Jan. 24


POLAND:

Soviet liberator returns to Auschwitz


On January 27, 1945, Yakov Vinnichenko walked through the gates of
Auschwitz into a netherworld of ghostly, emaciated women
huddled together in dark barracks to prop one another up.

"Some tried to kiss us, but it was uncomfortable -- you didn't want to get
infected," the one-time Soviet infantryman recalls.

Vinnichenko was among the first outsiders to glimpse the horror of the
concentration camp in southern Poland as the troops of the Soviet 322nd
infantry division cut the surrounding barbed wire and swept through.

This week, he and a handful of comrades-in-arms return to Auschwitz to
join Vice President Dick Cheney, Russian President Vladimir Putin and
other world leaders in honoring the 60th anniversary of the camp's
liberation.

It will be his second trip to Auschwitz since the liberation; he traveled
there in 2000 to mark the 55th anniversary.

Up to 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, perished in gas chambers
or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. In all, some 6 million
Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

By the time Vinnichenko's unit arrived, most of the prisoners had been
evacuated by the Nazis on death marches as they fled toward Germany.
About 7,000 were left -- "those who couldn't move," as Vinnichenko put it.

"They were skin and bones, could hardly stand on their feet. ... It's
impossible to describe," he said.

"They were holding each other up, they couldn't walk. The Germans just
left them behind. They didn't have time to burn them up, to shoot them."

He said his regiment was rushing to the next battle and spent only a few
hours in the camp, but he did duck into one barracks.

"There was filth, and blood. It was a women's barracks," he said,
recalling the sight of hard, three-level bunks covered with straw
mattresses.

Of the inmates he said, "Some were crying, some were laughing."

Vinnichenko, a trim-looking man in a tweed jacket decorated with military
medals, acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his
recollections are cloudy; one of the clearest memories is leaving the camp
and picking up two bottles of port wine found abandoned in a basement.

"Sixty years have passed, you forget a lot -- and for 30 years, no one
showed interest or cared to ask," he said.

Under communist rule, the Soviet narrative of World War II avoided mention
of the Holocaust -- a theme that could raise questions about the state's
demonizing of Jews at home and its hostile relations with Israel.

Only in the years since the Soviet Union broke up has the destruction of
European Jewry won widespread acknowledgment in Russia.

Vinnichenko had seen persecution and cruelty in his own prewar life: In
1933, when he was 7, his father starved to death in the state-induced
famine in his native Ukraine that killed up to 10 million people.

Three of his uncles were sent to Soviet labor camps; his mother fled to a
village near Moscow, leaving him with his grandparents.

"They took the grain away from the peasants. There was nothing to eat.
They took the horses, the cows," Vinnichenko said. "Life was hard until
the war."

He joined the Soviet Army in 1941, at age 15, after the Germans invaded
his homeland; there was no other choice.

"Whether you wanted to go or not, they picked you up. No one asked. It was
the same on the front; you don't want to fight, you're shot dead by your
own men," he said. "The commander's behind, you're in front -- it's only in
movies that the commander is in front."

Four thin ribbons on his chest, above his medals, signify the four wounds
he sustained during the war -- which he credits for saving his life since
he was taken out of combat for long bouts in hospitals.

(source: Associated Press)





FRANCE:

Cardinal's painful Auschwitz mission


Pope John Paul II's request was an honor and a responsibility: Would you,
the pontiff asked, be my special envoy at ceremonies to mark the 60th
anniversary of Auschwitz' liberation?

At first, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger remained silent. He was torn.

Lustiger, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, lived through World War
II as a teenager in hiding. His mother died at the Nazi death camp in Poland.

"I thought for 30 seconds, and I said yes," the archbishop of Paris said
Friday, recounting his conversation with the pope. "It's difficult for me,
but I'll say yes."

On Thursday, 60 years to the day after advancing Soviet troops liberated
Auschwitz, world leaders will pay their respects at the former death camp.

Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners -- most of them Jews -- were
killed in gas chambers there or died of starvation and disease.

The 60th anniversary carries special weight, as few survivors are likely
to be alive for the 70th.

Lustiger, 78, will attend out of a sense of duty to the Church.

