May 4



USA//PENNSYLVANIA:

Jewish group to honor Holocaust victims----Allentown event will include
music, candle lighting ceremony.


The Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley will sponsor its annual
observance of Yom Hashoah V'hagevurah, the community Holocaust remembrance
program, 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Jewish Community Center, 702 N. 22nd St.,
Allentown.

Each year, those who perished in the Holocaust are honored.

Through song and music, tribute will be made to the memories of the
6million murdered in Nazi death camps.

New York musicologist and musician Jerry Silverman will present: ''The
Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust.''

He will guide the gathering on the step-by-step journey from 1933 to today
using music and songs.

The music will include rare recordings of voices long still. Jerry's son
Misha will accompany him on saxophone.

The program also will include the Jewish Day School Voices Choir under the
direction of Bunny Filler; a procession of second- and third-generation
survivors; and a memorial candle lighting ceremony.

Six candles will be lit, one for each million who died. Five of the candle
lighters are survivors or survivors' children and their families; the
sixth, reserved for lighting on behalf of the community, will be lit by
Ursula Wuerth, whose parents' actions under Nazi rule helped save lives.

This Jewish Federation program is coordinated by local Holocaust
survivors, Second and Third Generation and the Jewish Federation of the
Lehigh Valley.

(source: The Morning Call)




GERMANY:

Hitler's Nurse Describes His Final Days


Adolf Hitler was a shaking, graying, weakened man who "sank into himself"
in the final days before his suicide on April 30, 1945, according to the
first published account of his nurse, who worked in his bunker as Allied
forces closed in on Berlin.

Erna Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, told
Britain's Guardian newspaper in an interview published Monday that Hitler
"had a lot of gray hair and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20
years older," toward the end of his life.

"In the last few days, Hitler sank into himself," Flegel said. "He shook a
great deal, walking was difficult for him, his right side was still very
much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life (in July 1944)."

With defeat imminent, Hitler, 56, shot himself and his mistress Eva Braun
whom he married shortly before his death committed suicide by taking
cyanide in his underground bunker in Berlin.

Flegel dismissed Braun.

"She didn't have any importance. Nobody expected much of her," she said.
"She wasn't really his wife."

By contrast, Flegel described Magda Goebbels, wife of Hitler's propaganda
chief Joseph Goebbels, as "a brilliant woman, on a far higher level than
most people."

The Goebbels also killed themselves and poisoned their six children in the
bunker after Hitler's death.

Flegel said she tried to persuade Mrs. Goebbels not to take the lives of
her children as Russian troops got closer.

But Goebbels replied: "I belong to my husband. And the children belong to
me," Flegel recalled.

"You have to understand that we were living outside normal reality,"
Flegel said.

The Guardian said Flegel had never given a public account before of her
job as Hitler's nurse and her time in the Berlin bunker. But as the 60th
anniversary of end of World War II approached this weekend, she was
speaking out for the first time.

Flegel's existence became known after the transcript of an interview she
gave to U.S. interrogators was declassified by the CIA four years ago,
according to the Guardian.

In a separate interview with the German tabloid BZ, Flegel said she wanted
her story to be known. "I don't want to take my secret with me into
death," she was quoted as saying.

Asked by the Guardian what she thought of Joseph Goebbels, Flegel replied:

"I didn't like him. Nobody liked him. There were always people who hung
around him, of course, relatives and so on, but they were only there
because they wanted to help their careers. There were also lots of women
there who were young and pretty. They used to hang 'round his ministry.
They had an easier time of it than the rest of us, for whom things were
more difficult."

She said Magda Goebbels did not say anything about her husband's numerous
affairs.

The Goebbels' children, Flegel said, were favorites with Hitler, who drank
hot chocolate with them and allowed them to use his bathtub.

Flegel described how Hitler said goodbye to his medical staff on April 29,
1945, the evening before his suicide.

"He came out of the side room, shook everyone's hand, and said a few
friendly words. And that was it. There were a few people who then heard it
(the shot, when Hitler killed himself the next afternoon) and there were
others who didn't. The Fuhrer suddenly wasn't there any more," she
recalled.

"I knew that the Fuhrer was dead. Suddenly there were more doctors in the
bunker ... I didn't see Hitler's body. It was taken up to the garden. The
Fuhrer had such an authority that when he was there you knew it. It felt
so extraordinary," she said. The Guardian said Flegel remained in the
Bunker until the Russians arrived.

Asked why she had remained silent for 60 years about her experiences,
Flegel said they were simply too controversial.

"It was because after 1945 people started pointing fingers at each other
and suggested that so and so was infected (a Nazi)," she said.

Flegel evaded the question of whether she regretted her role in the Third
Reich. "Everyone has their own opinion," she said.

(source: Associated Press)

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

CHRONOLOGY-Holocaust memorial opens after years of debate


In Berlins, a memorial to the 6 million murdered Jews of Europe is due to
open on May 10 after 17 years of debate and controversy.

The following is a chronology of that debate:

AUGUST 1988 - Journalist Lea Rosh calls for a central monument to Jews
killed in the Nazi era between 1933 and 1945. NOVEMBER 1992 - A site near
the Brandenburg Gate, which until 1989 stood as the dividing line between
East and West Berlin, is chosen. SEPTEMBER 1993 - Chancellor Helmut Kohl
throws his weight behind a monument to Europe's murdered Jews. APRIL 1994
- Architectural competition launched.

