Nov. 14



USA//ILLINOIS:

Nazi-Era Rail Car Unveiled at Ill. Museum


When Fritzie Fritzshall was 12 years old, she and her family were
deported to Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from a Jewish
ghetto in what was then Czechoslovakia. Her grandfather did not survive the
journey.

On Wednesday, she and other Holocaust survivors gathered to unveil the
remnants of a Nazi-era German rail car that will be displayed when the
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center opens in suburban Skokie in
2008.

"It may be this many years later but the smell and the fear that was in that
box car, that has not left me and I'm sure many survivors feel the same
way," Fritzshall said.

The 64,000 square-foot center will break ground in May. Museum organizers
say it will help survivors heal, preserve personal belongings and educate
people on the events that led up to the Holocaust, during which six million
Jews were killed.

"If we change (the minds of) some of the young people, they will realize
that we're all the same regardless of color, regardless of religion and the
world will be a much better place to live," said Barbara Steiner, 79, who
survived the Warsaw ghetto and three concentration camps.

Samuel Harris was 8 years old when he rode in a railroad car similar to the
one that will be included in the museum. He said Wednesday that one of his
strongest memories of the May 1942 trip was longing to trade places with a
dog he saw outside the train.

His parents and five of his siblings died at Poland's Treblinka death
camp.

"We were cramped, hungry and thirsty. I was terrified," said Harris, 70, who
arrived in Chicago as an orphan in September 1947 and now is president of
the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois.

Wednesday also marked the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or Night of
Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany were
attacked. About 100 Jews were killed and thousands deported to concentration
camps in a prelude to the Holocaust.

Helga Franks was 12 and living in Berlin at the time.

"That was the beginning of the end for me," Franks, 79, said Wednesday. "I
realized when I saw the synagogues burning and all the stores broken into
that this was the end of my life in Germany."

(source: Los Angeles Times)



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USA//SOUTH CAROLINA:

S.C. man helped liberate Jews in camps


Sometimes when he closes his eyes and his mind wanders back 60 years, Mickey
Dorsey can see the hollow stares and emaciation, and smell the stench of
rotting human flesh.

He's 20 then, riding in an armored truck through Germany and Austria as
his Army division captures town after town in the final days of World War
II in Europe. On a dirt road, they stop at a 10-foot-tall fence. On the
other side are thousands of people, skin and bones, crying out to the
Americans for help.

A soldier blows open the lock. The Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp is
liberated.

"They just thronged around us," said Dorsey, 80, a retired Charlotte
business owner who now lives at Seabrook Island, S.C. "They grabbed our
legs and kissed our uniforms. We didn't know who they were or what was
going on."We'd never heard of concentration camps."

On this Veterans Day, Dorsey and four other Americans -- including Robert
Patton of Chapel Hill -- will receive a medal from the Israeli government
honoring them as liberators of thousands of Jews left to die in Austrian
concentration camps. They will be the first ex-soldiers outside Israel to
receive the medals.

The 1 p.m. ceremony will take place in New York at the Museum of Jewish
Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Expected in the audience are
several Gunskirchen survivors.

"I will be thrilled to see them," Dorsey said Thursday. "I will tell them
what an honor it is to be with them -- and to know that they're here."

Born with 1 finger on hand

Mason "Mickey" Dorsey was born in Chester, S.C., with only one finger on his
left hand.After his roommate at Clemson University, the late writer James
Dickey, enticed him to leave school after three semesters and join the
military, that hand almost kept him out.

He wanted to be a fighter pilot, but the Army Air Corps turned him down.
So did the Marines and Navy.

So he went to Fort Jackson in Columbia, and the Army took him, warning he'd
probably see limited service -- which meant a stateside job.

He wanted to fight, but his hand disqualified him. Yet after scoring a
perfect 100 percent on physical endurance tests and outshooting the other
soldiers in his battalion, a doctor ignored regulations and sent him to
war.

At Fort Benning, Ga., he was assigned to the newly formed 71st Infantry
Division and trained as a gunner and radio operator in a cavalry
reconnaissance troop -- the division's eyes and ears.

