Oct. 20


THE NETHERLANDS:

A Holocaust-era diary and love letters written by a Jewish teen to her
Dutch boyfriend while she was imprisoned in an internment camp in 1943
have been donated to a Dutch archives.

Archivists in the Dutch city of Tilburg on Tuesday announced the rare
discovery with parallels to the famed diary by Anne Frank.

The journal was kept by 18-year-old Helga Deen during the final month of
her detainment in a Dutch internment camp in April-July 1943. That July,
she was shipped off to a Nazi concentration camp in Sobibor, Poland with
her brother, father and mother. All four died at the camp.

``She kept the secret diary for her boyfriend in order to help him
understand what she was experiencing,'' said Yvonne Weling of the Tilburg
Regional Archive.

Deen recorded some of her day-to-day experiences for her boyfriend Kees
van den Berg, but even more of her emotions, Weling said.

``Maybe this diary will be a disappointment to you because it doesn't
contain facts,'' Deen wrote to Van den Berg. ``But maybe you'll be glad
that you find me in it: conflict, doubt, desperation, shyness,
emptiness.''

``If my will dies, I'll die too,'' she wrote in another entry.

``We are homeless, countryless and we have to adjust ourselves to that way
of life. What we have seen in these last months is indescribable, and for
someone who hasn't been there, unimaginable,'' she wrote.

Elsewhere, she recorded her relief on one occasion after her family was
once not selected for deportation -- and the fear they might be chosen
next time. On June 6th, 1943, 1,300 children were transported from Vught
to Sobibor and Auschwitz. Deen saw them leaving and wrote:

``Transport. It's too much. I'm destroyed and tomorrow again.''

Van den Berg had written back to Deen on some of the blank pages of the
diary, concealed within a school notebook marked ``Physics'' and
apparently transferred back and forth between the pair. He kept the diary
after Deen was deported, and saved it along with a lock of her hair.

It is not known how the two exchanged the letters or how her diary
ultimately came into Van den Berg's hands.

Weling said the family of Van den Berg, who has also died, donated the
diary to the archive earlier this year.

Deen's final entry was written on July 2, 1943. It contained a partially
illegible phrase ending ``... between the packages, because we're leaving
soon,'' apparently referring to an attempt to smuggle the diary out of the
internment camp.

Parts of the diary will be on display for one day only on Oct. 30 in
Tilburg, and the archive is negotiating with museums to show it elsewhere.

Anne Frank wrote her famous diary while she and her German-Jewish family
hid in an Amsterdam attic for 25 months.

They eventually were betrayed to the Nazis, and Anne died at age 15 of
typhus at Bergen-Belsen, Germany in 1945, just weeks before the British
army liberated the concentration camp.

Only her father survived the war, returning to collect Anne's notes and to
publish them. ``The Diary of Anne Frank'' became the first popular book on
the Holocaust, and she became a symbol of Jewish victimhood.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including some 100,000 from
the Netherlands.

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On the Net: Tilburg Regional Archive: http://regionaalarchief.tilburg.nl

(source: Associated Press)





FRANCE:

A new wave of anti-Semitism in France is an extremely worrying phenomenon
that poses a threat to the fabric of French society, according to a
government report published Tuesday.

It said anti-Semitism in France was not restricted to people of Arab
origin, Muslims and the far right, and proposed keeping a closer watch on
racism in the media and schools and creating a national watchdog to
monitor anti-Semitism.

``The new wave of anti-Semitic acts in the last few years is undeniable.
The threats and violence against French Jews are an obvious, new and
extremely worrying social factor,'' said the 50-page report, drawn up by
writer Jean-Christophe Rufin.

``Anti-Semitism and racism are not marginal subjects, even less so are
they communal matters -- they are at the heart of the evolution of our
society,'' he said.

``The fate of liberty and equality are being played out today on the field
of fraternity,'' he added, alluding to the three values espoused by the
French revolution in 1789 and cherished by France since then.

Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin hailed the report, which he had
ordered, as a sign of France's determination to crack down on
anti-Semitism.

But he acknowledged racist and anti-Semitic crimes had risen in the first
nine months of 2004 -- even though the rate had fallen in the third
quarter -- with 123 racist acts and 166 anti-Semitic acts reported.

``In both cases this is more than for the whole of 2003,'' Villepin said.
``Each of us must be extremely vigilant.''

Officials from President Jacques Chirac downwards have called for more
efforts to stop racism, intolerance and anti-Semitism in France.

The rise in anti-Semitic crime is often put down to tension between
France's 600,000 Jews and 5 million Muslims, but the report identified
other causes and found evidence of anti-Semitism among a variety of French
people.

Although Muslim North African immigrants are often blamed for anti-Semitic
acts, such crimes are also carried out by people on the margins of
society, it said.

``The new anti-Semitism seems more heterogeneous than believed by those
who see it as a problem specifically among people of Maghreb (North
African) origin and as a natural consequence of (violent) events in the
Middle East,'' it said.

``What we must convince the French people of is that anti-Semitism is the
common enemy of Jews and the Republic (of France).''

The report said the police should be informed of serious racist or
anti-Semitic incidents in schools and a series of legislative and judicial
measures to ``defend the democratic political system which alone can
protect all citizens equally.''

It said data published on anti-Semitic acts should be clear and should
compare the situation in France with other countries.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon caused a row earlier this year by
urging French Jews to emigrate to Israel to escape what he called the
wildest anti-Semitism. Sharon later ended the spat by praising France for
fighting anti-Semitism.

(source: Reuters)