JUNE 1995 - The government, city of Berlin and lobby group agree on a
design for a 20,000 sq metre (yard) angled concrete surface with the names
of all Jews who died in the Holocaust. Kohl rejects the plan and calls for
fresh debate on the issue. JULY 1997 - A second architectural competition
is launched. NOVEMBER 1997 - Competition jury decides on four finalists. A
design by sculptor Peter Serra and U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, which
envisages a "Field of Remembrance" built out of 4,000 concrete blocks,
emerges as the favourite. JUNE 1998 - Following a request from Kohl,
Eisenman modifies plan, cutting number of concrete blocks to 2,700 and
adding trees. Serra opposes the changes and pulls out of the project.
DECEMBER 1998 - Culture Minister Michael Naumann calls for a documentation
and study centre to be added to Eisenman's model. JUNE 1999 - The
parliament votes for Eisenman's twice-altered model as the design for the
Holocaust memorial, later approving cost of 27.6 million euros ($35.5
million). AUGUST 2001 - Criticism forces foundation raising funds for the
memorial to pull down provocative posters which said "The Holocaust never
happened" in order to grab people's attention.n euros ($35.5 million).
AUGUST 2001 - Criticism forces foundation raising funds for the memorial
to pull down provocative posters which said "The Holocaust never happened"
in order to grab people's attention.

APRIL 2003 - Construction begins.

OCTOBER 2003 - Construction briefly interrupted after it emerges that the
parent of Degussa, the company supplying anti-graffiti protection for the
2,700 concrete pillars, provided Zyklon B gas pellets used in Nazi
extermination camps. MAY 2005 - Memorial opens to the public.

(source: Reuters)


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

Bold, contentious Jewish memorial opens in Berlin


Berlin will unveil a haunting memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe
next week, culminating 17 years of charged debate and controversy over how
Germany should remember the darkest chapter in its history.

Situated on a vast plot of land between the Brandenburg Gate and the
buried remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the memorial has been hailed by
supporters as a courageous symbol of Germany's readinesss to face up to
its grim past.

Its detractors have slammed the design -- an open graveyard-like field of
rectangular charcoal-gray pillars -- as ugly, overly abstract and a
sitting duck for vandals.

The opening of the memorial on May 10 is unlikely to end a polemic that
has raged in German political, religious and artistic circles since feisty
journalist Lea Rosh began pushing for a monument to Jewish victims of the
Nazis back in 1988.

"It is not self-evident for a nation to put a memorial in the center of
its capital which recalls the worst acts, the most heinous crimes of its
own history," said Wolfgang Thierse, German parliamentary president and a
backer of the memorial.

"No one can say how this memorial will work, how it will be accepted and
whether the criticism will end. I think the debate and the fights it gave
rise to are bound to continue."

Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial consists of 2,711
pillars, which range in height from a few centimeters to 4.7 meters and
form a dense grid pattern through which visitors can wander.

From a distance, the site looks like a dusky, placid ocean. As one
descends on uneven, sloping ground into the memorial the concrete blocks
grow more imposing, tilt at irregular angles, and street noise fades.

The experience is intended to create feelings of unease and loneliness,
encouraging discussion on the plight of the 6 million Jews who died at the
hands of the Nazi regime.

Eisenman views the field as a metaphor for the Nazi regime and the mad,
ordered nature of its genocide.

"The field looks like it's reasonable, lined up," Eisenman said in an
interview. "Then you find the stones are not perfectly horizontal or
vertical. There is a warping sensation. It's unsettling. It seems
reasonable from the outside but when you get into it it's out of control."

At the request of the government, the dark field of pillars has been
complemented with an underground information center which documents, in
highly personal fashion, the stories of individual Jews killed by the
Third Reich.
Reaching a consensus on the memorial's final shape has been a messy
process replete with unexpected twists since former Chancellor Helmut Kohl
backed the project in 1993.

Kohl rejected as impractical initial plans to build a 20,000 sq meter
(yard) angled concrete surface on the site, containing the names of all
the Jews who died in the Holocaust. He then insisted on changes to the
Eisenman plan that prompted the architect's design partner, sculptor Peter
Serra, to drop out.

In 2001, the memorial foundation was forced to pull down fund-raising
posters which awkwardly tried to grab the attention of passers-by with the
title "The Holocaust never happened."

And in October 2003, construction was briefly interrupted after it emerged
that the parent of Degussa, the company supplying anti-graffiti protection
for the memorial's pillars, provided Zyklon B gas pellets used in Nazi
extermination camps.

Along this bumpy road, skeptics have questioned what the pillars have to
do with the Holocaust, attacked the decision to put the memorial in its
high-profile location and wondered aloud about why it is for the Jews and
not other Nazi victims.

(source: Reuters)




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

Holocaust Monument dedication too narrow: Korn


A senior Jewish figure in Germany, Salomon Korn, has criticised the sole
dedication of the new Holocaust Monument in Berlin to Jewish victims of
the Nazis, saying Germany should have commemorated other victims of Nazi
crimes at the site too.

In an article for the Jewish weekly Juedische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung
that is to appear on Thursday, he said Germany had missed a chance to
erect a memorial that shows the "full scale of the millennial Nazi crime".

Korn, an architect who is deputy president of the Central Council of Jews
in Germany, has argued since the plans were initiated that the monument
should also commemorate other Nazi victims, including Roma, homosexuals,
and

deserters.

US architect Peter Eisenman designed the field of 2,700 concrete slabs
known as 'stelae' that occupies the central Berlin site. The monument is
to be inaugurated on 10 May.

Korn said the public interpreted the Holocaust Monument as not just
commemorating genocide against the Jews, but also to an increasing degree
the entirety of Nazi crimes.

He praised the information centre at the side of the monument, which
Berlin added despite Eisenman's misgivings. Korn said he found the
information centre to be the site of the monument's greatest expressive
power.

(source: Expatica.com)

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

A survivor of Adolf Hitler's wartime bunker in Berlin has been tracked
down, a German newspaper claims.


