August 5



THE NETHERLANDS:

Belgian Holocaust denier arrested in Amsterdam


Belgian Holocaust denier Siegfried Verbeke has been arrested at Schiphol
Airport in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and might be extradited to Germany
for trial, Belgian newspaper "De Standaard" reported on Friday.

A German judge issued an international arrest warrant against Verbeke
at the end of last year because he cast doubt on the internet over whether
the Nazis actually killed six million Jews in World War Two.

Germany asked Belgium to extradite Verbeke last year but a Belgian judge
refused the request, the paper said.

Verbeke has already been convicted in Belgium of denying the Holocaust.
The appeals court in Antwerp sentenced him in April this year to a
maximum one-year jail term and a 2,500-euro fine for anti-racism laws.

The 63-year-old Verbeke has been the head of the Free Historical
Research Center since 1983. The center has publishes books in which the
Holocaust is denied or downplayed.

Verbeke has used the principle of freedom of speech to defend himself
in the past and is a renowned figure across Europe. He hadlinks with
various ultra-right groups across the continent.

(source: Xinhua News)





GERMANY:


Berlin's Holocaust memorials and museums produce a tangle of emotions

Visitors walk among some of the more than 2,700 ashen cement slabs at
Berlin's Memorial to the Slaughtered Jews of Europe. The monument, which
opened in May, cost 27 million euros to build but is a controversial
memorial to those who died in the Holocaust.

The Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened in 2002, is a major tourist
attraction in the reunified German city.

The Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is considered by
many to be the most significant example of contemporary architecture in
the city.

The Memorial to the Slaughtered Jews of Europe fails to connect with some
young visitors, who treat it like a playground.



Browsing in a hip houseware imports store in the Kreuzberg area of
Berlin, I heard a familiar melody on the stereo.

Could it be? Yes. The "Oseh Shalom." The last lines of the Mourner's
Kaddish, an ancient Jewish prayer for the dead and for peace, set to a
plaintive refrain and playing softly, in the neighborhood of a city where
tens of thousands of German Jews once resided, worshiped and were carted
off to death camps.

Sixty years after World War II ended, to the store manager I spoke to it
was just another track of ethnic background music to shop by. But for this
American Jewish traveler, it was one symbolic, ironic encounter among many
with today's Jewish-centric Berlin.

On a recent trip to Berlin (my first), I often felt history clashing with
modernity, grief suddenly engulfing me and moments of puzzlement and even
comic absurdity.

Holocaust reminders, markers, monuments, museums and memorials are
everywhere in this vibrant, self-aware city. And I often didn't know
whether to laugh, to rage or to weep when encountering them.


**

More information

To learn more about Jewish historical sites and memorials in Berlin, see
the following:

The Jewish Museum Berlin: www.jmberlin.de/home_english.htm

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/
(click on English at the top of the home page)

The Topography of Terror Exhibit: www.topographie.de/en/

General information about Jewish Berlin: www.berlin-judentum.de/ (click on
English on the home page)

General Holocaust information (from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C.): www.ushmm.org

**


Such ambivalence is not rare for foreign Jewish visitors to contemporary
Berlin.

The current generation of German leaders is the first to make a vigorous,
laudable commitment to publicly expose and repudiate the barbarism of Nazi
Germany, particularly the regime's annihilation of 6 million European
Jews.

These projects are not undertaken lightly. Often, they are the subjects of
fierce public debate.

But what are they? Heartfelt apologies to the Jews of the world,
expressing what German Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse called "the
acceptance of responsibility for our history"?

Or "Never again!" reminders to young people, to instill religious and
ethnic tolerance and refute neo-Nazis and Holocaust debunkers? Gestures to
burnish modern Germany's image, still scarred by its fascist past?

I cannot untangle a single answer. Nor can I tell you what I expected or
hoped for from these shrines. My feelings became clearer only as I
frequently confronted reminders of Berlin's unquiet Jewish and Nazi ghosts
confrontations I found fascinating and excruciating, meaningful and
disappointing.

The most massive, central and official of the monuments are major tourist
attractions of reunified Berlin: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe near the Brandenburg Gate (which opened in May) and the new Jewish
Museum Berlin (completed in 2002).

