Jan. 18


ENGLAND:

Hesitantly, Holocaust Survivors Revisit Past


The survivors of the Lodz ghetto held their magnifying glasses close to
the photographs and fixed their eyes on each enlarged image, searching for
a familiar face, a recognizable building, a known street.

"I am trying to find someone I know," said Esther
Brunstein, 76, a native of Lodz, Poland, who lived in the
notorious ghetto as a child from 1940 to 1944, before she
and her mother were taken to the Nazi death camp at
Auschwitz. Of the more than 200,000 people who lived in the
Lodz ghetto, only 5 percent or fewer are thought to have
survived the war. "Here, look," she said, "someone is
selling something on a scale, perhaps a little medicine, a
little food."

"But I won't look at many more," she said as her magnifying
glass rested on the face of a beaming toddler. "You see,
when I see the face of a child like this, and then you know
he did not survive."

Arrayed before the survivors for a private viewing on
Sunday was the largest collection of images of ghetto life
during the Holocaust by single photographer, Henryk Ross.
Mr. Ross, an official photographer of the Jewish Council,
the ghetto's German-supervised administrators, lived in
Lodz for years and chronicled its daily life. As the
Germans prepared in 1944 to round up most of the ghetto
residents for deportation to Auschwitz, Mr. Ross buried his
3,000 negatives. While his photographs include more
familiar images of the horrific aspects of ghetto life,
because of the nature of his job they also show less
frequently seen scenes of the seemingly contented ghetto
"elite," Jews who worked as ghetto supervisors and police
officers or held coveted jobs.

These latter pictures are at the heart of Mr. Ross's
collection and raise difficult questions about the tiny
minority of people in the ghetto who lived relatively
privileged lives amid mass deprivation and were reproached,
some as collaborators, after the war. Among them are Chaim
Rumkowski, the feared and despised leader of the Lodz
ghetto's Jewish Council.

"It was a very complex society, and a class system
existed," said Janina Struk, who was at Sunday's gathering
and is author of "Photographing the Holocaust:
Interpretations of the Evidence" (Chris Boot, 2004). "We
are seeing a people who had to survive, who had birthday
parties, who took photos of each other. We are so used to
images of horror that when you look at something different,
it is easy to say it's not true."

After the war, Mr. Ross, who later emigrated to Israel and
died in 1991, retrieved his negatives, distributing a few
of the most ghastly images, which served to document the
atrocities of the time. His son offered the collection to
the Archive of Modern Conflict in London in 1997.

The collection, aside from 100 images published last year
in "Lodz Ghetto Album" (Chris Boot), had never been seen by
the public until Sunday, when six survivors of the ghetto,
along with a few relatives and academics, gathered in a
room of the National Portrait Gallery here to search for
recognizable faces and discuss their impressions.

Helen Aronson, 77, who lived in the ghetto from 1942 until
its liberation by Soviet troops in January 1945, planted
the idea for the meeting after she spotted her boyfriend in
a photograph in "Lodz Ghetto Album" three months ago at a
Holocaust commemoration ceremony.

"I know this man, I know this man with the accordion," Mrs.
Aronson recalls saying as she looked at the image of young
people celebrating the arrival of Soviet troops in Lodz.
"This is my boyfriend, Wysocki Szlomo, my first love."

Her daughter, who was with her at the event, said: "Mum,
look at the girl sitting next to him. That is you. That is
you."

So it was, and soon Mrs. Aronson called other survivors to
spread the news. They asked the archive for a viewing of
the collection.

The fresh images, even after so many years, stirred a
labyrinth of emotions. The memories proved disquieting, not
only because some of the images recorded suffering, but
also because some showed the mundane and the contented.

The two women in the group seemed the most interested in
scouring the pictures. The four men seemed considerably
more reluctant. Aron Zylberszac, 67, who spent four years
in the ghetto and a year in labor camps, sat in his
wheelchair and avoided the task altogether.