The Berliner Zeitung relates 93-year-old Erna Flegel's account of the last
days of World War II, under the headline "I was Hitler's nurse".

Mrs Flegel said she stayed in the bunker after Hitler killed himself and
was there when Soviet troops arrived.

She said Hitler was so paranoid that he even suspected spies had filled
his cyanide capsule with false poison.

From January 1943 until the end of the war, Mrs Flegel's job was to give
medical treatment to Hitler and his inner circle, she told the paper.

She was interviewed by US secret service agents in 1945, but otherwise has
kept silent about her experiences for the past 60 years, the Berliner
Zeitung says.

Now, however, she said she had decided to speak out, telling the paper: "I
don't want to take my secret with me to the grave."

'Merciless' mother

Mrs Flegel's story does not challenge what is already known, but does add
new details.

She said of Hitler: "By the end, he didn't trust anyone any more - not
even the cyanide capsule he swallowed."

She also recalled trying to save the lives of the six children of Josef
Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, but said his wife Magda, who poisoned
them, was "merciless".

Mrs Flegel said that after Hitler's suicide, Goebbels took over as leader,
but no-one paid any attention to him.

"His last subordinates shot themselves in succession," she said. "And
those who didn't shoot themselves tried to flee."

She said she remained, however. "I had to look after the wounded."

In the newspaper interview, Mrs Flegel described the atmosphere in the
bunker as the noise of approaching Soviet forces grew.

"You could feel that the Third Reich was coming to an end," she said. "The
radios stopped working and it was impossible to get information."

Mrs Flegel added that when the Soviet troops arrived, they were
well-behaved and advised her to lock her door.

She said she stayed for several days, and was one of the last people to
leave the bunker.

(source: Berliner Zeitung)





ISRAEL:

Holocaust survivors vs. Bank Leumi


Dozens of Holocaust survivors demonstrated outside the headquarters of
Bank Leumi on Tuesday, urging the Israeli bank to open its records about
unclaimed assets of Holocaust victims and turn the money over to destitute
survivors.

The demonstration came two days before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is to
travel to Poland to participate in the "March of the Living," an annual
Holocaust memorial that this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp there.

An Knesset report early this year concluded the government and several
banks, including Bank Leumi, Israel's oldest commercial bank, hold more
than US$200 million in assets belonging to Holocaust victims. The bank
says it no longer holds any such funds.

"Sixty years after the Holocaust, there are still records that are closed.
There are still accounts that are unaccounted for. There are still names
of people that are unknown," said Bobby Brown, an official with the World
Jewish Congress who joined Tuesday's demonstration.

Survivors demanded that all the unclaimed assets be converted to funds to
aid them. About 280,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, but the
population is rapidly aging and in many cases living in difficult
conditions.

In the protest, several rows of chairs were left empty, marked with the
names of Holocaust survivors who have died in recent years. "Bank Leumi is
waiting for all of us to die," read a large poster.

"We decided to organize this demonstration, no matter how many people take
part, in order to prove and to proclaim to the whole world that we will no
longer be silent," said Zeev Factor, an Auschwitz survivor and chairman of
a welfare fund for Holocaust victims.

"If those who are responsible for running the country want to see the
survivors of the Holocaust, who came and created and defended this nation,
then next time we will turn out in full force," he said.

In the 1960s, most dormant Holocaust-era accounts held by Israeli banks
were turned over to a government custodian.

However, according to the Knesset report released in January, the
government and several banks hold assets valued at US$212 million,
including as much as US$70 million owed by Bank Leumi.

Many of the account holders were European Jews who were killed in the
Holocaust, the report said.

Bank Leumi said it turned over all unclaimed accounts to the government in
the 1960s, but accepted the report's conclusion that it undervalued these
assets at the time.

It said it has set aside NIS 35 million shekels to cover this shortfall,
in line with the report's findings, and is waiting for the government to
set up a mechanism to distribute the funds.

"We have nothing to hide," said bank spokesman Yoav Poles. "We're ready to
pay the money."
Organizers of the demonstration said the bank owes NIS 308 million
belonging to Holocaust victims. But the bank said this figure, noted in
the parliamentary report, is "theoretical."

(source: Associated Press)

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


Holocaust memorial eve Wednesday


The State of Israel will pause in memory of the six million Jews who
perished in the Holocaust as the country marks Holocaust Remembrance Day
starting on Wednesday night.

The annual state ceremony which this year will mark 60 years since the
end of World War II will begin at 8 p.m. at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.

The solemn hour-long opening event, which will be broadcast live on
Israeli television channels and radio, will be attended by Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon and President Moshe Katsav, as well as scores of dignitaries
and ambassadors from around the world.

The central theme of this year's ceremony, coming six decades after the
survivors of the darkest chapter in the 20th century were liberated from
the Nazis, will be "The Anguish of Liberation and the Return to Life."

During the ceremony, six torches will be lit by Holocaust survivors in
memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The chief rabbis of Israel will recite both a selection from Psalms as
well as kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer.

All places of entertainment will be closed on Wednesday night.

On Thursday, a two-minute siren will sound at 10 a.m. at the start of a
series of day-long ceremonies throughout the nation.

The official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the
siren is sounded at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial at Yad Vashem, in
the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs.

The "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony will follow in which
Holocaust victims' names are read out at both the Hall of Remembrance at
Yad Vashem, and the Knesset.

Approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors are thought to be living in the
country.

(source: Jerusalem Post)






AUSTRALIA/USA (ARKANSAS):

Holocaust Survivor Kurzem Finds Cousin


After seeing his mother and siblings shot to death by Nazis, 5-year-old
Ilya Solomonovich Galparin went into survival mode, concealing his
Jewishness and assuming the role of fair-haired Aryan mascot for a
Latvian Nazi military unit.