Also prominent: the Topography of Evil, a harrowing, open-air exhibit on
the perimeter of the site where the headquarters of the SS (Nazi special
police) once stood. A museum is being built there, to house the detailed
blueprints for genocide unearthed from the razed building's bunkers.

Berlin synagogues, once desecrated by the Nazis and now restored (with
protective anti-terrorism edifices, ironically), are now open to tourists
and to Berlin's current and surprisingly large Jewish population composed
mostly of 1990s migrs from the former Soviet Union.

There also are many more modest, intimate places of remembrance like the
"mirror wall," which lists the names and addresses of 1,723 Jews from the
Steglitz district who were Nazi victims.

Jewish "vogue"

Curiously, there also are signs of Berlin's general vogue for many things
Jewish: Klezmer bands, delis serving bagels, specialty bookstores. Berlin
writer Iris Weiss caustically labeled this phenomenon "Jewish Disneyland"
a sentimental craze for "exotic" cultural trappings related more to
Eastern European Jewish culture than the highly assimilated, pre-Hitler
Jews of Germany.
How one responds to all this is partly a matter of background. In my case,
my immediate family escaped the Holocaust (though not other forms of
anti-Semitism), by coming to the United States from Poland and Russia two
decades before Hitler seized power in 1933.

But the Holocaust was painfully real to me as a child. "Never forget!" was
the motto of my parents' generation. And from unsparing films, books,
religious lessons and testimony from camp survivors, I learned enough to
give me dreadful nightmares of Dachau and Auschwitz.

My young mind strained to imagine how any nation could coldly plan, and
largely accomplish, the systematic annihilation of an entire people. My
people. I still cannot truly comprehend it who can?

I was hoping to find some insight, or at least a sense of catharsis, at
Berlin's Memorial to the Slaughtered Jews of Europe. A sunken grove of
more than 2,700 ashen cement slabs, this giant civic monument was designed
by American architect Peter Eisenman, who says it resembles a "waving
cornfield." Not to my eyes: From above, and within, it seemed a bleak,
anonymous graveyard.

Drearily abstract, the piece bears no names or other words along its rows
of pillars. Nor does it identify the off-kilter alleys one walks through
between the tall slabs, as paths Jews may have taken in life, or to their
deaths.

Two decades of national debate, at a cost of 27 million euros to the
German government, and this was the result? No wonder the design (chosen
among 25 submitted) was so controversial. And how grotesquely ironic that
the project faced further troubles when it was learned that Degussa, the
company supplying graffiti-proof coating for the posts, had ties to a firm
that made Zyklon B the gas used to exterminate Jews in the camps. (A
different supplier was found.)

My difficulty with this grim eyesore was more visceral and immediate: It
left me cold. An enthused guide explained how the memorial allows each
visitor a contemplative, singular experience, its irregular paths creating
the symbolic illusion that those around you are disappearing in a dark
maze.

But German Jews didn't evaporate: Roughly 160,000 to 165,000, by
estimates, were worked to death, or slaughtered. This concept of absence,
instead of an inescapable collision with life and loss, began to enrage
me, as a head-game that bypasses the heart.

No wonder some children have been jumping from pillar to pillar. What
would make them think this structure wasn't a playground?

I hoped the memorial's underground museum, with its mission to personalize
Jewish suffering through victims' letters, diary excerpts, photographs and
family biographies, would be more compelling.

But despite the sleekly displayed photos, the anguished written pleas of
the murdered, the wall-projected tallies of Jewish dead from each country,
something was missing.

I got an idea of what it was from a recurring phrase in the exhibit notes:
"... the National Socialists (Nazis) and those who assisted them."

Who were these "assistants," I wondered? The Nazi reign lasted 12 years.
What were the masses of ordinary Germans thinking, feeling, doing when
their Jewish co-workers and neighbors fled the country in the early 1930s
or were forcibly ejected from their homes and deported?

Where was a display about the roots and extent of German anti-Semitism? If
this chilly, cerebral memorial wasn't going to engage the heart, couldn't
it at least ponder how a society resists or acquiesces to genocidal
brutality?

Maybe such memorials are really not for most Jews, as our guide implied,
but for those who know little of Holocaust history. So what did I want
from them?