"I have been once in my life to Auschwitz. I don't want to return, because
it is a place of death and destruction," Lustiger told reporters in Paris
before his trip. "If I am going, it is because the pope asked me."

Lustiger visited the camp in 1983. Asked what Auschwitz means to him, he
makes a list: "Murder, extermination, sin, the sin of men, horror, the
madness of sin."

Lustiger was never sent to a death camp. But "I could have and should have
been deported," he said.

As a teenager, Lustiger went into hiding from the Nazis in Orleans, south
of the capital. There, Lustiger, who was not a practicing Jew, converted
to Catholicism in 1940 at the age of 14.

While Lustiger's father brought the children to safety, his mother stayed
behind in Paris to tend to the family hosiery shop.

She was rounded up by the Nazi occupying forces, who sent her first to the
Drancy transit camp outside Paris and then on to Auschwitz.

Lustiger was ordained a priest in 1954. Despite his atypical background,
he rose through the Church hierarchy to become the public face of
Catholicism in France as archbishop of Paris.

In public, Lustiger has rarely addressed his mother's death, or the deaths
of 30 to 40 other family members on his father's side who also were killed
by the Nazis.

Lustiger says he saw the tragedy coming, though he was just a child. He
spent several months in 1936 and 1937 with host families in Germany to
learn the language.

Though his hosts were anti-Nazi and knew that he was Jewish, others did
not realize his true identity, Lustiger said.

In Germany, Lustiger said, he met children in the Hitler Youth who told
him: "We will kill all the Jews."

"I was sure they would do what they said they would do," Lustiger said.

"Nobody around me wanted to believe me."

(source: Associated Press)





UNITED NATIONS:

U.N. holds first Holocaust memorial


The U.N. General Assembly is marking its first-ever commemoration of the
liberation of Nazi concentration camps as a reminder that the evil of mass
murder still threatened the world, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said.

Monday's special session -- at which the foreign ministers of Israel,
Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg, representing
the European Union, are scheduled to speak -- is a memorial to the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest death camp.

Jorge Semprun, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany,
addresses the session as the representative of Spain's Foreign Ministry.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, will lead the U.S.
delegation, Italy is sending its speaker of the senate and Russia, whose
troops freed Auschwitz at the end of World War II in 1945, is to be
represented by its human rights commissioner.

"The evil that destroyed 6 million Jews, and others, in those camps is one
that still threatens all of us today," Annan said. "It is not something we
can consign to the distant past and forget about it."

Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were
killed in Auschwitz alone, dying in gas chambers or of starvation and
disease.

Six million Jews overall were exterminated in Nazi camps and millions of
others including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies perished
or were used as slave labor in the camps.

The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust
Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on January
27.

To accompany the assembly session, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom
opens an exhibit of photos and sketches from the Auschwitz camp, called
"The Depth of the Abyss," including some 60 sketches by Zinovii
Tolkatchev, a private in the Soviet Red Army, who drew them at the time of
the liberation of the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps.

They were donated to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance,
documentation, research center, by his daughter and son in Kiev, Anel and
Ilya Tolkatchev.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the camps, is
attending the memorial along with Congressman Tom Lantos, a California
Democrat who was saved from death by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish
diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary. Wallenberg is
the uncle of Annan's wife, Nane.

The meeting was requested by U.S. Ambassador John Danforth in a letter on
December 9, and backed by Russia, the European Union, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand. Annan polled member states and 138 nations in the
191-member assembly agreed.

Israel's U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, who has accused the General
Assembly of operating with an "immoral majority" against Israel said last
week he believed there was a change in atmosphere that even allowed
nations who did not recognize his country to vote in favor.

Still, Annan expected the session to be linked to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The General Assembly, which dominated the United Nations at its
inception, voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and
Arab states. This led to Israel's creation a year later.

"I think whether I like it or not, it is linked in the minds of many
people," Annan said.

(source: Reuters)






POLAND:

60 years on, Jews and Poles grow closer


Michael Reiss was 10 when his parents, having survived the Holocaust,
emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1957.

He says that as a child he felt anti-Semitism "on his own skin" and yet,
nearly half a century later, he has returned to a free Poland.