"We were generally behind enemy lines radioing back what we saw," Dorsey
said.

Survivors began eating clay

The division shipped out for Europe in January 1945. In southern France,
it was eventually attached to Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army and began the
push toward Germany.

The 71st broke through the Siegfried Line, Germany's massive defense wall
along its border, and captured Pirmasens in March. It crossed the Rhine
River at Ludwigshaffen, below Frankfurt, and found the German army in
shambles.

It captured Frankfurt, Amberg, Coburg, Nuremberg and Regensberg, and crossed
into Austria, where they captured Hitler's birthplace, Braunau am Inn.

About May 1, seven days before Germany surrendered, Dorsey's unit got off on
a dirt road and found Gunskirchen.

The dead lay everywhere. The Americans gave the living what K-rations they
had. They ate everything -- cigarettes included. The Americans searched the
huts and found stacks of dead bodies. More than 15,000, mostly Jews,
survived. They'd been marched to Gunskirchen a month earlier from a larger
camp. Many died along the way of typhus and dysentery.

"Some left the fence and fell to their knees and began eating clay. Others
ate grass and bark off the trees," Dorsey said.

He was instructed to radio headquarters for help. "We need doctors, medical
supplies and food -- quick," Dorsey messaged by Morse code.

Three hours later, his unit was ordered to push ahead.

Yet the scene stayed with him. He moved to Charlotte in 1950 and started a
company, Lubromation Inc., that his son Dale now runs. Three years ago in
Washington, at a division reunion, he met a dozen survivors. They thanked
him for saving their lives.

"I looked at them and said, `It's been more than 50 years; have I made all
this up? I saw all these bodies and smelled the smell and saw people eating
earth. Is it true?' " he recalled. "They said, `Oh, yes, absolutely, it's
true.'

"It was one of the most touching things I'd ever experienced."

Today will compete.

"There's no way you can erase that experience from your mind," Dorsey said.
"You could feel that smell penetrating your clothes. These people were just
put inside that fence to die.

"I am so grateful to be able to see them again."

(source: Charlotte Observer)





SLOVAKIA:

Breaking the silence on the Roma Holocaust


THE ROMA Holocaust is still unknown and unacknowledged. Though the war
ended more than half a century ago, history has yet to clarify all the
facts. And what we know generally remains unknown to the public. Why?
Disinterest? Dislike for dealing with what is behind us? A tendency to
forget and deny that the marginalized theme of marginal groups concerns us
also?

On the night of August 2 to 3, 1944 the "gypsy" section of the
concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed down. A small number
of the prisoners from all around Europe were deported to concentration
camps in Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. The remaining 2,897 Roma men and
women, including old people and children, were taken to the gas chambers.
Nobody survived.

It is believed that around 21,000 European Roma deported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau suffered a similar fate during World War II.

What is the worst period in the modern era for Roma, when almost half of
the population was killed, is remembered in Slovakia through a travelling
exhibition called Slovak Roma Holocaust 1939-1945, which opened in
Bratislava on November 9. In Slovak, Roma and English the exhibition
documents the situation of the Roma during WWII in Slovakia.

The first two panels of the show provide basic information on the Roma and
their position in Europe during WWII. The third panel explains the
legislation taken against them between 1939 and 1945, from administrative
measures to action suppressing their civil rights. The exhibition
particularly focuses on work units organized in Slovakia.

A special panel is dedicated to the detention camp in Dubnica nad Vhom, to
which entire Roma families were sent in 1944.

The harshest were the years at the end of the war, 1944 and 1945, when
Slovak Roma were deported, imprisoned, tortured and several hundred killed
on the spot. The exhibition also documents the development of the
territory in southern Slovakia, which fell to Horthy's Hungary during the
war following Vienna's arbitration. The last panel shows Holocaust
reminiscences and the way Roma as well as non-Roma cope with the tragedy.

The exhibition is part of the Ma bisteren! (Don't Forget! in Roma) project
dedicated to remembering the Roma suffering during the WWII. Ma bisteren!
puts up memorial plaques at locations where Roma persecutions took place,
and educates widely on the subject.