Frustration dogged me as I visited Berlin's Jewish Museum, which a German
academic had annoyingly assured me wasn't another Holocaust "guilt trip"
but a tribute to centuries of German Jewish culture.

Poignant memories

My skepticism was quickly shattered, though, by the building itself.
Brilliantly designed by American architect Daniel Libeskind (also slated
to create a Ground Zero memorial in New York), it is a remarkably dramatic
expression of a history interrupted, with its odd angles, scarlike
zigzagging window slashes and eerie internal voids (empty towers).
The historical exhibits within have won less applause than the structure
itself. But they are colorful, informative and often high-tech/interactive
enough to engage youths.

A lengthy narrative guides you from the first documentation of Jews in
Germany (a decree by Roman emperor Constantine in 321) to the present, via
exhibits of manuscripts, paintings, ritual objects, video and audio clips,
and (predictably) homages to Jewish German "all stars" from poet Heinrich
Heine to scientist Albert Einstein to movie director Billy Wilder.

But along this time continuum, the ebb and flow of German persecution of
Jews is also apparent, through pogroms, special taxes, restrictions on
land ownership and profession. And yellow identity patches 400 years
before Hitler decreed all Jews would wear a yellow Star of David on their
clothes.

However, the most poignant exhibit was a temporary art installation in the
only one of the museum's "voids" that is occupied.

"Shalechet (Fallen Leaves)," by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, consists
of 10,000 iron-wrought, open-mouthed "faces" spread across the floor. You
can walk on this metallic carpet, a disconcerting, heart-wrenching act of
communion. I felt as if I was literally tramping on the faces of the dead
(the piece is dedicated to all victims of persecution), as the clanging of
"faces" under my feet echoed into the room's lofty reaches.

Also rewarding, if painful, was a display of rather mundane objects in the
museum's small Holocaust section. I was especially struck by a Berliner's
neatly typed note, informing Nazi authorities that his neighbor was aiding
desperate Jews with illegal food rations and forged passports. The "hidden
history" of individual depravity, and moral courage it was all there on a
scrap of paper.

But the memorial in Berlin that moved me most was even smaller, even less
conspicuous.

I first came upon the stolper steine (stumble stones) while walking near
the Sophienstrasse, an artsy area of boutiques, galleries and cafes.

Suddenly a glint of brass on the sidewalk caught my eye. It was a small,
embedded plate, bearing words and numbers the names, birth and death
dates of Jews who had once lived at this address, and the names of the
concentration camps where they perished. One person listed was a toddler
at her death, another perhaps her elderly grandmother.

These 4x4-inch brass cobbles turned out to be the work of Cologne artist
Gunter Demnig, who has researched and installed more than 3,600 of them in
45 German cities. The stones memorialize not only Jews, but also some of
the millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazi genocide homosexuals, trade
unionists, the disabled.

The cobbles cost $100 each, but were more precious to me than gold. They
say quietly: "There were human beings living here, with names and loved
ones. Please remember what happened to them, and should happen to no one."

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," has said of Germany's willingness to
face its past, "This is how we move forward; this is how we really show
that we are no longer complicit morally, intellectually in any way in
those deeds."

More than anything else on my trip, the stumble stones made real to me the
lost Jews of Berlin and the righteous impulse to honor them.

(source: Seattle Times)





USA//ILLINOIS:

Accused denies he helped Nazis
North Sider blames man with same name


An 86-year-old North Side man accused of aiding Nazis during the Holocaust
and lying about it to gain entry into the U.S. testified Thursday that he
never persecuted Jews and lived an itinerant, hand-to-mouth existence
during World War II.

On the final day of his trial, Osyp Firishchak denied he was ever a member
of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, a group that helped Nazi soldiers in
rounding up, beating and killing Jews in eastern Poland.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, questioned Firishchak about a host of documents
that show a man with the same name, birthday and place of birth served in
the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police from 1941 to 1943 and later in the guard
unit of the same organization.

The Office of Special Investigations, the Nazi-hunting unit within the
Justice Department, accused Firishchak of lying to U.S. immigration
officials after the war in order to gain a visa and ultimately
citizenship.

