August 1

USA:

Allied codebreakers missed Holocaust clues


A US government analysis suggests gruesome details from coded Nazi
messages intercepted by Britain could have confirmed and exposed the scope
of German genocide at least a year before Allied troops liberated the
death camps and became witnesses to the horror.

The US analysis suggests the Allies failed to understand the information
they had, information that might not have given warning of the Holocaust,
but could have prompted a military response to interrupt the deportations
and mass exterminations.

The analysis, called Eavesdropping on Hell, was written by Robert Hanyok,
a historian with the US National Security Agency's Centre for Cryptologic
History in Maryland.

In his report, he said intelligence gleaned throughout the war from German
military and police communication and from foreign diplomats provided
lurid, though often fragmentary and episodic, accounts of massacres,
deportations and even statistics on the killings in the concentration
camps.

One of the most harrowing messages codebreakers overlooked was intercepted
on January 11, 1943 and detailed the 1,274,166 Jews killed under Operation
Reinhard at four death camps - Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The
report notes: "The message itself contained only the identifying letters
for the death camps followed by the numerical totals."

The only clue that they were death camps was the reference to Operation
Reinhard, a tribute to the assassinated SS general, Reinhard Heydrich,
who had been charged with organising the Nazi plan to eliminate
Europe's Jews. But that was probably "unknown at the time" to the British
codebreakers, the report says.

However, British analysts must have considered the message important,
because it was classified "Most Secret" and marked: "To be kept under lock
and key. Never to be removed from the office."

The report said British and American efforts to sort the evidence were
hampered by large case backlogs and a shortage of translators. Efforts
were further slowed by the two allies' reluctance to share information
about German communications and by more pressing military priorities for
intelligence sifting.

The report also suggests anti-Semitism may have created an atmosphere that
affected how the intelligence was handled.

Peter Black, a US historian, said there was "nothing the Allies could have
done militarily". Aaron Breitbart, a researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre in Los Angeles, said: "If they announced it, would it have saved
lives? I think so, because there would have been greater pressure to bomb
Auschwitz in 1944 - at least the rail lines on bridges."

(source: Agence France Presse)





BRITAIN:

Holocaust victims win tax concession


The government said yesterday that it will no longer tax the compensation
that Holocaust victims and their heirs receive from Swiss banks holding
their war era accounts.
Around 1,000 people in the UK will benefit from the decision to exempt the
payments from income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax.

Many Jewish people deposited money in Swiss bank accounts to prevent it
from being seized by the Nazis. These have been dormant since the end of
the second world war.

A Swiss claims resolution tribunal now awards compensation to Holocaust
victims or their heirs in respect of this money. It is calculated by
factoring in inflation and interest on the original sum. The government
estimates that those affected in the UK are owed an average of 31,000.
The Swiss compensation arrangement is similar to the Restore UK scheme,
under which British banks pay compensation on unclaimed accounts opened by
Holocaust victims and frozen under the 1939 Trading with the Enemy Act.
Under British tax law, compensation paid for dormant bank accounts is
normally treated as interest and so taxed. Death duties can also be
charged on UK bank account balances.

However, the government decided in 2000 to grant a tax exemption to any
compensation paid under the Restore UK scheme. It is now proposing
legislation to extend this exemption to cover all comparable compensation
schemes in other countries. Similar schemes exist in France, Finland and
Holland.

"Holocaust victims or their heirs ... should not have to worry about tax
when seeking to establish whether they have a valid claim," said paymaster
general, Dawn Primarolo.

The Exchequer has budgeted for 10m to cover the exemption. The measures
will be contained in the finance bill which is expected to receive Royal
Assent in 2006. People who have already received compensation will be
entitled to a rebate on the tax paid.

(source: The Guardian)





USA//TEXAS:

Evil, rendered in oil----Painter wasn't directly affected by the
Holocaust, but he wants the world to remember


PLOWING STONES

The exhibit will be at Holocaust Museum Houston, 5401 Caroline, through
Sept. 25. The museum is free and open daily. Balagura's Girls an
exhibition not related to the Holocaust will be at the Anya Tish Gallery,
4411 Montrose, through Aug. 20.

With a splat of his paintbrush, Sal Balagura stroked violet onto the large
mural at the entrance of his exhibit, Plowing Stones.