"All of these images are very much stuck in my mind," he
said. "I still have dreams every night, and photographs
make it worse, which is why I don't like looking at them.
In the dreams I am always trying to run away and always
trying to hide. It is so realistic, like it was all
happening, and I wake up in a sweat. I am completely wet."

As one image, a photograph of a postage stamp, was
projected on a screen, Perec Zylberberg, 80, who is Mrs.
Brunstein's brother, recognized himself. The stamp, of the
internal ghetto postal service, included a photograph of
him working behind a loom. "I am there," he said, nodding.

Mrs. Aronson picked out another familiar face, a young man
holding a rabbit and staring into the camera smiling. "He
was my friend," she said, "and here is his family."

As the official photographer, Mr. Ross, along with his
colleague Mendel Grossman, was directed to catalog everyday
life.

The photographs include images of tailors, cleaners,
weavers and doctors at work; of the hungry searching for
food and ladling soup into their mouths. There are also
unauthorized single frames of Jews being loaded into the
cattle cars that carried them to extermination and labor
camps, a corpse hanging from a noose in Lodz square, people
escaping from the hospital as the Germans rounded up the
sick, the old and the very young to send to their deaths.
Mr. Ross, academics say, risked his life to record those
scenes.

The photographs of the elite or the "protected class," as
the survivors here called it, were the most striking in
their departure from the stark pictures typically
associated with the Holocaust. They featured smiling
children in neatly pressed clothes, sitting around a table
laden with food and drink for a party. A plump boy in a
mini-policeman's uniform, marching with his young friends
around the street. Revelers gathered on top of a
horse-drawn carriage.

"It looks like Nazi propaganda," said Susanne Pearson, 76,
who last saw her parents in 1939, when she was taken to
Britain as a child. Her parents were sent to the Lodz
ghetto, and she never saw them again. "I know I will not
find my mother and father among them."

The former residents of the ghetto held a complicated,
decidedly nuanced view of these images, and wavered between
bitterness and understanding. "We can't today judge certain
circumstances of Lodz ghetto and Rumkowski," said Roman
Halter, 77, who was among the last to be taken to
Auschwitz.

"I am very hurt and bitter about the way the Lodz ghetto
was run," Mr. Halter said. "I lost my whole family in
Lodz." But, he added: "They were exceptional circumstances.
And it is easy to say now, 'He should have done this.' "

The elite encompassed both the bad and the good, Mrs.
Brunstein said. A ghetto policeman saved her life after he
spied her and her mother hiding on a roof during a German
roundup and continued on his way.

"Hunger does not bring out noble feelings," she said. "We
knew it was a hierarchy. They were privileged and they had
more food. If I had a chance, I would have taken it, too,
depending on the price."

For Mrs. Aronson, the photographs touch a more personal
chord. She was indirectly a part of the elite, she said.
Her father, who she said died after trying to save the
children of her small town, knew Mr. Rumkowski and, because
of that, Mrs. Aronson, her mother and brother were given
good jobs. Hers was at an orphanage and later at a
confectionary factory. She was in Lodz until the war ended.


"To say that we were privileged and that we knew we were
going to survive is a load of rubbish," she said, adding
that she, too, went hungry and feared for her life. "We had
the same rations as everyone else. My brother got from the
Germans a bit of food now and again. Food was the most
important thing to survive."

But survival, she added, was never a given. Safety came
only after liberation, when, after hiding in a bunker with
15 others for more than a week with a vial of poison in her
possession, they heard Russian voices.

Shortly after, she and her accordion-playing boyfriend sat
down with friends, pulled out the accordion, and smiled for
Mr. Ross's camera.

(source: New York Times)




USA//TEXAS:

Holocaust survivor helps teachers keep story alive----Teachers learn how
to incorporate WWII events into lesson plans


Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin and others had an important message to
deliver to dozens of Dallas-Fort Worth-area educators gathered
last week: Never forget.


Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin, in front of a projected photo of herself
as a child, spoke to teachers at a three-day conference at the University
of Texas at Dallas. "I prayed to die," said Ms. Godin, whose face is
scarred from the beatings she endured in the Stutthof concentration camp
in Poland. "But the women who saved me gave me some bread to eat when I
cried and wrapped my body in straw to keep me warm they told me to pray
to live. They said, 'If you live, don't let us ever be forgotten.' "

A three-day conference at the University of Texas at Dallas, "Teaching
About the Holocaust," brought local teachers together to study the
genocide that killed millions of Jews and others during World War II.

The event, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., is the first that has been offered in Texas, said
Stephen Feinberg, a director of the national outreach program at the
museum. The conference ended Saturday.

Teachers learned about local and national resources designed to help them
develop their own curriculum. They can view images of important artifacts
from the war on the Internet, such as Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary.
The Internet and other technology have made distance learning a reality
for teachers throughout the world, museum officials said.

Elliott Dlin, director of the Dallas Holocaust Museum, said the Holocaust
is "absolutely not" taught enough in Texas schools.

"In other states, it's mandated or recommended," he said. In Texas,
though, students could "theoretically follow every guideline and not touch
on it."

"It's unacceptable that [students] could complete their careers never
having studied it," Mr. Dlin said. "It's the seminal event of the 20th
century."

This month, the Dallas museum opened at its new, temporary location at
Record Street and Pacific Avenue. Museum supporters hope to break ground
in 2006 for a 35,000-square-foot Holocaust center north of The Sixth Floor
Museum at Dealey Plaza.

Mr. Dlin said he hopes events such as last week's conference, as well as
the recent move of the museum to a more high-profile area, will help
expose the lessons of the Holocaust to more educators and through them to
more students.

Professor Zsuzsanna Ozsvath opened the conference by explaining why
teaching about the Holocaust is important. She said one of the most
important tasks for teachers is to teach basic morality.

"Hatred leads to destruction," said Dr. Ozsvath, director of the Holocaust
studies program at UTD. "You must fight against it, . You must teach
children not to hate."

A historian from the national museum, Dr. William Meinecke, gave teachers
an overview of the history of the Holocaust and discussed how German
dictator Adolf Hitler rose to power, while Barry van Driel presented a
session on Anne Frank and the diary she left behind. Mr. van Driel directs
curriculum development and teacher training at the Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, Netherlands.

On Friday morning, a satellite hookup provided teachers a live connection
to historians at the museum at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous
extermination camps the Nazis ran in Poland. The 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the camp will be commemorated Jan. 27.

Teachers also heard the personal stories of Holocaust survivor Bernat
Rosner and his friend Frederic Tubach, whose father was a Nazi. The men
wrote the book An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the
Holocaust.

"It is important that nothing like this ever happens again," said Mr.
Rosner, whose father, mother and brother perished in the Holocaust.

Janice Grams, a middle school teacher in Denison, said the conference has
equipped her with new resources for the 12-week Holocaust unit she teaches
in her language arts classes.

"They're motivated to learn about it," she said. "I have students come
back and ask if I still teach the Holocaust."

Teachers learned how to incorporate lessons on the Holocaust at different
grade levels and in various subjects while remaining faithful to the Texas
state curriculum guidelines.

Cathleen Cadigan, a social studies teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School
in Dallas, said teachers should translate the many statistics associated
with the Holocaust into stories about people. She agreed that the
Holocaust is not taught enough in Texas schools.

"There's a great responsibility when teaching the Holocaust," said Ms.
Cadigan, who teaches a semester-long course on the Holocaust at her
school. "And there's a large margin for error."

Educators at the conference were given guidelines for teaching about the
Holocaust, including "avoid simple answers to complex history," "try to
avoid stereotypical descriptions" and "do not romanticize history to
engage students' interest."

Christina Vasquez, director of education at the Holocaust Museum Houston,
said she encourages teachers to talk not only about the horrors of the
genocide but also about the culture that was destroyed when whole villages
were wiped out.

