Sept. 10



UNITED KINGDOM:

Queen supports Holocaust memorial day


The 2006 UK holocaust memorial day was launched this week with the
announcement that a new trust, with the Queen as patron, will take
responsibility for the event.

Since the first HMD in 2001 the British government's Home Office have run
the commemorations, held each year on 27 January, the date of the
liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

From next year the new Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, whose trustees
include both educators and survivors, will take control of the activites
planned for the annual day.

The day, which has been instituted by many European countries including
France and Holland, will brought forward by one day to 26 January as the
27th is a Friday and events could clash with Shabbat.

Trustees appreciated

The main event of the day, which is running with the theme 'one person can
make a difference,' will take place in the Welsh capital Cardiff in the
new millennium centre.

At the announcement, Home Office minister Paul Goggins thanked the
trustees for their dedication to educating the British people about the
events of the Holocaust.

"We are pleased and proud to hand over the day to day running of the Day
to the Trustees, all of whom have shown unswerving commitment and dedication
to this important event and all it stands for," Goggins said.

"Holocaust Memorial Day has significance for our nation, not only because
we remember those who fell victim to the Nazis, but also because it
inspires and encourages us to act upon the lessons of the Holocaust and
challenge intolerance and racism wherever we find it," he added.

New independence

One of the trustees, David Russell, explained the importance of the Home
Office allowing an independent body to run the events.

Russell, who runs the Jewish East Celebration society which promotes
Jewish life in the East end of London, told EJP "The home office felt it
was overseeing the management to lay the foundations but never envisaged
it being a government initative ad-infinitum. This was not because they
wanted to be less committed to the concept but it is important that
independently."

Stephen Smith, director of the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Nottingha,
will chair the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Smith noted the importance of the Queens support of the day. The Trust is
honoured that Her Majesty the Queen has agreed to be patron, he said.
"Holocaust Memorial Day 2006 can teach us about individual responsibility
and the ways in which individuals can make a difference. The real lesson
is that even a small gesture can have an enormous impact."

(source: European Jewish Press)





SLOVAKIA:

First permanent Holocaust exhibition opens in Slovakia


Sixty years after the end of World War II, the first permanent Holocaust
exhibition has opened in Slovakia, commemorating some 70,000 Slovak Jews
who were deported to Nazi-run concentration camps, an official said
Friday.

The exhibition, inside a former synagogue in the western city of Nitra
some 90 kilometers (56 miles) northeast of the capital, aims to tell the
story of the Holocaust and its Slovak victims, said Pavol Supka of the
Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava.

Supka said the installation is made up of objects which document the
Holocaust, including some personal items such as prisoners' clothes, and
soap made from human bones.

The exhibition, which officially opened Thursday, was financed by the
country's Culture Ministry.

Explaining why such an exhibition did not open sooner in Slovakia, Supka
said that "until now, there was not the will, nor money.?

Under communism, which ended here in 1989, the Holocaust was largely
ignored in schools and by society.

Only since that regime fell has Slovakia slowly started to face and deal
with its wartime past, when the state organized and financed the
deportations of its Jewish citizens to concentration camps, where most of
them perished.

Supka said the exhibition will be open to the public daily.

(source: Associated Press)





USA (NEW YORK)/GERMANY:

Nazis and Medical Ethics: Context and Lessons


The practice of medicine in Nazi Germany still profoundly affects modern-
day medical ethics codes, according to Alan Wells, PhD, an expert in
medical ethics with the American Medical Association (AMA) and Patricia
Heberer, PhD, historian at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). To teach those
lessons to the next generation of physicians, the AMA and the USHMM bring
a lecture series on the subject to Long Island, NY medical schools this
week.

Upon previewing the Museum's special exhibition, "Deadly Medicine:
Creating the Master Race," which runs through Oct. 16, 2005, the AMA
Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs helped initiate the collaboration
between the AMA and the Holocaust Museum.

"During the 1930s, the German medical establishment was admired as a world
leader in innovative public health and medical research," Dr. Wells said.
"The question we are asking is: 'How could science be co-opted so that
doctors as healers evolved into killers and medical research became
torture?'"

"The story of medicine under Nazism is instructive and an important theme
in understanding the evolution of the Holocaust," said Dr. Heberer. "The
collaboration of the USHMM and the AMA Institute for Ethics presents a
unique opportunity to explore this topic, both in terms of history and
contemporary issues, and to bring the lessons drawn to students,
physicians, and faculty in universities around the country."

The presentations will focus on the role Nazi medical practices played in
the development of medical ethics and the lessons today's physicians have
learned from the period leading up to the Holocaust. The series is jointly
funded by the AMA Institute for Ethics, the AMA Foundation, the Museum's
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and host institutions. The series
will visit medical schools and selected universities across the country
over the next year.

"Many of the most important issues in medical ethics today, from genetic
testing and stem cell research to the humane treatment of prisoners of
war, are directly affected by the experiences of medicine leading up to
and during the Holocaust," Dr. Wells said. "Physicians need to explore
these issues without getting caught up in political agendas or the results
can be something we never intended and cause great harm."

According to Dr. Wells, World War II era Germans were extremely advanced
in medicine, technology and public health research but these successes
have largely been overlooked by history because of the medical extremes of
the Holocaust. For example, Germany was the first to have a high-powered
electron microscope, the first to document the link between asbestos and
lung cancer, and an innovator in developing high profile public health
campaigns for a variety of health issues, such as anti-smoking campaigns
and promoting breast self-examination to help detect tumors at an early
stage. These advances and campaigns, however, were eventually aimed
exclusively at the "Aryans" the Nazi ideal of the "master race."