If found guilty, he could lose his citizenship and face deportation from
the U.S., where he has lived since 1949.

U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan, who presided over the bench
trial, is scheduled to rule on the case after Aug. 25.

Faced with documents showing that a man with the same identifying
information had served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, Firishchak
responded that his name was common.

He said that far from holding a steady policeman's job, he struggled to
eke out a living during the war, walking for months from his hometown in
Ukraine to Germany and finally to Lviv, Poland.

"You have to understand, I didn't have an address. I looked for work. I
looked for where to sleep," he said. "I moved like a Gypsy from one place
to another."

The only thing prosecutors and Firishchak could seem to agree on was that
he was in Lviv during much of the war.

In that city, which is now part of Ukraine, the Jewish population was
forced into a ghetto and ultimately sent to extermination or forced labor
camps. About 100,000 perished.

Though Nazis directed the persecution of Jews in Lviv, most of the
day-to-day actions were performed by Ukrainian Auxiliary Police officers,
according to historical documents presented during the trial.

Firishchak said he was never among them, although prosecutors contended he
was an active participant.

During the trial, they presented documents that showed an Osyp Firishchak
helped round up absent Ukrainian police officers on the eve of what became
known as the Great Operation, a prelude to the final liquidation of the
Jewish ghetto.

A frail man who walks with a cane and has difficulty hearing, Firishchak
said he spent the war living an almost bohemian life, idling away days in
the coffee shops of Lviv and doing whatever work he could find, from
baby-sitting to handyman labor.

Prosecutor Gregory Gordon expressed disbelief that during the German
occupation of Lviv, when the Nazi army was looking for every able-bodied
man it could find to fuel its war machine, Firishchak was able not only to
evade detection but also to live an almost carefree life.

Firishchak responded that he never registered for work in Lviv because he
feared being sent to Germany.

He told the court that he had little direct knowledge of the treatment of
Jews in Lviv.

"I didn't see [Jews being forced into the ghetto], but everybody was
talking about it," he said.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Menkin called Firishchak's story implausible from start
to finish.

(source: Chicago Tribune)





AUSTRALIA:

Nazi hunter hones in on second suspect


An international investigation is in full swing into claims a second Nazi
war criminal could be living in Perth, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff says.

Alleged war criminal Charles Zentai was arrested in Perth last month and
could be extradited to Hungary to face allegations of abducting and
murdering a Jewish teen in 1944.

The 83-year-old pensioner, who lives in the Perth suburb of Willeton, is
suspected of having tortured and murdered 18-year-old Jewish man Peter
Balazs in Budapest while serving in the army of Hitler's wartime ally,
Hungary.

The Hungarian government requested Mr Zentai's extradition earlier this
year after the Simon Wiesenthal Centre - a Jewish human rights
organisation - alleged he escaped to Germany after the war by passing
himself off as a refugee.

The widower has denied the accusations and the legal process is
continuing.

Dr Zuroff, director of the Israel-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, credited
publicity surrounding the Zentai case with bringing out information about
another suspect in Perth.

"We are not at liberty to reveal any identifying information because the
allegations are being investigated," Dr Zuroff said from Jerusalem.

"It is not 100 per cent certain that those accusations are accurate.

"As you would imagine, the last thing we would want to do is to raise
allegations against someone who is innocent."

Dr Zuroff said his investigation, which would consider information from
archives in a number of countries, was likely to take another four to six
weeks.

No details of the suspect would be made public until the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre was satisfied the allegations could be substantiated.

"Basically we are in a situation where the only way any action can be
taken is if we are able to develop a case and then turn it over to the
Australian police," he said.

"Once we have ascertained that the information is credible and is serious
then we will turn the information over to the Australian authorities and
they will conduct their own inquiries."

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and if
Zentai is sent to Europe, he will be the first Australian to be extradited
over alleged war crimes.

"We had a project called Operation Last Chance which offers financial
rewards for information which (leads to) the prosecution and punishment of
Nazi war criminals," Dr Zuroff said.

"We received information, for example, about Charles Zentai in the
framework of that project.

"I am assuming that the publicity surrounding the Zentai case is what
prompted a resident of Perth to call us and give us some information about
an additional suspect."

(source: AAP)