Fifty years later, living in Australia, the man now known as Alex Kurzem
disclosed his Jewish identity to family members and then told his story to
the world in the 2003 award-winning documentary, "The Mascot," by his son,
filmmaker Mark Kurzem.

Now, Alex Kurzem is in Arkansas after locating first cousin Emmanuel
Krupitsky, also a Holocaust survivor, through online genealogy research.
On Thursday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the two will view "The Mascot" at
a screening at the Clinton Presidential Library here.

"From my father believing he had no one, to finding (out that) Emmanuel is
his first cousin, it's been an overwhelmingly positive experience," said
Mark Kurzem.

"The Mascot" won a major award at the 2003 Sydney Film Festival, but
Kurzem's story angered many in Australia's Jewish community, some of whom
doubted his claim that Nazis had accepted him as one of their own.

"I feel like I'm two persons in one body ... and they're not getting along
very well," Alex Kurzem says in the film.

Kurzem was likely known as Ilya Solomonovich Galparin on Oct. 20, 1941,
the day his mother gathered her children in her arms and informed them
they would be shot the next day. Kurzem, the oldest boy, decided he didn't
want to die and sneaked away after getting ready for bed.

He said the next day he hid behind a knoll and watched as his mother,
siblings and 1,600 other Jews from the Belorussian village of Koidanov
were slaughtered.

"Sometimes I wished I was shot with my mother," Alex Kurzem says in the
film. "I didn't understand who to blame. I still don't understand who to
blame."

Kurzem wandered the countryside, eating berries and begging. For how long,
he doesn't remember. Then, a man who likely suspected Kurzem was Jewish
took the boy to a Latvian battalion of the Nazi SS, apparently to be
killed.

But a Latvian soldier, discerning the boy was Jewish, took pity on him,
giving him a new name and fabricating a background for him. He ordered him
to never tell any one of his heritage.

Members of the Latvian unit took Kurzem under their wing and the boy lived
and traveled with them. The soldiers thought the fair-haired boy was a
Russian orphaned by the war and he became the unit's mascot, wearing a
Nazi uniform and carrying the unit's standard.

Emmanuel Krupitsky, 84, who led his siblings out of Minsk in 1941, leaving
their mother behind, says he does not blame his cousin for concealing his
identity or becoming a mascot for the Latvian unit.

"You can't blame a 5-year-old boy and the fact that he ended up with the
Latvian SS was good luck," Krupitsky said. "That Latvian soldier was a
mensch."

(source: Associated Press)






USA//CALIFORNIA:

Soul Mate in Years of Horror - A survivor tried to bury his memories of
Auschwitz as he raised a family in L.A. Then a comrade from the death camp
resurfaced.


Eugene Zinn was about an hour into a PBS Holocaust documentary in January
when he heard a familiar voice speaking his native Slovak tongue.

Eighty years old with his eyesight nearly gone, Zinn pressed his face
closer to the television screen in his West Hills den.

There, clad in an argyle sweater and walking around the restored Auschwitz
concentration camp in Poland, was Otto Pressburger, a man for whom Zinn
had been searching for much of his life.

Zinn knew he needed to find Pressburger. He knew he wouldn't rest until he
did.

For decades, Zinn didn't speak about the horror of the Holocaust. His
three years in the death camp seemed so distant. So at odds with a happy and
fruitful half-century in Los Angeles. The 45-year marriage. The fulfilling
career designing wheelchairs. The two "extraordinarily wonderful" children
he had raised, sent to college and on to successful careers. The perennial
kvetching about the Dodgers.

The nightmares, however, never let up. He would conjure up images of his
mother, Helen, then 46, and his father, Heinrich, 58, lined up outside the
gas chamber with his little sisters Maedy, 13, and Erika, 12. Screaming
for help once inside. Finally passing out. No one to help them.

"There's no way you can block it out," Zinn says.

Zinn knew of no one in L.A. who could relate. Even he couldn't quite
fathom the enormity of it. "Sometimes I'd think, did it really happen to
me?" If people inquired about the striking blue "30113" tattooed across
three inches of his outer left forearm, he would reply, "I was at
Auschwitz." Few pressed further.

Zinn says he didn't want to trouble his children with the evils he had
endured. Instead, he did his best to try to enjoy life. He took his kids
to baseball games. He sent flowers to his wife, Sarah, each Valentine's Day.
He flew the family to Europe or the Caribbean on annual vacations. "And thank
God, we had beautiful times," Zinn says. "I wanted to raise my children to
be happy."

Son Harry, now 44, recalls reading "Night," Elie Wiesel's famous Holocaust
account, in junior high school and realizing for the first time what his
father must have endured.

But it would be like asking someone whether he had cancer, the younger
Zinn recalls. "You don't want to know it's true, and if it is, you don't
want to bring it up."

That Zinn - or anyone - could survive Auschwitz for three years is
remarkable in itself. Wiesel spent less than a year there and in other
camps. Most of the more than 1 million prisoners brought to the camp from
1940 to 1945 died or were executed within weeks of arrival.

Zinn's train arrived in April 1942, packed with 973 Slovakian Jews,
including his four teenage male cousins. All but 88 were dead within 17
weeks. Zinn guesses maybe five of his trainload made it to the war's end.

Within three weeks, the first of his family members perished. His cousin,
Zoltan, wracked by beatings and chronic diarrhea, died in Zinn's arms in
the wooden, straw-strewn bunk they shared with three others. Within three
months, the other three died, too.

"Every evening prayer, I would ask God to take my soul," Zinn recalls, so
the Nazis "wouldn't have the satisfaction of killing me."

