April 2



USA//OREGON:

Holocaust survivor sues TriMet, former driver


In Portland, a Holocaust survivor is suing TriMet and a former bus
driver for more than $5 million, claiming memories of Auschwitz were
recalled when the driver yelled at her and pushed her off his bus.

Rosa Wigmore, 81, who survived the notorious Nazi concentration camp, is
seeking just over $3 million in damages from former driver Timothy J.
Shuey and a little more than $2 million from the transit agency.

Shuey quit TriMet shortly after the June 27 incident.

The lawsuit claims Shuey discriminated against Wigmore by referring to her
in vulgar terms as an immigrant and telling her to "go home from where you
came from" after she complained that he missed her stop.

He then grabbed Wigmore from behind and knocked her to the floor. When
Shuey forced her out the door of the bus, she fell to the sidewalk.

Mary Fetsch, TriMet spokeswoman, said Friday that agency officials had not
seen the lawsuit and had no comment. Shuey, 48, could not be located for
comment.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, alleges
personal injury, a violation of civil rights and elder abuse.

The complaint alleges Wigmore suffered and endured extreme physical and
mental pain and suffering, including a heart attack, broken ribs and
soft-tissue damage.

"I am still very, very bad," Wigmore said Friday of her health.

She referred further questions to her attorneys, including Elden
Rosenthal, a prominent Portland civil rights lawyer who 15 years ago won a
$12.5 million lawsuit against a national white supremacist group in the
killing of an Ethiopian college student.

"This is a terrible thing for her," Rosenthal said, declining to comment
on specifics of the Wigmore lawsuit.

But the complaint says the bus incident caused "a reopening of the psychic
injuries" Wigmore suffered in Auschwitz.

From 1940 to 1945, more than 1 million people most of them Jewish died
in the largest of the Nazi concentration camps.

Wigmore, who is Jewish and came from Yugoslavia, carries a concentration
camp tattoo on her arm. She immigrated to the United States after World
War II and became a U.S. citizen in 1968.

Patricia Warford, a Newberg psychologist who specializes in trauma and
stress, said Friday that Wigmore would have been at Auschwitz during a
very impressionable time in her life, in her late teens or early 20s.

"Rough treatment, being pushed and grabbed, the humiliation piece of it
were all part of Auschwitz," Warford said. "It certainly is possible to
have a psychological response to a trigger event, such as being grabbed on
a bus. Whether that happened is up to the jury or court to decide."

(source: Associated Press)






USA//MISSOURI:

Suspected ex-Nazi loses appeal -- Court: Man thought to have been guard
should not have citizenship

In St. Louis, a federal appeals court agreed that a man suspected of
serving as an armed guard at a Nazi concentration camp and during forced
marches should lose his U.S. citizenship.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that Adam Friedrich
had admitted the World War guard service and that he worked under strict
orders to shoot prisoners attempting to flee.

By ensuring "that prisoners did not escape from these unspeakable
conditions, Friedrich personally assisted in the persecution that occurred
in those camps," making his 1962 naturalization "illegally procured,"
Roger Wollman wrote for the 3-judge panel.

Judge Wollman said the panel accepted Mr. Friedrich's claim that he "never
saw a prisoner escape, never harmed a prisoner, never discharged his
weapon while guarding prisoners, and never saw any prisoners die during
the forced evacuation marches."

The ruling affirmed a fedeal judge's finding last year.

His attorney, D.W. Hoff Jr., called the ruling regrettable but not
surprising and said he was unsure whether more apeals would follow.

The Romanian-born Friedrich, 83, has denied lying about his wartime
record, saying he disclosed his service in the Nazi Waffen SS when
applying for his visa. He has never been criminally charged.

The Justice Department and federal court rulings show Mr. Friedrich
volunteered in 1942 in Austrial for service in the Nazi Waffen SS. In
1943, he reported for duty as an armed guard at Germany's Gross-Rosen
concentration camp. About 1,500 of the camp's roughly 100,000 prisoners
died during his first five months there.

He also helped march a few thousand prisoners between camps, the appeals
panel found. In one march, it said, prisoners were forced to sleep
without blankets in open fields during winter. In another case, prisoners
- after nearly a day of walking - were loaded into unheated cattle cars
for a rail trip that lasted more than a day, never given food or bathroom
amenities.

Mr. Friedrich came to the United States from Austria in 1955, applied for
U.S. citizenship in 1961 and was naturalized the next year in St. Louis.

-- Investigations --

More than 70 people who assisted in Nazi persecution have been stripped of
U.S. citizenship since the Office of Special Investigations began
operations in 1979, according to the Justice Department.

(source: Associated Press)