Reiss has regained his Polish citizenship and is awaiting his Polish
passport, revoked by the communist government at the time of his family's
flight from a country that was once home to 3 million Jews, the biggest
Jewish community in the world.

"I feel good here, even though I don't feel I am Polish. I am from
Israel," said Reiss, a businessman who has lived in Poland for much of
the last four years.

More than 1,000 Israelis asked for Polish passports last year alone, one
of many signs that strained Polish-Jewish relations are normalizing and
wounds and traumas rooted in the horrors of World War II are starting to
heal.

Poland's joining the European Union last year is clearly one incentive but
the key factor is that political ties between Israel and Warsaw, which
were virtually non-existent under communism, have become cordial in recent
years.

Much credit for this goes to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who
next week will host his Israeli counterpart Moshe Katsav and about 30
other heads of state to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the
Auschwitz Nazi death camp.

Only 10 years ago, the camp was a source of controversy between Jews and
Poles that revealed deep mistrust between the victims and the witnesses of
the Holocaust and marred Poland's efforts to build better ties with
Israel.

Multinational Auschwitz

The controversy centered on a Catholic convent set up in one of the
buildings that used to be part of the camp, preserved after the war and
turned into a museum.

For Jewish organizations the convent was an intrusion onto their biggest
graveyard and they demanded its removal. The issue was hijacked by
radicals on both sides and it took papal intervention to finally remove
the convent in the early 1990s.

Historians agree that at the heart of the dispute was a communist lie,
propagated for 40 years, which maintained Auschwitz was a place of
martyrdom of Poles and other European nations as much as Jews.

The number of victims was exaggerated to 4 million from an actual 1.5
million and their count was based on citizenship rather than religion or
ethnicity, which diluted the scale of the Jewish genocide.

"As awful as it sounds now, when I began work in 1965, we were told
Auschwitz must have a 'multinational character,' reflecting the socialist
values of the time," said Franciszek Piper, head historian at the
Auschwitz museum.

Commemorative plaques listed the victims in alphabetical order, with Jews
-- Zydzi in Polish -- right at the end. There was no mention that most of
these Poles, Hungarians, French and Dutch were Jewish.

Saviors or accomplices?

For some Jews, the initial reluctance to accept the truth by many Poles
was a proof of widespread anti-Semitism and raised the question of Polish
complicity with the Nazis' plan to exterminate their Jewish neighbors.

Bitter feelings were reinforced by accounts of Poles helping the Nazis
kill or capture Jews as well as a number of post war pogroms of those who
survived as they returned to their towns and villages.

Poland's image was also tarnished by an anti-Semitic campaign conducted by
the communist authorities in 1968, that saw most of the 300,000 Jews who
survived the Holocaust leave the country.

Many in Poland were incensed at the accusations of complicity with the
Nazis, who killed 3 million ethnic Poles during their ruthless rule and
razed Warsaw to the ground.

They point out that thousands of Poles risked their lives to save their
Jewish compatriots and many were killed by the Nazis for doing just that.

Poles are the largest group of European nationals awarded the Israel's
Righteous Among the Nations title for helping to save Jews during the war.

But five years ago, Poles were forced into more soul-searching, when an
account of a wartime massacre of 1,600 Jews by their Polish neighbors in
eastern Poland was published.

The initial shock and denial gave way to recognition that Poles were
indeed responsible for the atrocity, leading Kwasniewski to apologize at a
ceremony in memory of the victims.

"It was a very courageous speech, and it shows Poland's maturity in
dealing with its own history, even painful episodes. There is more
readiness to remember the past and deal with it," said David Peleg,
Israeli ambassador to Warsaw.

Israel's allies

With these dark pages finally turned, relations between Warsaw and
Jerusalem have warmed considerably.

Some argue Poland has ironically become a greater ally of Israel than many
"Old Europeans," often very critical of the Jewish state's treatment of
Palestinians.

"The bottom line is that Poland has become one of the greatest, if not the
greatest, ally of Israel in the European Union," Polish chief rabbi
Michael Schudrich told Reuters.

Peleg says the Poles' past struggle for their own country's independence
makes them sympathetic to Israel's cause.

