Nov. 6


POLAND:

Treasures Emerge From Field of the Dead at Maidanek

Adam Frydman shut his heavy-lidded eyes and vividly recalled his first
glimpse of this unplowed field 62 years ago. He was 20 and had just
arrived from the Warsaw ghetto with his father and brother. He imagined
hundreds of Polish Jews huddled behind barbed wire fences. He heard
barking dogs. He inhaled the unmistakable smell of death. When he got his
bearings, he pointed unambiguously.

"There," he said.

So there is where they dug. Barely beating the season's first frost and
oblivious to a punishing wind, a team of archaeologists transformed the
former Maidanek death camp into a crime scene, complete with victims,
witnesses and evidence.

After carving only a fraction of the 1,100-by-164-foot field into
checkerboard plots that resembled shallow graves, they found about 20
women's rings, a heavy gold bracelet, 2 watches, gold-framed eyeglasses, a
miniature Roman Catholic religious medallion and 15 valuable American
Eagle gold coins. Even after the very first find, a tiny cut stone - maybe
glass or a garnet - they declared their mission a success.

Once, it was written that there could be no news after the fact from a
former death camp. But this week there was news from Maidanek. The dead
bared their buried prayers.

"To me this was an act of defiance," Mr. Frydman said. "People who
expected to die said why give it to the Germans, why help their war
effort?"

David Prince, a pharmacist and Holocaust survivor who accompanied his
wife, Ella, a former Maidanek inmate, said, "It was priceless to whoever
put it there," and he added, "They said let it rot in the ground - the
bastards won't get it."

"It was meant to be found by people exactly like us," he concluded.

Four Maidanek survivors who live in Australia came here with Israeli
archaeologists, Israeli and European amateur investigators and British and
American documentarians. They found exactly what they were looking for:
evidence validating indelible memories that for whatever motivation,
desperate people facing imminent death had scratched burrows into the
earth and secreted objects largely of sentimental value.

The participants also learned a great deal about one another and even
something about themselves.

Tessie Jacob was 19 when she arrived at Maidanek with her doting parents.
When she emerged naked from the disinfecting showers, they were gone. Last
Saturday, for the first time, she stepped inside a small room, its
concrete walls still splotched with the cobalt blue stains of Zyklon-B
gas. A dead rosebud was tucked behind a pipe. This was the gas chamber
where her parents died.

"Forgive me," she wept. "I was the baby. You had to pay the price. I came
to apologize for being alive."

Grzegorz Plewik, 35, a historian at the Maidanek State Museum, gently
grasped her arm. "I try to understand what you went through," he said.
"You're not guilty."

The expedition was conceived by Yaron Svoray, an Israeli journalist and
former police investigator best known for infiltrating neo-Nazi groups. In
a casting director's dream, he recruited the survivors - who speak English
with a Polish accent and an Australian inflection - and teamed up with an
American entertainment executive, Matt Mazer, to form Historical Media
Associates.

Their goal was to research Mr. Frydman's recollection, return to Maidanek
with him and other survivors, memorialize their visit in a documentary
film and transform the camp into an enduring archaeological dig, perhaps
conducted jointly by Israeli, German and Polish students.

"Holocaust stories are about misery, but this is a story of redemption,"
Mr. Svoray said. "This story is not only about what we find. It's about a
bunch of people working together to find something."

The first ring was discovered by Shlomi Avni, a captain in an elite
Israeli Navy reserve unit, and Andreas Vokti, a German bricklayer whose
grandfather was in the Wermacht.

Maidanek is not as infamous as Auschwitz, but according to the Holocaust
Encyclopedia, 170,000 inmates died here. John Demjanjuk and Hermine
Braunsteiner Ryan were guards (they later emigrated to America, where they
were prosecuted). Art Spiegelman recounted his father's ordeal here in
"Maus."

Built in plain sight in suburban Lublin to accommodate about 20,000 Soviet
P.O.W.'s, Polish dissidents and Jews, the camp suddenly was flooded with
as many as 18,000 Polish Jews deported from Warsaw in April and May of
1943 after the ghetto uprising was quashed.