He was putting the finishing touches on the mural during the Thursday
night opening of his show at the Holocaust Museum Houston. The show also
includes 28 dramatic paintings, which staffers hope will tour museums in
other cities.

But the powerful 7-by-11-foot mural, showing a long road, a field of
stones and a concentration camp in the distance, will be painted over.

During the opening, people sipped wine and stopped to admire the paintings
and read the accompanying poems.

Several middle-aged women gasped disapprovingly when a speaker mentioned
that the mural was temporary. After Balagura stopped painting to answer
the audience's questions, one of the women asked how he felt about its
destruction.

The artist with a slight build nodded.

"Of course I don't like it, but there is a symbolism to it," he said. "Why
should something as simple as a painting be more durable than the people
who died?"

Unlike other artists who paint about the Holocaust, Balagura, 62, is
neither a concentration-camp survivor or the child of one. In fact, he has
never visited a concentration camp.

But he grew up in the Holocaust's shadow. Balagura's Jewish parents
emigrated from Romania to Cali, Colombia, in the early 1930s. "Romania did
not require Hitler," Balagura explained. "They were highly anti-Semitic to
begin with."

His parents joined his mother's sister, who had already moved to Cali,
then brought over the rest of their family safely.

One of his first playmates was a young girl who wore a brace to hold her
head up straight. She died when they were both 5. Years later, he learned
that members of the family were Holocaust survivors. His friend was born
in Buchenwald concentration camp probably the cause of her birth defects.
The horrors of the Holocaust, he realized, continued years after the war
ended.

Balagura also remembers being greatly influenced by Menachem Begin (later
the prime minister of Israel), who made a fund-raising visit to Colombia.
At the Balagura family's house, the young, energetic man talked with great
empathy about the plight of survivors and refugees.

Balagura began painting when he was 3, and at 17, he had his first solo
exhibit at the Museo la Tertulia in Cali. He loved art, but to please his
family, he studied biology and went to medical school.

His new wife, Ursula, accompanied him to Princeton, where he earned a
doctorate in psychology. He taught at the University of Chicago and the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst before he decided to study
neurosurgery.

But after years of practice, even his fascination with the brain was not
enough to keep him in medicine.

"My artistic side was clamoring to get out of the closet, " he said. "I
had continued painting, but people thought I was a hobby painter, and that
was like putting a stake in my heart."

When he turned 50 in 1994, he decided to concentrate full-time on his art.
He and Ursula moved to Tesuque, N.M., where he built a studio. (The couple
recently bought an apartment in Houston and plan to divide their time
between both places.)

He examined several subjects: Colombia's indigenous people, musicians and
young women.

But he found himself drawn to Holocaust themes, in poetry and painting,
although he had never visited a concentration camp

He still hasn't. "I try to avoid them, because they have been purified,
sanitized and beautified," he said. "Of course, it's important for people
to go, but they need to remember that when the camps were in use, there
were no flower gardens."

An interview he read with an elderly Polish official inspired one of his
more gripping paintings.

As the official was leaving a building across from the Warsaw ghetto, he
recalled, he saw a Jewish man. The Jew, the official knew, would be killed
if he was caught outside the ghetto. The official told the Jewish man to
hide in a nearby church and promised that he would return and help.

A half-hour later, he arrived at the church. But it was already too late.
The man from the ghetto was dead, most likely of starvation.

The story haunted Balagura. For four years, he dwelled on it in a painting
called Death Posing for the Artist, a scroll-like circular piece, like the
Torah, with six skeletal figures in slightly different poses. "It depicts
how with the last breath, life escapes," Balagura said. "And how easy it
is to die."

He began showing his works, both Holocaust-related and not, in 1992, in
Victoria, Texas. Since then, he's had gallery shows in Germany and Spain,
and in Holocaust museums in Florida, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Houston,
where his last exhibit was in 2000. He's particularly pleased that Plowing
Stones will travel to other museums, including the Sherwin Miller Museum
of Jewish History in Tulsa, Okla.

For those who dismiss Holocaust art and refer to it as "relics," he
encourages them to take another look.

"I would like people who come to the show to leave feeling that behind a
person, there is an entire universe," Balagura said. "And that when you
kill a person, you truly kill everything that would have followed. That's
true in the streets of Houston or the camps in Poland."

(source: Houston Chronicle)