"The Poles' history, their suffering and difficulties, the fact they were
divided by neighbor states for more than 100 years, then communism and
Solidarity fighting the regime -- place them in a better position to
understand our security situation than people in Western Europe," Peleg
told Reuters.

(source: Reuters)

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

Auschwitz still has power to shock


At first the red-brick barracks look almost respectable, numbered like
normal houses along tree-lined paths.

But then the gas chamber reveals itself through the wintry fog, and the
death wall where prisoners were stripped and shot, and the soil and ponds
still full of teeth and crumbled bones from incinerated corpses.

The death factory where the Nazis murdered 1.5 million people went idle 60
years ago on Jan. 27, but Auschwitz, ground zero of human savagery, still
has the power to stun its visitors into silence.

"For me, this is a grave, not a museum," said Shalom Gross, a 57-year-old
Israeli who lost more than 80 relatives to the Holocaust on his mother's
side alone.

He held three Hebrew holy books. "I have come here to pray," he said.

Auschwitz today is many things at once: an emblem of evil, a site of
historical remembrance, a vast cemetery.

With its neighbor Birkenau and the town of Oswiecim -- the Polish name of
Auschwitz -- it is also a place where life goes on, where people go to
work, shop for groceries and try to make a living in a depressed
coal-mining region where unemployment runs
to 19 percent.

Some of the barracks serve as offices for the scholars and administrators
at the memorial site, who walk past the gas chamber and barbed wire as
they go to and from work. A room once occupied by an SS guard is eerily
preserved, down to the photo of Adolf Hitler on the wall.

"It is strange to work here, where we don't have contact with beauty,"
said Franciszek Piper, the head of the museum's historical research
department, whose spare office is on the second floor of Block 23.

"But if people in Poland wished to live far from the places where people
were killed, persecuted, where the soil is soaked with the blood of those
killed by the Nazis, then everyone would have to leave Poland."

The 60th anniversary carries special weight, because very few survivors
are likely to be alive for the 70th. Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia
and Jacques Chirac of France will attend Thursday's ceremony at Auschwitz,
along with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and others. U.S. President
George W. Bush visited Auschwitz in 2003.

An estimated 600,000 people visit the camp each year to learn or to grieve
or to reflect on the past. Most move about in quiet reverence, yet even
here, there's occasional levity -- smiling tourists posing under the
infamous main gate with its cynical slogan "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" (work makes
you free), or a group of visitors laughing as they line up to see a
documentary about mass murder.

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, says he has often seen such
behavior at Auschwitz.

"It's exactly the people who are smiling that you want there," he said.
"While it's disconcerting to see, the experience will play back in their
heads -- two months or two years later -- and have an effect."

More than 90 percent of the victims from 1940 until the Soviet Army
liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, were Jews, and the rest were Gypsies,
Polish political opponents, Soviet POWs, Catholics and homosexuals. They
died in gas chambers, from starvation, medical experiments, disease or
forced labor.

Auschwitz is in fact not one camp, but two: Auschwitz I, built in an
abandoned Polish military base, and Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, a much
bigger complex that went up later about 2 miles (3 kilometers) away to
expedite the Nazis' Final Solution.

It is Birkenau that shocks more profoundly, a flat, vast space still
ringed by the silver birch trees (birken in German) that gave the place
its name.

Crematoria lie in rubble as a reminder of the Nazis' effort to hide their
crimes as their defeat loomed.

Still intact are the rail tracks on which prisoners in cramped cattle cars
were hauled into the camp and selected for slave labor, experiments, or
death.

Many of the visitors are Israeli schoolchildren brought here to reinforce
the ethos of "never again." Many more come from Germany, alone or in
groups organized by schools, churches and unions to confront their
nation's past.

This month, a German service workers' union brought young and middle-aged
adults to visit the camp and meet with a survivor.

After a day at the camp, they gathered to reflect on their experience.

"I cannot comprehend the cruelty, how our parents and grandparents could
have gone along with this," said Jochen Schuk. "Or even today how people
can still cling to ideologies of hatred."

Auschwitz is held up as a moral lesson in the fight against racism and
anti-Semitism, but it has also become a potent symbol for those seeking
other meanings.

For Poland, invaded and occupied for five years by Germany, then ruled by
communist dictatorship for more than 40 years, having Auschwitz on its
soil is particularly painful.

