We had arrived in hell," the 76- year-old Portland woman said.

Six decades after Kryszek's journey, and after 10 years of
often-contentious planning, Portland now has a Holocaust memorial that
honors the roughly 130 Holocaust survivors living in Oregon and southwest
Washington.

The Oregon Holocaust Memorial, which opened yesterday in a quiet corner of
Portland's heavily wooded Washington Park, also is dedicated to the local
survivors' friends and relatives who were killed by the Nazis.

Visitors to the Oregon Holocaust Memorial first see a replica of a
European town square, strewn with cast bronze artifacts representing what
was left behind -- a tattered teddy bear, a pair of broken eyeglasses.

A path of Belgian cobblestones leads to a 9-foot-tall stone wall bearing
quotations from interviews with regional Holocaust survivors on one side
and the names of their lost relatives on the other. On one end, buried
beneath a 12 1/2-ton basalt boulder, is a vault filled with soil from the
six major extermination camps used in the Holocaust.

In 1995, Portland designated 23,850 square feet in Washington Park as the
site of the memorial. Local organizations and individuals donated most of
the $1.5 million spent to build the memorial.

(source: Associated Press)





GERMANY:

More payouts for Nazi sterilisation victims
Wed 1 September, 2004 18:58



BERLIN (Reuters) - Some 2,500 people forcibly sterilised by the Nazis will
see their compensation payments almost double under an overhaul of state
pay-outs to Hitler's German victims.

Payments for those who were sterilised will rise to 100 euros (68 pounds)
a month from 61 euros and many other German victims of Nazi abuses will
become eligible for compensation for the first time, the German Finance
Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Nazis sterilised tens of thousands they considered "unfit" to have
children, including people who were mixed race, blind, deaf, severely
depressed or physically disabled.

"People who were sterilised suffered a terrible injustice, which affected
their whole lives. They couldn't start their own families and now in old
age they are often alone," Marga Elser and Volker Beck, lawmakers from the
ruling Social Democrat/Green coalition, said in a statement last week.

"We believe Germany has a moral duty to allow them to live out their
twilight years with dignity."

The ministry also said all those jailed by the Nazis on political, racial
or ideological grounds could claim 77 euros for each month of their
imprisonment up to a total of 2,556 euros. Previously, only some former
prisoners were eligible for compensation.

It also said it would relax the criteria for claims by children of victims
of euthanasia programmes and other Nazi-sanctioned abuses.

Six years ago Germany annulled thousands of verdicts passed by Nazi courts
in cases where people were tried under laws deemed to have violated
"elementary principles of justice" or which supported the ideological aims
of the Third Reich.

(source: Reuters)