"Adolf Hitler spoke of Germany as a body with himself as the doctor," Dr.
Wells said. "He wanted to make Germany 'healthy' by eliminating diseased,
unhealthy parts of the body. Early on, this meant killing the disabled.
But because the Nazis also believed that Jews possessed 'bad' genes, they,
too, came to be portrayed by public health 'experts' and 'scientists' as a
threat to racial purity and a healthy nation."

These actions grew from a theory called "eugenics" (using selective
breeding to improve the genetic quality of a species), which came from a
distortion of Charles Darwin's theories of "survival of the fittest,"
according to Dr. Heberer. Some eugenics programs, such as laws sanctioning
the sterilization of the "feeble minded," initially met with resistance
throughout the world, including in Germany. But when the Nazis came to
power, and particularly during World War II, these constraints disappeared
and the Nazi regime was able to implement its radical version of medicine.

"We want to understand why healers became killers and use our
understanding as a guide for medicine today," Dr. Wells concluded. "Even
though the horrors of the Holocaust seem to be so long ago, we can never
forget this history because it continues to affect medical ethics today.
For example, one reason doctors today are so concerned about racial and
ethnic health disparities is because our codes of ethics demand that we
treat every person equally, without regard to race or ethnic background.
This ethical obligation is a direct outgrowth of the horrors of Nazi
medicine."

(source: AMA)





AUSTRIA:

Play about Nazis killing children show how Austria confronting its past

With dreamy, phantasmagorical scenes mixed with horrific depictions of
torture, frequent nudity and Heil Hitler greetings, a new play about the
Vienna clinic where Nazis killed children they deemed unworthy to live
shows how far the country has come in confronting its dark past.

Spiegelgrun, which opened Sunday on one of Vienna's most storied stages,
has provoked this largely conservative city but playwright Christoph
Klimke says that's exactly what he was aiming to do.

"Theater can't change anything, but it has to tell the truth and be
political," Klimke said. Though Austria has come a long way in
acknowledging its role collaborating with the Nazis in World War II, the
play picks at a wound the country until recently preferred to leave
untouched. Some of the brains collected from the 700 children killed at
the Am Spiegelgrund clinic because the Nazis deemed them to be physically,
mentally or otherwise unfit to live were buried only in 2002. Dr Heinrich
Gross, a top Spiegelgrund doctor accused of involvement in many of the
deaths, had a successful career after the war.

That such a play is being staged at Volkstheater, Vienna's second-most
prestigious theater, shows "how much the situation has changed," said
Wolfgang Neugebauer, a former scientific director at the Documentation
Center of Austrian Resistance.

"In the 50s and 60s, no one would have thought of writing a play like
this. Now, even issues that are delicate in Austria, such as contemporary
history and the Nazi era, are brought to stage," he said.

Art dealing with Nazi crimes is important because it could teach new
audiences about the atrocities committed, he said. "A theater play is
perhaps more effective in conveying emotions than a scientist's
presentation."

The former clinic now serves as a memorial to the victims, and the play
casts a glaring spotlight on the crimes committed at Spiegelgrund, where
thousands of children were exposed to cruel experiments.

Gross, 89, began losing his standing in society only in the early 1980s,
after he lost a libel suit he had filed against Dr. Werner Vogt, one of
his critics. He remains free despite facing charges in the deaths of nine
children. Austria's justice minister has said that Gross will not be put
on trial because he suffers from severe dementia.

Klimke finds that outrageous.

"The story goes on until today. And it's a story about an Austria which
does not want to remember," he said. In the play, Rainer Frieb portrays
Gross as an evil Nazi scientist who views his patients only as research
objects. His bone-chilling laughter hangs omnipresent over the stage
during the two hour, 15 minute play.

Andreas Seifert plays the lead role, the child Karl Fuchs, brought to the
clinic because he was considered asocial. It shows him and other patients
being confined in straitjackets, held in tiny cage beds and force-fed
medication through funnels. The play follows Karl _ whose character is
based on a Friedrich Zawrel, a Spiegelgrund survivor _ after the war,
showing how his life was ruined by his experiences at the clinic. In a
cruel twist of fate, Gross, who worked after the war as a court
psychiatrist, evaluated Zawrel during a 1975 trial for theft. Zawrel
received a long prison sentence but was released in 1981 after Vogt
intervened on his behalf.

The play also shows how the Nazi policies snuffed out the children's
dreams _ of becoming a ship's cook, a magician or the owner of a
children's movie theater.

"We wanted to show that not the children are sick, but the country is
sick," Klimke said.

Waltraud Haeupl, whose 4-year-old sister was killed at Spiegelgrund in
1942, said she found the depiction of the victims and their sufferings
respectful. To stage such a play even a few years ago would have been
impossible, she said.

"It's a very good signal, and I hope lots of people will follow it. I hope
that this will continue to be dealt with," said Haeupl, 70.

Reinhard Skolek, a 57-year-old Vienna psychotherapist who saw the play
Monday, said he found parts of the play _ such as scenes meant to depict
the children's dreams so absurd they were hard to understand _ but
welcomed the artistic interpretation anyway. "It discusses the general
theme of the value of human beings. Such debates are important still
today," he said. ___

On the Net: http://www.spiegelgrund.at

(source: Associated Press)