He worried about his parents and siblings. The last time he had seen them
was at Passover, April 2, 1942, in their home in Huncovce, Czechoslovakia.
As German soldiers rounded up the cousins, Zinn said his last words to his
mother: "Don't cry, Mother. I'm not afraid of work. They won't kill me."

A few months after that last Seder together, Zinn saw the son of the
cantor of his synagogue, who had just been transferred to Auschwitz from
the Madjanek death camp, where most of the 100 other Jews in Huncovce had
been taken. He relayed the devastating news: Zinn's parents and two
sisters had been sent directly to the gas chamber at Madjanek. His elder
brother, Alexander, 20, was brutally beaten not long after, and when he
fell, SS guards stomped on a broomstick across his neck to finish the job.

The cantor's son told Zinn that his father had been singing on the train
as they left home, thinking he would soon see his younger son, Gene, again.

Zinn had no one. Except for prisoner number 29045.

Also 17 and from Slovakia, Otto Pressburger had arrived three days before
Zinn. Pressburger's parents and three brothers all perished within six
weeks of arriving at Auschwitz. "From then on, it was just me,"
Pressburger recalled in a telephone interview. "Just me and Zinn."

Pressburger, strong and solid though just 5 foot 6, initially dug the
ditches into which the dead bodies were dumped, then dug them up again
when the camp filled with the unbearable stench of rotting flesh.

The Nazis had a solution. They sent Zinn, Pressburger and hundreds of
other prisoners to masonry classes in the mornings. The rest of the day,
they worked shoulder-to-shoulder laying bricks and mortar for four large
buildings. These would become crematoriums at Birkenau, the camp next to
Auschwitz. At 5 foot 3, Zinn was far from the strongest of his family.
Nor, in his view, was he the smartest. He doesn't think there was a greater
reason he was spared, his faith in God so shattered by the atrocities.

"What I keep asking myself," he says, "is how come I'm the only one who
survived?"

Zinn dodged direct death sentences several times.

In one of the regular "selections" designed to weed out "useless eaters," an
officer pointed him to the fatal line. Zinn ran. When soldiers caught up
with him 10 minutes later, he was given a reprieve. Anyone able to run for
that long, the officer said, could still work.

Once, he heard guards discussing how they had picked 81 prisoners for the
gas chamber, when they intended to pick only 80. Zinn knew German. He
shouted out that he would relinquish his place.

Some choice assignments helped the pair evade death. Early on, Zinn and
Pressburger sifted through confiscated belongings for gold and valuables,
sometimes finding a salami in a coat pocket. An assignment expanding the
chicken coops provided an occasional stolen egg downed raw and warmth from
fires that served as incubators.

The final job was the luckiest. In 1944, they were assigned to the stables,
where they could wash their bodies and uniforms in the horses' bathwater.
Better grooming helped them survive the gas chamber selections.

On Sundays, when work was lighter, they picked lice off their uniforms.
"We were killing lice and fleas just like our captors were killing us," Zinn
says. They and a dozen other Eastern European prisoners would talk about
home and their mothers' cooking, and sing the "Auschwitz Song." Its
sprightly melody belies its seven grisly verses, all in German, with lines
such as,

"And should I never see my homeland

And like many thousand others through the chimney go .

I greet you my dear ones wherever you are

Remember me sometimes because I had to leave you."

As the Russian army approached in January 1945, the Nazis forced the
prisoners to march west. Zinn and Pressburger drove horse-drawn wagons and
pilfered from the clothes and supplies they had loaded for the officers.
The rest had to walk through the snow. Between the freezing weather and
the SS guards' bullets, 15,000 of the 60,000 prisoners died.

When American tanks drew close from the west, the SS herded the prisoners
into boxcars again. At one village, all Jews were told to get out. The
stable-masters stayed put. The 80 Jews who got off were shot on the spot.

Pressburger jumped off the train about 90 minutes before it reached
Prague.

"That was the last time I saw Zinn," Pressburger recalls. "I had no idea
he lived through it."

Zinn jumped an hour later.

As the war ended, Zinn followed his mother's last instructions to the
family: Return home, no matter what.

When he arrived in Huncovce, he found no trace of his family's existence.
Their home was occupied by a family he didn't know. The yeshiva, or Jewish
school, had been desecrated. His grandparents' gravestones had been
shattered.

His parents' 15 siblings who lived in the village, their spouses and their
families had all been killed.

A neighbor handed him a thin gold band. His mother had asked that her
wedding ring be given to the first Zinn to return home.

For more than 40 years, Zinn kept the ring in his wallet, wanting to hold
close the only tangible connection he had to his past.

He carried the ring during his two years in the Czech army and when he
moved to Palestine.

He carried the ring to the U.S. in 1955, first to Pittsburgh to stay with
an uncle who had immigrated before the war, and eventually to L.A. He kept
the ring with him while he worked as a cabinetmaker, while he went to night
school at L.A. City College, and for the 34 years he worked his way up
from junior draftsman to manager at Everest and Jennings, where the "EZ"
wheelchair line adopted his initials.

"I didn't want to put it away someplace," Zinn says.

And then, while shopping at the Farmers Market seven years ago, a
pickpocket stole his wallet.

Zinn can't pinpoint when or why he began uncovering his past. Perhaps, he
said, he realized how distant the slaughter was becoming. Perhaps he
recognized that he was getting old and that memory, however persistent, is
impermanent.

In 1992, Zinn took his family back to his birthplace.

In one sense, Huncovce - now part of Slovakia - hadn't changed much. The
mountains were still as stunning, and a 15-minute stroll still went from
one end of town to the other.

His house still had a functioning outhouse and a water pump still wrapped
in straw against the freeze.

He knocked on the door at the gate. An old woman answered, showed them
around, then asked, "Do you want to buy the house?"

