Nov. 27



(in) SWITZERLAND:

Holocaust Stamps Auctioned But Museums Stay Away


Unique stamps, envelopes and cards mailed from Nazi-era death camps and
Jewish ghettoes were sold at auction on Wednesday but the world's
Holocaust museums left private collectors to sweep them up.

The hundreds of historic, and emotive, items were part of a philatelic
collection put together over 40 years by U.S. lawyer Herbert Rosedale who
won fame acting for parents trying to free their children from the grip of
religious cults. Rosedale, of Romanian Jewish origin, died in 2003,
leaving the collection -- much of it not catalogued -- to his family.

"It was the collectors bidding here, not museums or institutions and not
even dealers," said auctioneer David Feldman after the sale which took
bids over the Internet and telephone as well as from the hall.

The two major lots -- over 500 envelopes, or covers, from big camps like
Auschwitz and from small short-lived ones, and some 100 items of mail from
Nazi-appointed Jewish ghetto leaders, or Judenrat -- were bought by a
French collector.

The buyer, whom Feldman's Geneva-based auction house declined to identify,
paid a total of 56,000 Swiss francs ($47,600) for them, plus 18 percent
commission.

"But museums today, even the most high-profile ones, don't have the
budgets for this type of purchase," said Feldman aide Karol Weyna who
prepared the vast Rosedale "Holy Land and Holocaust" legacy for the sale
on behalf of the lawyer's family.

The whole collection, which covered the region from Turkish rule in the
19th century through to Israel of the 1990s, brought some 520,000 Swiss
francs ($440,000), said Feldman.

The total was more than 50 percent above the estimate.

"A PHENOMENAL HOLDING"

Of the two major lots, Weyna described the concentration and forced labor
camp collection as "a phenomenal holding that begs for someone to research
fully and present in exhibition form."

It included mail, often simple but deliberately deceptive "I am well"
cards from camp inmates to family and friends left behind in ghettoes, and
from guards and officials to their families and to relief organizations
like the Red Cross.

(source: Reuters, Nov. 24)





USA//NEW YORK:

Holocaust Survivor Reunites With Rescuer


In a meeting that left her trembling with emotion, Hanna Morawiecka was
reunited with the Jewish boy whose family she helped rescue from
extermination in Poland during World War II.

A beaming Andre Nowacki, now 68, greeted the Polish woman at Kennedy
International Airport.

``Hanna Morawiecka, my little sister,'' he said Wednesday after hugging
her and presenting her with a bouquet of carnations.

``You haven't changed since you were 9,'' she told him in Polish.

They first met in 1942, when Morawiecka, her two sisters and their mother
took in the Nowacki family after Nowacki's father was sent to a Nazi death
camp. The Catholic family, at risk to their own lives, provided a safe
haven for the Jewish mother and son at their Warsaw home.

If the Germans had discovered the Nowackis, the Morawiecka sisters ``would
have been shot on the spot,'' said Nowacki, whose father owned a knitting
factory. Morawiecka's father was a member of the Underground.

Both families fled a burning Warsaw in 1944 after the Germans moved in to
quell an uprising, and they hid in the countryside around the Polish city.
The families went their
separate ways after exchanging promises to find each other after the war.

Nowacki, who says more than 100 of his family members died in the
Holocaust, made his way to Israel, Canada and then the United States. He
carried with him through every stop the memory of Morawiecka, five years
his senior, and the bravery of her family.

Nowacki spent two decades searching for them, starting about 40 years ago
and going through the Red Cross and other organizations and individuals.
Finally, having all but given up, he told a friend in Poland whose father
was unemployed, ``I will hire your father to find my family. And he did
it in one day. He had connections.''

For decades, Morawiecka had thought Nowacki was dead. But one day in
Warsaw, she said, ``a man came to my apartment and said, 'Do you know
Andre Nowacki?'''

She phoned her sisters ``and I said, 'He's alive!'''

Morawiecka and Nowacki kept up their contact. But it wasn't until this
week, when she boarded a plane to spend Thanksgiving with him and his
American family, that the pair met face to face. The Jewish Foundation
for the Righteous brought the pair together.

Nowacki, a food industry chemist who lives in Long Beach, was joined at
the reunion by his wife, Eve, and their two adult daughters.

``I feel so euphoric that I practically can't see now,'' Morawiecka said.

------
On the Net: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous: http://www.jfr.org

(source: Associated Press, Nov. 25)





GERMANY:

Ex - British Spy Honored As Holocaust Hero


A former British spy credited with using his cover as a passport officer
to save thousands of Jews from Nazi Germany was honored as a hero
Wednesday at his country's embassy in Berlin.

Frank Foley was posted to Berlin in the early 1920s by Britain's Secret
Intelligence Service, the predecessor of MI6.

After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, Foley used his official job as
the embassy's passport control officer to issue visas to Jews fleeing Nazi
persecution -- often bending rules under which London was trying to limit
Jewish migration to British-ruled Palestine.

``Without diplomatic immunity, at considerable personal risk to himself,
this unassuming man chose to follow his conscience,'' British Ambassador
Sir Peter Torry said before unveiling a plaque at the embassy to Foley,
whose 120th birthday would have fallen Wednesday.

``He went to the concentration camps to secure the release of Jewish
prisoners'' and ``sheltered Jews at great risk to himself and his family
in his own home,'' Torry said.

Foley died in 1958. Israel's national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, in
1999 awarded him the title of ``Righteous Among the Nations.''

(source: Associated Press)