Jan. 15



ENGLAND:



A Prince Who Forgot History Angers Many


Britain's royal family could hardly be described as immune to stumbles and
scandals. But even by its standards, Prince Harry - son of Prince Charles
and Diana, the Princess of Wales, grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, third in
line to the throne - has broken new ground.

After photographs of him wearing a Nazi swastika at a
private fancy-dress party last weekend appeared in The Sun,
Jewish groups from Los Angeles to Jerusalem protested, and
some people urged him to visit Auschwitz to understand why
he caused such offense.

The affront was all the deeper because the pictures
appeared two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz - an event that is to be observed
by other members of the royal family, including the queen.

In a written statement Wednesday night, Harry said he was
"very sorry if I have caused offense."

"It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize," he said.


But he came under pressure on Thursday to offer a more
direct apology. "It would be appropriate if we heard from
him in person about how contrite he is," said Michael
Howard, the leader of the opposition Conservatives. But the
royal family said the prince would not be making a further
statement and did not plan to attend the Holocaust
commemoration.

Prime Minster Tony Blair said it was up to Buckingham
Palace to resolve the matter.

Clearly, Harry's brief apology did little to quiet the
storm of criticism. "This was a shameful act," said Rabbi
Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal human
rights group in Los Angeles. Urging the prince to attend
the commemoration on Jan. 27, Rabbi Hier said, "There he
will see the results of the hated symbol he so foolishly
and brazenly chose to wear."

There were calls, too, for the 20-year-old Harry to be
barred from entering Sandhurst, Britain's premier military
academy. He is supposed to enter this year, and the army
indicated Thursday that this newest notoriety would not
alter the plan.

But above all, the debate provoked some introspection about
whether the memory of the death camps had endured across
the generations.

In Jerusalem, Robert Rozett, the director of the library at
Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said the photographs of
Harry wearing a swastika showed that "the lessons of the
Holocaust have not really entered deeply within his
understanding and consciousness."

The photographs showed the prince at the party - the theme
was "native and colonial," according to The Sun - wearing a
khaki shirt with German insignia and a red, white and black
swastika armband.

Prince Harry has a reputation for headline-making behavior,
including alcohol and marijuana abuse, reported cheating in
an examination and an incident last year when he was seen
grappling with a photographer outside a nightclub.

The royal family, and especially Prince Philip, the queen's
husband, has committed an array of gaffes. Prince Philip
reinforced his reputation for ill-chosen utterances in 1997
when he addressed Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany as
Reichskanzler - the title used by Hitler.

Not only that. As The Evening Standard, among other
newspapers, noted on Thursday, the royal family had an
ambiguous relationship with Germany and the Nazis. The
House of Windsor was formed in 1917 when the royal family
changed its name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a name it acquired
with the marriage in 1840 of Queen Victoria and Albert of
Saxe-Coburg, which was then a duchy in central Germany.

In the 1930's, moreover, some members were widely seen as
openly sympathetic to the Nazis. In one iconic photograph,
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, smiling broadly, were seen
greeting Hitler.

Prince Harry has sought to modify his image by working last
year to help AIDS sufferers in Lesotho and being
photographed recently with his elder brother, Prince
William, 22, loading relief supplies for tsunami victims.
The princes' mother died in a car crash in 1997.

One former armed forces minister, Doug Henderson, said the
prince was "not suitable" for the military academy, and
Dickie Arbiter, a former Buckingham Palace spokesman, said
the incident showed that Prince Charles did not have "the
right discipline over his children."

(source: New York Times)

*************************

Straw to attend Holocaust ceremony in Poland


Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, will visit the Nazi concentration camp
at Auschwitz in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation
during the Second World War, the Foreign Office said today.

The announcement follows criticism that the British delegation at the
ceremony on January 27 did not include a high-ranking British official.
The Government had been planning to send two less senior members: Denis
MacShane, the Europe Minister, and Ivor Caplin, the Defence Minister.