"You can't understand how important the Holocaust was unless you
understand what was lost," she said.

(source: Dallas Morning News)





ISRAEL:

Knesset: Banks hold NIS 1b belonging to Holocaust victims


A Knesset committee that looked into the question of bank accounts in
Israel belonging to Holocaust victims announced Tuesday that financial
institutions are holding some NIS 1 billion in victims? funds.

The committee said that the state must return NIS 586 million to victims?
heirs, and that the five major banks must return some NIS 322 million, NIS
307 million of which must be returned by Bank Leumi. Mizrahi Bank must
return NIS 12.9 million, Bank Hapoalim NIS 1.7 million, and Israel
Discount Bank must return NIS 535,000.

The committee will convey its findings to the Knesset plenum for approval
on Tuesday, and the final report will be presented to the public in a
press conference.

Members of the committee, headed by MK Colette Avital (Labor) criticized
the banks and said they were to blame for delaying the committee?s work.
Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin rejected the criticism and said the banks
should be praised for their cooperation.

Accountants working with the committee said they located some 9,000 bank
accounts which likely belonged to Jews who perished during World War II.
The committee said the accounts? net worth was about NIS 947 million.

The reason that most of the funds must be returned by the state stem from
the fact that most of the money was transferred to the British Mandate
authorities during the Second World War, and following the creation of the
State of Israel, the funds were transferred to the general conservator.

MK Avital said the actual figures that banks will have to return will much
slower, as only some of the heirs of the account holders will likely be
located.

(source: Ha 'Aretz)




GERMANY:

WAR CRIMES----Dade man takes Nazi hunt to Germany

Sixty years after the end of World War II, a South Florida man is offering
German citizens a reward for leads on Nazi criminals and collaborators.



Operation: Last Chance, a Golden Beach man's Nazi-hunting project, is
headed for Germany, birthplace of the Holocaust.

Investment manager Aryeh Rubin and Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's Israeli operation, launched the effort in July 2002 in
the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, hoping to smoke out aging war
criminals with $10,000 rewards for tips leading to prosecution and
conviction.

They will announce the same deal to Germans on Jan. 26 at the German
Bundestag in Berlin, the day before Germany marks Holocaust Memorial Day.

So far, the effort has generated 326 tips, many about collaborators in
Croatia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Austria.
Tipsters have identified people, burial sites and towns were residents
were wiped out.

One man who didn't want a reward told of watching four armed collaborators
haul off 10 Jews -- five Olkons and five Jaffes -- from his Lithuanian
town in a wagon. A half-hour later, the man wrote, shots rang out. Soon,
the wagon returned with the armed men and a pile of clothing, said Zuroff,
56, during a phone interview from Jerusalem.

Rubin, 54, had what turned out to be a fantasy: that people would unburden
a guilty conscience by turning themselves in.

It didn't happen. Nor has anyone identified a relative.

Still, Operation: Last Chance has been able to refer 72 names to
prosecutors in Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, the latter two of which have
opened 18 pretrial murder probes involving dozens of suspects.

Referred cases have met three criteria, Rubin said: ``We try to find out
if the information regarding the crime is reliable; whether [the suspect]
is alive and healthy; whether he's been prosecuted in the past.''

Rubin's Targum Shlishi foundation has paid $5,000 so far: half of a reward
to a Croatian man whose information led to a 90-year-old accused Nazi
collaborator.

NO BREAKS

Accused perpetrators don't deserve a break because they're old, Rubin
believes.

``I don't want them to have the peace of mind to sleep at night. They took
away our memory: the grandmothers, the repository of our culture.''

The project has generated much publicity overseas, accomplishing Rubin's
second goal: bringing Holocaust awareness to countries reluctant to
confront their histories, prosecute war criminals or combat the
anti-Semitism festering within their borders.

Through media coverage and ads for the rewards, people all over the world
''have been exposed to atrocities of the Holocaust,'' Rubin said. ``By
getting exposure, we've done a tremendous service for the Jewish people.''