"How can I buy it, when I never sold it?" Zinn replied.

The Zinns hired a taxi to drive the few hours to Auschwitz.

Son Harry captured the trip on video. As the family walks around the camp
that now seems more like a college campus, with its red brick buildings
and manicured lawns, Zinn tells what happened to him.

"On this spot, I was standing naked with a whole block of prisoners," he
says. "I was selected and waiting for the gas chamber. The row here was
the last row. But the truck taking the prisoners was full."

While awaiting the next truck, he explains, the SS man said, "How old are
you? Seventeen? You want to work? OK. Then you can work."

Looking healthy and wily in his late 60s, he drags on Benson & Hedges
cigarettes.

"And here, in the mornings, we used to get up and there would be
shootings.."

And here is Block 27, "where you were brought when you were sick.
Depending on who saw you, they would either give you aspirin or a shot.
If you got a shot, in five seconds you were dead.

"From Block 11, the hangman came. Once they brought six mothers, whose
sons had escaped. They hanged them for two days, with a sign around them
that said, 'My son tried to escape, and now I'm in prison.' "

Over and over in the video, the words "right here" and "right here in this
spot" fall like gavels. But in a sense, it is as if Zinn is directing his
final argument at himself.

Birds chirp on that bright June day, and the trees look lush. Zinn
gestures toward the green fields that have replaced ankle-deep mud and
declares: "Every inch of it is fertilized with Jewish blood."

On the video, he asks the clerk to pull his file. He shows her the number
on his arm. Back comes a card with his dates of birth, camp entry and
departure.

Then he asks the clerk for the record of Allegra Haim. She was 18 when she
was rounded up in Athens in the fall of 1943, after she left her family's
hiding place to buy some food. They never saw her again.

Zinn learned from the records that Allegra had survived until Russian
troops liberated the camp. A week later, in a Red Cross hospital at the
site, Allegra Haim, the sister of the woman Zinn met at L.A. City College
and who became his wife, died. She had never left the camp.

A few years after the trip, Zinn was interviewed at length - at son Harry's
urging - by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Created
by Steven Spielberg after hearing recollections of survivors he met in
Poland while filming "Schindler's List," it has videotaped the
recollections of 52,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide.

The interview triggered Zinn to begin searching for his Auschwitz buddies.
Two years ago, he went to the 10th anniversary of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, where survivors were grouped by country. Would Pressburger be
there? No, and worse, he could find no one he knew.

Time was running out, with so few of the estimated 250,000 prisoners
liberated from the camps still alive.

He had all but given up hope when he saw Pressburger on his television
screen. Excited, Zinn dialed Harry and daughter, Helene, 38, and asked them
to track Pressburger down. They contacted KCET in L.A., the public
television station that co-produced with BBC the six-hour documentary,
"Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State."

The station passed along Zinn's contacts to Pressburger and his family,
telling the Zinns that it would be up to Pressburger whether he wanted to
contact them.

A week later, Pressburger called from his home in Herzlia, Israel. Zinn
recalls those first words in Slovak that sliced through his soul: How come
I don't remember you?

Zinn said his name, using the European pronunciation.

"Oh my god, 'tzeen,' of course I know you," Pressburger said. They hastily
caught up on where they had gone after leaping from the train.
Pressburger, now 81, told how he had been badly bruised and was nursed
back to health by a Czech family.

Eventually, he went to Palestine, fought in the military and founded a
printing business. He married a Romanian immigrant in Israel, Busia, whose
family had been in hiding in a Jewish ghetto during the war in what is now
Ukraine. They have two sons, one in New Jersey, and five grandchildren.

Pressburger says he survived so he could tell the world what he had
witnessed. He lectures about it twice a week to schoolchildren and talks
often at home about it. "Even our youngest granddaughter knows all our
Holocaust stories and experiences," he says.

Zinn and Pressburger's lives could have intersected many times after
Auschwitz. Zinn had gone to Palestine shortly after the war and fought in
the military, too. Both had visited Auschwitz with their families in the
early 1990s. Pressburger had toured L.A. on a vacation, and Zinn had taken
his family to visit Israel in 1984. Pressburger also had been interviewed
for Spielberg's Visual History project.

And then they went back to what they shared. "After that, all we spoke
about was Auschwitz," Pressburger says. "Memories, experiences.. Our
history. Auschwitz is our history."

Zinn ticked off names of the other dozen friends they had worked with in
the stables. What had become of Joseph, "YoJo" Weiss? And Washavaski,
whose testicles had been cut off? And what about Erwin Gutman? And Karmen
Haupt, whom Zinn had jumped from the train with and who he knew had gone to
Canada? And the guy from Lodz, Poland, they called "Lodgznik?"

Pressburger said he had kept in regular touch with three of the
stable-masters who had immigrated to Israel. Weiss had died just two years
ago. He and Pressburger had remained the closest of friends.

Burying that lifelong friend from Auschwitz was so painful that he became
physically ill, he says, which his doctor attributed to emotional
distress.

The old friends talked for about an hour, but communication grew
difficult. Zinn's Slovak is rusty and his Hebrew even worse. He tends to
mix in Slavic-accented words in English, which Pressburger doesn't speak.

Zinn said he told Pressburger: "Otto, please write me a long letter." They
said goodbye.

But Zinn could not wait for a letter. In early March, a few weeks after
that first conversation, he called Pressburger.

Zinn told Pressburger: "Otto, I have to see you."

"I would love to, but I'm too old to travel," Pressburger said. And Zinn
had second thoughts about leaving Sarah, whose memory is failing.

Zinn spends much of his time these days tending his two Meyer lemon trees
and his calla lilies. His wristwatch chirps out the time because macular
degeneration has been hindering his vision. He can no longer drive.