This low-key presence stood in stark contrast to that of other major
European nations. Presidents Jacques Chirac of France, Vladimir Putin of
Russia and Horst Koehler of Germany are to be greeted by President
Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland.

The Foreign Office had insisted that the British delegation was
"appropriate". Mr Caplin, who is Jewish, is the junior defence minister
responsible for veterans' affairs while Mr MacShane, whose father was a
Polish army officer, has overall responsibility for European matters.

But the junior status of the British ministerial team was heavily
criticised by Nicolas Soames, the Shadow Defence Secretary.

He said: "This is yet another misreading by the Government of the
symbolism of a major event of the most profound importance and
significance. To send two junior members is wholly unacceptable and will
be regarded as an affront by all thinking people."

The Prime Minster will be attending Holocaust Memorial Day events with the
Queen in London, including receptions at St James's Palace and Whitehall
and a memorial concert in the Palace of Westminster.

The Queen will be represented at the Polish ceremony by her youngest son,
Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex.

(source: London Times)







FRANCE:

Large Holocaust center to open in Paris


Europe's largest center dedicated to information and research on the
Jewish Holocaust will be opened in the Marais district of the city.

The center will open Jan. 27, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
the Auschwitz death camp, at a site already occupied by the Memorial to
the Unknown Jewish Martyr, it was announced Thursday.

The memorial has been expanded by restructuring the five-story building it
occupies, creation of two new levels in the basement for a museum, and
construction of a new six-level building. The complex will include a new
auditorium, research facility, library, multi-media center, and
administrative offices.

Another major addition to the site will be a wall bearing the names of
76,000 Jews deported from France during the Nazi occupation between 1942
and 1944. Many of these were identified by the Center for Contemporary
Jewish Documentation, which will be part of the new center.

The documentation project was begun secretly in Grenoble in 1943 on the
initiative of Isaac Schneersohn, who purchased the Marais site for
Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1956. The enlarged memorial and
center will be known officially as the Shoah Memorial, using another name
for the Holocaust.

(source: Big News Network)


******************

Le Pen Defends Nazis, and Draws Fire


Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front, has
built his 50-year political career on a message of barely disguised racism
and anti-Semitism. But his latest attempt to rewrite the history of World
War II has provoked deep shock and loud demands here for his punishment.

In an extensive interview with a right-wing weekly that
came to light this week, he was quoted as saying the Nazi
occupation of France was not "particularly inhumane," that
"excesses" were inevitable and that France had to be
delivered from "lies about its history."

The timing of the remarks so close to the 60th anniversary
of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in
southwestern Poland on Jan. 27, 1945, have added to the
anger. "Despicable" is how Justice Minister Dominique
Perben described Mr. Le Pen's remarks in announcing a
formal criminal investigation into whether he had broken
the law.

"In denying the history of France, he's disqualified
himself as a politician," Mr. Perben said on Europe 1
radio, adding that Mr. Le Pen "must explain what he said
before a court of law."

The remarks by Mr. Le Pen, 76, were published last Thursday
in Rivarol, a small-circulation, far-right weekly
newspaper. But it was only when the daily newspaper Le
Monde published the highlights on Wednesday afternoon that
France's political class reacted.

Under a 1990 revision of the press law, Mr. Le Pen could be
charged with publicly denying the existence of "crimes
against humanity" committed by the Nazis in World War II or
with making an "apology for war crimes." If convicted, he
could be sentenced to five years in prison and fined
$60,000.

In an interview with RTL radio this morning, Mr. Le Pen
said that his freedom of speech was under assault, that he
was being attacked because of his opposition to the new
European Union Constitution and that he stood by his words.


"They are true, and it is rather scandalous that, 60 years
after the war, one cannot express oneself in a coherent and
calm way on these subjects," he said.