He said that most Jewish communities in countries where Operation: Last
Chance has gone have welcomed the effort, although some Jewish leaders
didn't want to rock the boat.

In Romania, where tipsters generated 15 leads, ''we met with the elders in
a group, conducted the meetings in English and Yiddish, and it was
tearful,'' Rubin said. 'One elder said, `There is no question we want to
support you, but why are you 20 years too late?' ''

GOOD RECORD

Rubin called Germany ``the main event.''

''We wanted to have our track record and be able to go where it all
started and do an appeal to people who are receptive,'' he said.

The German government has the best record in Europe of prosecuting Nazis,
he said, and has stripped many one-time Nazis of their pensions.

''It has paid a lot of blood money to survivors and, as ironic as it
sounds, is the best friend Israel has in Europe,'' Rubin said.

But revisionists and generations coming of age amid renewed anti-Semitism
''want to forget the past,'' he said. While he doesn't expect to find many
more suspects, Rubin wants his campaign to focus attention on their deeds.

''It's clear we're at the end of the road,'' he said, given that the war
ended 60 years ago. ``The top guys are gone. Ninety percent of those who
killed Jews got away with it. But the world has to realize if you harm a
Jew, there are people yet unborn who'll come after you.''

Zuroff praised the German government's commitment to Holocaust education
and memorials, but said ``the prosecution dimension is not getting its
due.''

NEAR-MISS IN CROATIA

There have been a couple of near-misses. The tipster who got paid
identified the Croatian collaborator Milivoj Asner who, Zuroff said, was
rewarded for his loyalty to the Ustasha fascist movement with the
responsibility of keeping order in the town of Slavonska Pozega, where 150
Jews once lived.

Asner stood by as Ustasha looted and burned the Pozega synagogue, then
established a detention camp where, Zuroff said, more than 300 detainees
were killed in August 1941 for ''ostensibly'' trying to escape.

A postwar official state investigation found him among those who bear
direct responsibility for the murder of members of the Pozega Jewish
community after the war, Zuroff said.

Alen Budaj, a 27-year-old Croatian researching his family's Jewish roots,
found an anti-Jewish directive written by Asner in the national archives,
along with other incriminating information, and passed it on to Operation:
Last Chance.

Asner lived for many years in Austria -- which hasn't prosecuted a Nazi
war criminal since the 1970s -- then returned to Croatia in 1991, where he
founded a right-wing political party.

PROBE ORDERED

Last June, Zuroff met with Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, who was
''shocked'' by the information and ordered an investigation, according to
Zuroff. When the investigation was announced at a news conference, Asner
fled to Austria, where Zuroff said he lives openly in Klagenfurt.

''The Croatian authorities have not officially approached Austria in this
matter,'' Johann Sattler, a spokesman for the Austrian Embassy in
Washington, D.C., said in an e-mail. ``They also did not transfer any
documents regarding the allegations against Mr. Asner, which would allow
the authorities in Austria to start criminal investigations.''

Zuroff said he gave the same information to the Austrian government that
he had given Mesic.

''Once again,'' he said, ``I'm very disappointed but hardly surprised.''

(source: Miami Herald)





FRANCE:

France marks anniversary of liberation of Concentration Camp


Holocaust survivors in France have begun marking the upcoming 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Hundreds of French Holocaust survivors gathered Sunday at Paris City Hall
for the ceremony, the first in a series of French events planned for the
anniversary.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe pledged to make 2005 a year of remembrance.

"We are capable of building humanity based on moral values. That's why
our gathering today is the first of 2005 that will make this commemoration
of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps a peaceful weapon
against those who are still inspired by barbarism, against falsifiers of
history, against those who today still say that it wasn't so terrible and
that the period of the occupation in France wasn't so barbarous."

It is estimated that between one million and one and a half million
prisoners, most of them Jews, perished in gas chambers or died of
starvation and disease at Auschwitz.

Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz death camp on 27 January 1945.
Only two and a half thousand of the inhabitants survived.

In total, six million Jews were killed during the Nazi Holocaust.

The official commemoration of the event will be at Auschwitz in Poland
on January 27.

Several world leaders are due to attend the ceremonies, including
Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jacques Chirac of France, Israel's
Moshe Katsav and Germany's Horst Koehler.

(source: Xinhua News)




ENGLAND:

Nazi Costume Reveals Ignorance


Harry Windsor, third in line to the British throne, is - how to put this
with due charity? - a royal nitwit.

Unless you're an extra on a World War II movie set, it is never right to
wear a Nazi armband in public, as the prince did at a recent costume
party. He is presumably not a Nazi sympathizer and must have thought it
merely amusing to sport Hitlerian regalia. Earth to Prince Harry: Unless
you're Mel Brooks, Nazism is not a joking matter.

Harry is only 20 years old, some defenders say, and therefore prone to
immaturity. Nice try, but that won't do.

Back in the 1940s, Englishmen younger than Prince Harry were fighting and
dying to save Great Britain from the swastika. They didn't sacrifice their
lives so that a prince of the realm could swan around as a swastika-clad
life-of-a-posh-party.

Why should Americans care? Because this shameful incident speaks to the
importance of keeping historical memory alive in a culture.

An official at Israel's Holocaust memorial said, "When a British prince
wears the uniform of a Nazi soldier at a party, it indicates that the
lessons of the Holocaust have not really entered deeply within his
understanding and consciousness."

Exactly. It is hard to imagine that any decent person, having truly
confronted the enormity and meaning of Nazi evil, would associate himself
with it in any way. More commonly, one sees kitschy expressions of the
communist hammer-and-sickle in popular culture - something unthinkable if
people understood the blood-soaked cruelty of communism.

On a less grand scale, incidents in which public figures such as Al
Lipscomb casually invoke Hitler or fraternity boys masquerade in blackface
are a sure sign that they either have no clue about the historical weight
and hateful resonance of these gestures - or worse, that they know exactly
what they're doing and don't care.

(source: The Sun News)




SWITZERLAND:

Nazi victim compensation goes online


An international claims resolution tribunal has published online a revised
list of Swiss bank account owners in a bid to compensate victims of the
Nazis before or during World War II.

The Switzerland-based international team of lawyers representing the Nazi
victims' Claims Resolution Tribunal published 13 January a new list of
3100 Swiss bank account owners who may have been persecuted by the Nazis -
subsequently losing their savings.

"Individuals who believe that they are owners or heirs of owners of any of
these accounts, and these accounts only, may file a claim," the tribunal
said.

Those listed have six months from 13 January to make a claim, the tribunal
said.

The claims process - part of a Holocaust Victim Assets class action in the
US District Court -- first began in 2001. The intent is to give Nazi
victims and any heirs a chance to claim for assets deposited in Swiss
banks in the period before or during World War II.

In 2000, some 36,000 accounts were identified as being "probably" or
"possibly" owned by victims of the Nazis. A list was published in 2001 of
some 21,000 of those account owners.

So far, a total of some US$230 million has been awarded to about 2800
claimants who could prove they or their family were owed funds deposited
in Swiss banks between 1933 and 1945, when the war ended.

"The 2005 List that follows presents the names of approximately 2700
account owners and 400 Power of Attorney holders that were specified in
the Second Memorandum to File and whose publication has now been
approved," the tribunal wrote.

The 2400 account holders were not included in the 2001 list of names
released. The new list also included names of owners of accounts
previously identified in a survey of dormant bank accounts following a
1962 Swiss decree on assets belonging to victims of racial, religious or
political persecution, the tribunal said.

Certain Polish and Hungarian account owners with accounts subject to
post-war international agreements between Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary
were also included.

Some names had been removed, where account owners were believed not to be
Nazi victims or if the accounts had already been paid, the tribunal said.

(source: iT. News)