He clings to his family. He spent only two nights away from his children
while they were growing up, and although they live nearby, he still
insists they phone when they arrive safely home after visits.

He can't recall ever crying since he left Auschwitz.

On a recent visit, Zinn insisted a reporter tell him all the details
Pressburger had recalled in the telephone interview, and as they are read,
he dabs at his eyes.

He searches for words to convey how much reconnecting with Pressburger has
meant.

"In the context of my whole life, I couldn't figure out all those years,"
he said. "I didn't meet one person who was with me in Auschwitz, or who I
knew before Auschwitz. And suddenly, I saw someone I knew for three years,
who escaped one hour before me.. Otto Pressburger gave me a feeling that it
actually was like that . that it's not just a dream."

(source: Los Angeles Times; Batsheva Sobelman of The Times' Jerusalem
bureau)




SOUTH AFRICA:

Holocaust to be remembered on May 8


The annual day of remembrance to commemorate the memory of the six million
Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War
will be held on May 8, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies announced on
Wednesday.

The ceremony will start at 12 noon at the Martyr's Monument, West Park
cemetery and will be hosted by the SAJBD and the SA National Yad Vashem
Memorial Foundation.

SAJBD spokesperson Charisse Zeifert said Dr Azila Reisenberger, acting
head of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, would be
the guest speaker.

In addition to the traditional readings from Holocaust literature,
survivor Celia Boruchowitz will play music from the Vilnius ghetto on her
violin.

"It is 60 years since the liberation of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death
camps, and fewer and fewer survivors are still alive to relate their
memories," said Zeifert. "It's crucial for younger generations to carry
the torch forward."

Zeifert said an oath would be taken by members of the SA Union of Jewish
Students to remember the events of the Holocaust and work to prevent their
repetition.

(source: South Africa Press Association)




POLAND:

Auschwitz March to Recall Holocaust Victims


Thousands of people from some 50 countries have begun converging on
southern Poland to take part Thursday in a march in memory of Holocaust
victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most grimly efficient of Nazi death
camps.

"This year's 'March of the Living' will be the largest ever, with 18,000
to 20,000 people coming to Auschwitz on May 5, which is Holocaust
Remembrance Day," the event's director Aaron Tamir told reporters in
Warsaw last week. "It is going to be a huge and complicated event because
this year marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau and death camps in other countries, and the whole world
is paying attention," Tamir said.

At least 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews, died at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the key extermination sites for Nazi Germany's
"final solution," which aimed to wipe out Europe's 11 million Jews. The
Nazis succeeded in exterminating six million European Jews, half of them
from Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish community before World War
II.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his Polish counterpart Marek Belka
and Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany of Hungary, which lost 450,000 Jews at
Auschwitz, will be among dignitaries who will attend the event. Sharon was
"unlikely to march," the organizers told AFP.

March of the Living

In light of the huge numbers taking part this year, the organizers have
arranged for thousands of people to set off Thursday morning for the
three-kilometer (two-mile) walk from the train station at Oswiecim -- the
Polish town which tragically gave its Germanized name to the Auschwitz
camp -- to the Birkenau sector of the death camp. The main march, which
will group around 10,000 people, including many international officials,
will leave from the original camp at Auschwitz in the early afternoon.

"We've hired six special trains to bring participants to Oswiecim," Tamir
said.

Auschwitz was set up by the Nazis in 1940 on the site of a former Polish
army barracks on the outskirts of Oswiecim and expanded later to the
village of Brzezinka -- Birkenau in German -- three kilometers away, to
allow Hitler's Germany to more efficiently kill Jews, Sinti, Roma, Poles
and others considered inferior human beings.

At Birkenau, near the rubble of two interconnecting gas chambers and
crematoria the marchers will gather in mid-afternoon for a memorial
ceremony, held near the train track that carried Jews and other deportees
to almost certain death more than 60 years ago. The camp was liberated on
Jan. 27, 1945 by Soviet troops.

Belka, Sharon, professor, writer and former Auschwitz inmate Elie Wiesel
will be among those to give speeches to the gathering, which this year
will include as many Holocaust survivors and their descendants as
possible, according to Tamir.

Countering Holocaust deniers

"The survivors will not be with us forever, and when they are gone, it
will be easier for those who deny the Holocaust to spread untruths," Tamir
said. "The idea for the march came some 20 years ago when there were
voices saying the Holocaust never existed," he said. The denials "were
heard by students and young people around the world and the founders of
the March of the Living decided the best way to stop the debate was to
bring youths from all countries to see with their own eyes what happened."

From its start in 1988, when it gathered small groups of young Jewish
people, the March of the Living has grown to include "adults, survivors,
students, youngsters, pupils" and, for the past few years, non-Jews.

"Our project is to take people 'from Holocaust to revival,'" Tamir said.

Some participants come to Poland just for the day of the march while
others spend a week in the central European country, which lost six
million civilians in World War II, half of them Jews, visiting sites
linked to the Holocaust.

"Participants see and feel the Holocaust with their own eyes," Tamir said.
"Then many young people fly to Israel for the 'revival' part of our
project."

The principal aim of the march remains "to make sure that what happened
more than 60 years ago never happens again," he added.

(source: Deutsche Welle)

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

Sharon to visit Auschwitz for Holocaust march


JIsraeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will take part in a commemorative
march for Holocaust victims in Poland on Thursday, a trip his aides say
will symbolise steadfastness in the face of rising anti-Semitism.

He will join Polish leaders and an estimated 20,000 people from around the
world in the annual walk between the former Auschwitz and Birkenau death
camps, honoring the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust during
World War II.

The event, expected to be the largest ever March of the Living along the 3
km (1.9 mile) track through the German Nazi-built complex, coincides with
the 60th anniversary of the camps' liberation.