Before an appearance in court on Thursday, where he was
appealing a conviction last spring for "inciting racial
hatred," Mr. Le Pen said it was "astonishing and shocking
that the justice minister has not accorded me the
presumption of innocence."

About 76,000 Jews were deported to death camps during the
Nazi occupation of France from 1940 until 1944, with the
help of the collaborationist Vichy government. Only about
2,500 of them survived. Thousands of French civilians were
killed in attacks by the German Army, especially as the war
neared an end.

Mr. Le Pen, who in 1987 dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as
a mere "detail" of World War II history, has been convicted
of racism or anti-Semitism at least six times.

He has run for president four times and enjoys a strong
popular following. In 2002, he came in second in the first
round of presidential elections with 16.8 percent of the
vote, crushing the Socialist left and shaking the French
political establishment to the core.

"In France, at least, the German occupation was not
especially inhumane, even if there were a number of
excesses, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square
kilometers," he was quoted as saying in the interview in
Rivarol.

He questioned the veracity of the historical record of mass
executions of civilians in France by the German Army.
"Besides," he continued in the interview, "if the Germans
had carried out mass executions in all corners as the
conventional wisdom has it, then there wouldn't have been
any need for concentration camps for political deportees."

Sounding relaxed and peppering his words with slang, Mr.
Le Pen also said the Germans treated the French no worse
than they treated their own German soldiers.

"Ah, of course, if one was caught with a weapon five
minutes after four soldiers of the German Army had been
gunned down, one would quickly have been bumped off," he
said. "But note that the Germans acted the same way towards
their soldiers who had sinned."

A fierce nationalist and opponent of the European Union,
Mr. Le Pen also said, "It's not just from the European
Union and globalization that we need to deliver our
country, but also from the lies about its history."

He also suggested that the official version of the June
1944 massacre of 642 people in Oradour-sur-Glane, the worst
Nazi atrocity in France in World War II, was untrue. A
German convoy rolled into the quiet southern village,
rounded up its residents and shot them before setting the
buildings and the piles of bodies on fire.

"On the drama of Oradour-sur-Glane, there is a lot more to
be said," Mr. Le Pen said, citing it in the context of
examples in which he said the Gestapo had actually tried to
prevent civilian deaths.

"It drives me mad that he denies the history," said Robert
Hebras, a survivor of Oradour whose father and two sisters
were killed in the massacre, in a telephone interview.

"It's terrifying to see that even after 60 years, I still
have to fight for memory, to be vigilant, to justify, to
prove. There are only two of us survivors left in Oradour.
When we die, who will be here to keep alive the memory, to
bear witness?"

Human rights and Jewish groups were also quick to react.


Serge Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunter, told France Info radio
that Mr. Le Pen had made the comments only to get
attention. "The only trick he has is to invent a new
scandal on the occupation era," he said.

The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism
described Mr. Le Pen as a "rambling, old man," whose
remarks "only inspire us with contempt and disgust."

(source: New York Times)





CANADA/SWITZERLAND:

Cash too late for Holocaust victims


For three years, George Kraus has waited for money stored by his father in
a Swiss bank account before the Second World War. Now, as the records of
3,000 more bank accounts are published on the Internet in an effort to
return hundreds of millions of dollars to Nazi victims and their
descendents, he hopes his grandchildren will see some of the money.

"It's been 60 years. I gave up already. I am already old, and I don't need
the money now," said Kraus, 78. "I needed it in 1969 when I came to
Canada, but I don't need it now. It's symbolic for me, but that is all."

Kraus survived three years at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration
camps. His parents didn't.

The Swiss banks had already released more than 20,000 names of account
holders. This latest batch of accounts comes after a settlement reached
last June between the banks and victims of the Nazis.

He's one of 33,496 who have made claims to the money. He was 15 when the
war started, and he vaguely remembered his late father saying something
about money in a bank account.

But the possible return of money is very little, very late, survivors say,
because most are too old to benefit.