The exhibition opened in Bansk Bystrica on the occasion of the
International Day of Remembering the Roma Holocaust on August 2. The
Bratislava Museum of Jewish Culture at idovsk 17 hosts Slovak Roma
Holocaust 1939-1945 until January 15, 2006.

(source: The Slovak Spectator)



NORWAY:

Norway converts Nazi HQ into Holocaust centre


The bright sun sparkles on the cold waters of the fjord, forcing the
grey-haired man to squint slightly.

"This is where I come to think," Odd Bjorn Fure says without breaking his
gaze.

From a balcony on the central tower of the fortress-like Villa Grande, he
stares out over the treetops towards a cargo ship heading slowly out
towards the sea.

"And I'm sure Quisling came here to think too," he adds.

Vidkun Quisling was the head of Norway's collaborationist government
during the 1940-45 Nazi occupation and the imposing Villa Grande was his
home and headquarters.

"This is a house that has a strong aura of power and an authoritarian
style. It was marvellous for his purposes," Fure had said earlier in his
office, Quisling's former bedroom.

Now the history professor and his team have moved in and in the rooms
where Quisling entertained his Nazi masters, they exhibit and study the
Holocaust and other 20th century genocides.

And Fure wants to take the study of the Holocaust a step further.

He wants to explore the links between the breakdown of society in the
Holocaust and the fracturing of relations between Muslims and Christian
Europeans today.

By next year, 10 researchers from across the world and a resident academic
will work at the HL Senter in Villa Grande. The H stands for Holocaust and
the L for livssynsminoriteter, the Norwegian word for religious or ethnic
minority.

"We will work on constructing models on how Muslim societies can live
peacefully within predominantly Christian societies by looking back at the
Holocaust," he said.

TROUBLING RELATIONSHIP

July's suicide bombings in London, when four young British Muslims killed
52 people, underlines how urgent the work is, the 63-year-old said.

"That is at the centre of our work because it shows a troubling
relationship between a majority population and the minority."

It is impossible to know where the cargo ship crawling down the Oslo fjord
is heading.

However, there was no doubt where the cargo ship Donau was going as it
steamed out of the Oslo fjord with 500 Jews on board on the cold, grey
morning of Nov. 27, 1942.

When it reached Germany, the Jews were taken to Auschwitz, the most
notorious of the Nazis' death camps.

"This ship came to Norway carrying Soviet prisoners of war with a one-way
ticket to perish through labour and it left carrying Jews to their death,"
Fure said.

Further batches of Jews followed bringing the total number rounded up,
imprisoned and then sent to Germany by Quisling and his men to about 770.
Only 30 survived.

Other countries in occupied Europe deported more Jews and the Nazis killed
about 6 million in all, but it is the efficiency that Norway -- a
well-run, democratic country before the war -- arrested the Jews that
strikes Fure.

"The Quisling regime was actually more radical than other regimes as it
did not differentiate between those Jews who had integrated and those who
had just arrived," he said.

TIPPED OFF BY NORWEGIANS

It is not clear who ordered the arrest and deportation of the Jews but
Norwegians, and not Nazis, carried out the order, Fure said.

"Norwegians rounded them all up. The machine arrested everybody."

About half of the Scandinavian country's Jewish population managed to
escape, tipped off and hidden by ordinary Norwegians.

In 1999, Norway became the first country to pledge compensation to Jewish
victims of the Holocaust.

Quisling was an anti-Semite. He was tall and strong with blue eyes and
blond hair. Although highly intelligent, Quisling struggled to live with
reality, Fure said.

"He was a fantasist who wanted to take Norway back to what he thought were
its glory days during the times of the Vikings."

Stained-glass windows depicting centuries old Viking battles decorate the
ground floor of Villa Grande.

In the spring of 1945, Norwegian resistance fighters entered Oslo. They
made their way towards the wooded peninsula on the fjord and surrounded
the villa.

Quisling had planned to fight to the death but his supporters deserted him
and he surrendered without a shot being fired.

Within months, he was tried by a Norwegian court, branded a traitor and
executed.

(source: Reuters)