"It's a very symbolic date because it is 60 years since the liberation of
the camps and comes at a time of rising anti-Semitism when some people are
questioning the very response to the Holocaust the establishment of a
Jewish state," said Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Sharon.

Many Jews have already arrived in Poland, with 7,000 due to attend a
concert on Wednesday evening in the recently revived Jewish quarter of
Krakow, 70 km from the Auschwitz camp.

Another 5,000 are expected to take part in a memorial ceremony near the
Warsaw Ghetto memorial on Wednesday as part of a tour taking in
Polish-Jewish sights which will later travel to Israel.

A Tel Aviv University report released on Wednesday found anti-Semitic
incidents had increased by 68 percent in Britain and almost 40 percent in
France last year.

Calling 2004 "the most violent year in the last 15 years," the researchers
said there had been a 39 percent increase in violent attacks against Jews
worldwide compared with 2003.

ISRAEL NURTURES POLISH TIES

Sharon will be commemorating the Holocaust with Polish leaders on Israel's
official memorial day, highlighting a warming of relations the two
countries have enjoyed since the fall of communism in Poland 15 years ago.

Israel has agreed to iron out one area of tension with Poland over annual
trips by thousands of Israeli students to ex-concentration camps and
Holocaust memorials there.

(source: Reuters)






USA//NEW YORK:

US Holocaust museums shift focus to teaching tolerance


The Holocaust is still being remembered just not the way it used to be.

Sixty years after its end, an increasing number of cities have built
architectural testimony to the Holocaust. Twenty-six cities in the United
States and Canada now have Holocaust museums, and others have built
monuments or established research foundations or educational centers.

Holocaust museums and memorials have shifted the nature of remembrance,
moving away from the emphasis on testimony and defiance toward the
teaching of tolerance and understanding, according to several Holocaust
experts.

"Holocaust memorials always reflect their time. Every generation has to
find its own reason for memorializing," says James Young, a professor at
the University of Massachusetts and the author of The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Older museums marking the Holocaust, such
as the original Yad Vashem, built in 1957, focused on telling the
survivors' stories and conveying a "sense of hope and gratitude," Young
says.

Newer memorials, such as the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, which
opened in 1993, often make a self-conscious attempt to universalize
messages in an attempt to make them accessible to more people, he adds.

According to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and a consultant on
the development of the Washington museum, visitors to the new museums,
built roughly during the last decade, learn universal moral imperatives,
such as "the importance of military ethics and of recognizing the humanity
of the enemy even while undertaking action against them."

Broadening the message of the Holocaust in memorials to include the
persecution of gays and lesbians during World War II or including other
genocides raises some controversy.

Berenbaum worries that moving the focus away from the specific Jewish
nature of the tragedy borders on "soft-core denial, by trying to call
other" mass murders "Holocaust-like."

"Twenty years ago, Judaism was defined" as a "sacred survival," Berenbaum
says; Judaism's function was to ensure the continued survival of Jews.
"The Holocaust therefore played a major role in Judaism, endowing moral
defiance to the sense of Jewish survival."

The Holocaust memorials of this period, from the 1980s to the mid-90s,
therefore, had a specific message, according to Berenbaum: "The whole
world is against us, powerlessness invites victimization and thus the
Jewish people must rely upon themselves and only themselves and assume
adequate power to preserve themselves in the contemporary world."

Today, he says, this message "isn't quite credible. Many people have
non-Jewish friends," and it is hard to accept that we can exist as a
people if we must be unconnected to other nations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of museums proliferated motivated,
scholars say, by a few different ideas.

All museums want to say the Holocaust "is a terrible thing," says Deborah
Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory
University and author of the recently published book History On Trial: My
Day in Court With David Irving. If we know about it, "we have a better
chance of preventing this from happening again. We are ensuring the
future," she says.

As more museums were built, a growing discomfort over their proliferation
began to be felt in some parts of the community. Berenbaum says that "the
Jewish community was quite unhappy that resources it felt entitled to were
going to be given to Holocaust education they wanted money for Jewish
education and donations to Israel." For this and other reasons, the rush
to build Holocaust museums has been "dwindling. Once one museum has been
built, you don't need another one in that city," he says.

Young has noticed that new memorials, including the one in Washington,
move beyond historical education, speaking to "the ultimate effects of
bigotry and racism. There has been a self-conscious effort to open
themselves up to more groups."

North American memorials now experiment with attempts to educate people
about the Holocaust and genocide without minimizing the Jewish nature of
the tragedy. As Young explains, "In an era of installation art, it makes
sense for" Holocaust "memorials to be more abstract, and allow" for people
to take away different messages from the same exhibit.

The architecture of museums and memorials has changed to accompany
contemporary attitudes.

Berenbaum says that the original Yad Vashem provided the first "model of
an integrated institution; a museum that tells the story of the Holocaust,
a research institution and archive, and an educational institution that
teaches teachers and students the history of the Holocaust, its meaning
and application to the new generation." When it came to the Washington
museum, planners tried take a slightly different tack.

"There are corners that don't quite meet the building is not supposed to
reassure you," Young says. "It is constructed from brick and iron, a
material reference to the Holocaust."

Lipstadt is pleased by the diversity of the visitors to the Washington
museum, which she helped plan.

"I sit in the lobby and watch America pass by me," she says. "Every part
of the country comes the vast majority of visitors are non-Jewish."

She hopes this means that more people are getting an important message.
"While it's important to know what happened, building an identity as
victims is not who Jews are. A whole world of Jewish identity is lost: We
should teach people to be Jews in spite of the Holocaust, not because of
it. We have to teach them the good stuff, too."

(source: Jerusalem Post)