The Nazis treated the Poles as an inferior race, dotted their land with
death camps and murdered about 3 million non-Jewish Poles. Yet it often is
tainted with guilt by geography.

Last year, when a Canadian TV station referred to Treblinka as a "Polish
concentration camp," Poland formally complained to the Canadian
government.

So sensitive is Poland to accusations of anti-Semitism that visitors to
Auschwitz are forbidden to make recordings of guided tours. Some have
edited the recordings to "prove that Poles are anti-Semites, even those
who work at the Auschwitz museum," said Marzena Konopka-Klus, a camp
guide.

A particularly fraught question is whether Auschwitz is primarily a Jewish
experience, or a universal one.

One of the most wrenching disputes involved a Carmelite nunnery next to
the camp. Jewish groups protested that it was an intrusion on their sacred
burial place. Polish-born Pope John Paul II intervened in 1993 and got the
nuns to move out.

Jews and Christians have quarreled over crosses put up around Auschwitz. A
discotheque in a tannery near the camp where prisoners worked and died was
shut following international protests.

Plans for a small shopping mall across the street from the Auschwitz
museum were also scaled down after Jewish groups complained.

And then there's the predicament of Oswiecim, a town of 42,000 forever
associated with a monstrosity for which it bears no blame.

Residents insist that life in Oswiecim is just as normal as anywhere else.

But Andrzej Bibrzycki, the chief elected county official, said he longs
for a time when investors and tourists will stop shunning the economically
depressed coal-mining area and create jobs for the 19 percent who are
unemployed.

"In Jerusalem, near Christ's tomb, Muslims are doing good business. So
believers of other faiths are making good money near sacred shrines," he
said. "I think these kinds of expectations are normal."

At this time of year, tourists move through the camp and the unheated
exhibit spaces bundled in heavy coats. Any urge to complain is stifled by
the photos of inmates in thin, pajama-like fatigues.

As dusk falls, museum officials quietly lock the entrance gates, but
refrain from breaking the silence with announcements over loudspeakers. As
the night deepens, the visitors drift off at the time of their choosing --
or when the gloom and the cold become unbearable.

(source: Associated Press)





GERMANY:

Surviving the horror of Auschwitz


Adam Koenig was one of eight siblings in a Jewish family.

A week after World War II began, at age 16, he was sent to a concentration
camp. It was the beginning of nearly six years of horror.

"They take off our hair, haircut, the clothing away, had a shower, cold,
and they hit us," Koenig remembers. "My first impression was, that's ...
(what) hell would look like."

Koenig survived Sachsenhausen and other Nazi death camps as a manual
laborer. In October 1942, he was transferred in a cattle car to Auschwitz.

''Who isn't able to work they sent to Birkenau, which meant to come to the
killing factory. That we knew, we saw it, you could smell it. It smells
like burnt meat. Sweet. A certain smell, it's hard to forget it.

"A lot of people committed suicide when they saw there is no hope."

With Soviet troops advancing on Auschwitz in January 1945, the Nazis moved
tens of thousands of prisoners -- Koenig included -- to other death camps.

''Later in history they called it the death march. And it was like that.
Those who couldn't continue, and fell, were too weak to continue to
march, they were shot."

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 60 years ago this week. Less than
three months later, on April 15, British troops liberated Koenig at
Bergen-Belsen.

But it wasn't a day of joy for him.

''Maybe I felt that the ...the damage must have been so much for the
family that I couldn't expect any good things," he says, fighting back
tears.

Indeed, Koenig would learn that four of his younger brothers and sisters
died in the Holocaust as did his parents -- his father at Auschwitz.

''After 20 years I decided to talk about it. And if I didn't manage to
keep my feelings in a certain way, I wouldn't do that. It would be too
hard."

Koenig's wife, Maria, also was at Auschwitz. They met as they and other
survivors searched for loved ones.

As retired teachers, they continue to lecture to keep the Holocaust memory
alive. At age 82 and a great-grandfather, Koenig remains on a mission.

''People who have the experience, they have to do something. They have a
certain responsibility that the things which happened shouldn't be for
nothing."

(source: CNN)