"Why did they keep (the accounts secret) so long? It's too late now," said
Paul Kagan, a Polish Jew.

"Most of the holocaust survivors are gone or very old," he said, adding
that he didn't have any money in the accounts because many Polish Jews
didn't have much to begin with.

"My mother suffered so much from the Nazis, then the Stalin regime, and
she had nothing," said Esfira Vaynshteym of her mother Sonya Levin, who
survived the holocaust.

(source: Edmonton Sun)





POLAND:

18,000 to march to mark Holocaust's end----In May, survivors will lead
tours of camps, ending at Auschwitz


Organizers have announced that 18,000 people, including families and
educators, will participate in the annual March of the Living in May,
marking the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust and the end of World War II
with a journey through Poland's concentration camps.

The March, which coincides with both V-E Day (May 8) and Holocaust
Remembrance Day (May 5), will be one of the last major events in which a
significant number of Holocaust survivors are expected to participate.

Since 1998, the March has been an annual event, drawing more than 100,000
people to Poland for a three- or six-day tour, led by Holocaust survivors,
of several concentration camps, culminating at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which
was the largest Nazi-built concentration camp complex.

At this year's march, a major ceremony will mark the milestone anniversary
as families, synagogue groups, educators and church groups from more than
40 countries gather in Poland.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Polish President Aleksander
Kwaniewski, as well as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, are expected to lead a
contingent of world leaders in the ceremony commemorating the Holocaust
and promoting a message of unity and tolerance.

March organizers say that a surge in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide in
recent years makes the memory of the Holocaust's atrocities relevant for
both Jews and non-Jews.

"Anti-Semitism is not only a danger to Jews, it is a danger to all today
who cherish democracy and freedom," said Avraham Hirchson, a member of the
Israeli Knesset and founder of March of the Living. "The resurgence of
anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic acts around the globe underscore the
importance of so many world leaders and citizens of the world assembling
at Auschwitz to declare that intolerance and bigotry must be destroyed."

(source: Religion News Service)





USA/GERMANY----new book

Schindler biography casts new light on figure movie made famous


Elon University professor David Crowe began researching Oskar Schindler
with a blank slate, wondering how much of the Hollywood tale of
the European industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the
Holocaust could possibly be true.

His early research shook the historian in Crowe: Schindler spied on
Czechoslovakia for the Germans, aided in the invasion of Poland and
fathered two illegitimate children with whom he had no relationship.

But he also truly saved more than 1,000 Jews, spending his personal
fortune to feed and house them as World War II raged to an end. In turn,
those Schindler Jews cared for their savior after the war, when he became
an alcoholic with little money, Crowe writes in "Oskar Schindler: The
Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind
The List."

"The bottom line is does he deserve the accolades? Absolutely," says
Crowe, whose book ($30, Westview Press) was published months before the
60th anniversary of the end of WWII. "He was the single most righteous
Gentile during the Holocaust."

Crowe's book is hardly the only one about Schindler; his wife, Emilie,
wrote her own memoir. But Mordecai Paldiel, director of the Righteous
Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem, describes it as the definitive
story of Schindler. Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial foundation in
Jerusalem, has the world's largest repository of Holocaust information.

And it draws on new records that Crowe uncovered during his research,
including Czech secret police files that documented Schindler's work for
German military counterintelligence.

Crowe, a Holocaust historian and member of the education committee of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has written
other books, including one on Gypsies in Eastern Europe and Russia. His
biography of Schindler also will be published in German and Dutch.

Crowe's book and "Schindler's List" _ the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie
based on the 1982 historical novel by Thomas Keneally _ reach the same
conclusion. But, as might be expected, Hollywood's version of the
Schindler story simplifies the transformation of a man whose passage from
spy to savior still confounds.