Hundreds of the unchosen - not yet selected for work or for death - waited
on a grassy purgatory, the sloping middle field between Barracks 4 and 5
for hours or even days within sight of a smoky pyre. The camp's original
crematory was either not working or could not handle the capacity. Unlike
most other deportees to the camps, they had yet to be stripped of all
their belongings.

"These people realized help was not coming, that they were the last Jews
in the world," said Mr. Svoray, who was joined here by his wife, Mikhal,
and their two teenage children.

He and Mr. Mazer explained that they were not treasure hunters, not in the
conventional sense.

"We've spent a million dollars so far to find rings worth maybe $100
retail," said Mr. Mazer, who organized the expedition and won the museum's
cooperation. "But the objects tell a powerful story. There is no way that
a modern person can understand the experience, but looking at an object,
understanding the circumstances of how it got here and being involved in
its rescue gives us all an opportunity to connect with the people here and
their sacrifice."

The camp, now about half of its original 670 acres, is largely barren
except for the brown wooden horse barns that served as barracks. It is
drab - even the raucous, swooping birds are black - but punctuated
occasionally by blue-and-white Israeli flags waved by school groups from
Israel. The students rarely explore, much less bridge, the guilt and
suspicion that still divide many Poles and Jews. Earnest but frustrated
government historians who have worked here for years had barely
interviewed any Jewish survivors until now.

"Seeing the place is very important," said Thomasz Kranz, who runs the
museum's scientific department and is completing an analysis that will
reduce the official toll at Maidanek, but also will challenge the
Communist and nationalist orthodoxy by concluding that the vast majority
of victims were Jews. "Also important is that we try to confront the past
together."

Every morning, Mr. Plewik, the museum historian, said, he drives his
children by the camp on their way to kindergarten. They know he works
there, but not what he does or why. "I don't know what to tell them," he
said. "Maybe later."

Maidanek abuts a Catholic cemetery, which was festooned with flowers and
candles and crowded with Poles visiting before All Saints' Day. Two
striped smokestacks from nearby power plants now dwarf the 65-foot-tall
square brick chimney of the crematory. Signs advertising new homes nearby
promise a park vista - the park, in this case, being the former death
camp.

After three days of digging with guidance from Mr. Frydman and an assist
from a metal detector, Mr. Mazer presented Mr. Kranz with the unearthed
objects, which perhaps will go to Israel and elsewhere as part of a
traveling exhibit. The team arranged to secure the site and hopes to
return next spring.

By Wednesday, Mr. Plewik, after good-natured prodding from Mr. Mazer, was
routinely referring to the inmates of Maidanek as Polish Jews rather than
distinguishing between Poles and Jews.

Tessie Jacob was feeling unburdened. "I owed it to my parents," she said.
"I found the truth. I know what they went through, and I know there's
nothing left of them."

Adam Frydman was vindicated. "One day I'll be gone and then there'll be no
one to tell the story," he said. "The people who died here can't tell the
story, except in what they left."

(source: New York Times)





FRANCE:

France Opens Resistance Memorial

President Jacques Chirac opened a memorial on Thursday dedicated to
members of the anti-Nazi Resistance. The memorial is near Strasbourg and
near the site of a World War II concentration camp.

"Never forget the victims of the darkest chapters of mankind's history,"
Mr. Chirac told a gathering of former inmates and officials at the
Struthof-Natzweiler camp, built by the Nazis in 1941 in the mountains of
Alsace, a region that was annexed by Germany during the war.

The memorial, in a vast underground storage room dug by camp inmates,
gives visitors an overview of 14 Nazi concentration camps, including
Auschwitz in Poland, Bergen-Belsen in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria.

Mr. Chirac was accompanied by his defense minister, Michle Alliot-Marie,
and Simone Veil, a former government minister who was deported from France
to Auschwitz at the age of 17.

(source: New York Times)