One of the most memorable scenes in Spielberg's movie occurs when
Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, confers with kindly clerk Itzhak Stern
(Ben Kinglsey) about which names to put on a list of Jews to be saved from
the Plaszow labor camp near Krakow, Poland.

The Nazis had given Schindler permission to take 700 Jewish men and 300
women from the Krakow plant to a new one in Brunnlitz near his hometown in
Czechoslovakia.

But in reality, the list was composed while Schindler was behind bars,
accused of bribing the commandant of the labor camp, Amon Goth.

In addition, Stern did not write the list. According to Crowe's book, it
was drawn up by a far less sympathetic individual _ a Jew named Marcel
Goldberg who worked for the German non-commissioned officer in charge of
transport at the camp.

It was a common practice for the SS to use Jews as administrators at
camps.

Schindler had passed on word of some general groups of people he wanted
included, but Goldberg composed the actual list.

"So the question among the Jews became, how do you get on Goldberg's
list?" Crowe says.

Crowe believes Goldberg selected people with pre-war connections and those
whom his family knew.

In addition, the decision made at Plaszow about who to put on the list was
not final. During a stop at a camp called Gross Rosen for processing, 20
to 25 Plaszow men were removed from the list and left behind, replaced by
Jews from Gross Rosen.

"The word is out among the Gross Rosen Jews that this is a list of life,"
Crowe said. "At Gross Rosen, Goldberg lets it be known that he's in
control of the list. People swarm around him."

Similarly, the names of eight to 10 of the women were changed while that
group stopped at Auschwitz.

Eventually, the 1,000 Jews made their way to Brunnlitz. Schindler and his
wife were there and for some reason another three transport trains full of
Jews showed up also, in early 1945. Crowe believes the cars were sent to
Brunnlitz by mistake in the confusion of the final stages of the war.

Schindler and his wife were struggling to feed the Jews already at
Brunnlitz and could have turned the cars around. Instead, they accepted
them.

Some Jews had frozen to death on the way to Brunnlitz and others died
there. But in the end, 1,098 survived, with Schindler spending his
personal fortune to keep them alive with food purchased on the black
market.

Schindler easily could have shut down his factory in Krakow and rode out
the war on the money he made there, Crowe said.

"But he orchestrates a situation where he is able to convince authorities
in Berlin to move his factory and move 1,000 Jews in the process," Crowe
said. "He takes all the money he made in the first five years of the war
to feed and care for his Jews."

Crowe professes uncertainty about what caused Schindler to save "his"
Jews. He doubts it was a single event, as is suggested in Spielberg's
film.

The historian acknowledges Schindler may have opportunistically hoped to
be able to stay in business after the war. But Crowe also believes he also
was compelled by something simpler and more altruistic: "I think he was
just disgusted by some of the things he saw."

Sol Urbach, a Schindler Jew whom Crowe interviewed for the book, agrees.
"The brutality of the Germans was more than he bargained for," said
Urbach, 79, who now lives in Del Ray Beach, Fla.

Urbach last saw his parents, three brothers and two sisters March 12,
1943, when he left for work at Schindler's factory in Krakow.

When he arrived at work, Urbach told The Associated Press, "Oskar
Schindler announces we should not go back to the ghetto. He tells us to
stay and do our best to see if we can sleep on the floor of the factory
and stay alive."

Urbach survived, but his family died in the Nazi liquidation of the Krakow
ghetto that took place the following day.

After the war ended, Schindler became an alcoholic. In 1957, he abandoned
his wife in Argentina.

By the end of his life _ Schindler died in 1974 and is buried in Jerusalem
_ the Jews whom Schindler saved were supporting him.

As he fell into alcohol dependency, Schindler pawned the gold ring the
Jews gave him after the war, which was inscribed with a verse from the
Talmud: "He who saves a single life saves the entire world."

So when he traveled to Israel for the first time 1962, Schindler was given
a replacement, a symbol of the work he had done to save 1,098 worlds.

"There certainly had to be an element of self-preservation in Oskar's
actions, though it is difficult to determine how much," Crowe said. "In
the end, he sacrificed everything for his Jews and lost everything."

On the Net: Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org

(source: Associated Press)





GREECE:

An open wound
Nikos Konstandaras

The question of whether the Greeks are anti-Semitic never fails to cause a
furor. It is like a wound that never heals. Most Greeks claim, with
passion, that they have no problem with Jews, noting the efforts many
Greeks made to protect Jews during the Nazi occupation. But observers note
the ease with which many Greeks (including some intellectuals and
journalists) blame many of the worlds ills on Jews. The Greeks counter
that they are simply criticizing the Israeli governments policies
regarding the Palestinians. The problem is that the historical context is
fraught with myths, tragedies and misunderstandings. And above everything
hovers the Holocaust, which destroyed Greeces ancient Jewish community.

Many Greeks appear unaware of the sensitivity Jews and various
international observers have to anything smacking of attributing
collective responsibility. At the same time, many observers appear
excessively sensitive to Greek comments. Exaggerations feed a silly
antagonism.

Greeks and Jews have shared a complex history since Hellenistic times. A
frank dialogue would allow Greeks to criticize Israel without presenting
Jews as Nazis and without using language that might suggest bigotry. And
Israelis (regardless of provocations) should be aware that the tragedy of
the Jews has made the whole world sensitive to the use of violence by a
state, and they should understand that not all censure is anti-Semitism.
Both Greeks and Jews should learn to take criticism.

But first they must remember their shared history and see behind the
myths. One needs only to read Giorgos Ioannous short story on The
Elimination of the Jews to understand the absolute horror. He wrote of the
Thessaloniki Jews he saw being marched off to their deaths: They were, in
their great majority, neither tycoons, nor bankers, nor lords, but simply
poor wretches, like us.

(source: Commentary, Nikos Konstandaras, Kathimerini)





GERMANY:

German politicians seek ban on Nazi insignia


German politicians have called for a Europe-wide ban on Nazi insignia
after Britain's Prince Harry caused outrage by wearing a swastika armband
and Nazi regalia at a fancy dress party.

Harry, younger son of heir to the throne Prince Charles and the late
Princess Diana, was photographed in German wartime uniform with a swastika
armband at the party at a friend's house last Saturday.

The pictures of the 20-year-old prince appeared in Britain's Sun newspaper
on Thursday and have been reproduced by media around the world including
the Israeli press.

"The whole of Europe once suffered under Nazi crimes, therefore it makes
sense to ban Nazi symbols across Europe," Silvana Koch-Merin, European
Parliament Liberals spokeswoman told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper
in a preview edition on Saturday.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews and millions of others including
Poles, Soviet prisoners, homosexuals and Gypsies.

Germany has tough anti-fascist laws which ban the use of Nazi symbols like
the swastika and the stiff-armed "Heil Hitler" salute.

It is also illegal to distribute Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf", which
is available in most countries, including Israel.

Markus Soeder, general secretary of Germany's Christian Socialist Union
opposition conservative party told the paper: "In a Europe grounded in
peace and freedom there should be no place for Nazi symbols. They should
be banned throughout Europe, as they are with good reason in Germany."

Soeder also urged the German government to push for a more balanced
history program in British schools.

"After this latest incident with Prince Harry, the government should
encourage our European friends in London, to lay more weight on Germany's
development beyond the Nazi period in history lessons," he said.

Jewish groups have demanded Harry, who is Queen Elizabeth's grandson, make
a symbolic visit to the Auschwitz death camp to atone for his mistake, but
in Germany, criticism of the prince has been mostly muted.

Financial daily Handelsblatt wrote in an editorial on Friday: "Germans,
who have long thought the British should make less fun of the Nazi era,
can register this story with a certain malicious glee."

The prince apologized for his gaffe in a written statement on Thursday.

(source: Reuters)