May 29

USA:

Jehovah's Witness Tells L.A. Audiences of Defying Nazis----For refusing to
renounce his faith, Leopold Engleitner -- now 100 -- served time in
concentration camps during World War II.



Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to
renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness.

In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an
audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the
efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance.

Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story
to encourage others to stick by their principles. His last stops were in Los
Angeles this week, with screenings of a documentary about his life at the
Music Hall theater on Wilshire Boulevard and sold-out presentations at the
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

The Austrian native's story is a lesson in faith - especially for the many
Jehovah's Witnesses who drove from as far as San Diego to see him - and in
history.

Jehovah's Witnesses "could have signed a document and walked out" of the
camps, said Robert Buckley, a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C.

Buckley has traveled throughout Europe to interview non-Jewish survivors of
the Nazi period. That document was a declaration agreeing to cut ties with
the church, thus allowing them to join the army in defense of the
fatherland, he said.

Peter Black, senior historian at the Washington holocaust museum, said the
Nazis targeted Jehovah's Witnesses mainly for three reasons: Refusing to
swear an oath to any earthly authority, declining to serve in any army other
than Jehovah's and proselytizing to encourage others to follow their ways.

About 3,200 Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, Black said. They
were among the lesser-known victims: Gypsies (also known as Roma),
homosexuals and political prisoners, including Communists, Socialists and
Soviet prisoners of war. The mentally and physically disabled were murdered
under a euthanasia program.

"It's about time that the world came to appreciate that there were other
victims of that Nazi era other than the Jewish people," Buckley said.

Engleitner's slight, stooped frame did not diminish the light that sometimes
entered his eyes as he recounted his experiences.

Audiences at the theater and museum soon found that the tiny man in the
wheelchair they photographed with camera phones had quite a sense of humor -
despite stories of cruelty and of some prisoners so desperately hungry that,
at one camp, they roasted potatoes in the crematorium.

Through a translator, Engleitner described his introduction to the
Buchenwald concentration camp in October 1939. When, responding to a
supervisor's question, he said he was a Jehovah's Witness, he was beaten and
locked in a dark cell where someone he couldn't see in the blackness
started kicking him.

Engleitner rolled under a bed as he tried to evade the blows. Instead of
kicking his stomach, his assailant made contact with the iron bed. The
shouts of pain from the attacker - who turned out to be another prisoner -
led the supervisor to open the door and remove Engleitner.

Another story, featured in the documentary, elicited laughter as he
described how a judge warned him against rejecting military service.
"Engleitner, Engleitner," the judge said. If you continue this way, "then
you already have both feet in the grave."

If he already had both feet in the grave just standing there, Engleitner
replied, "what on Earth will it be like at the front lines? Or do they
shoot sweets out there?"

Several people who heard and saw the spry Austrian said they were not at all
surprised by his sometimes sassy levity.

"Largely, it's a byproduct of his faith in Jehovah . and his hope for the
future," said Perry Mason, 48, who drove with fellow Witnesses from Santa
Ana to see a Monday night presentation at the Los Angeles holocaust
museum.

"That would fill anybody who believed that with optimism." Mason also wore a
purple triangle - the symbol assigned to Witnesses in the camps - in honor
of Engleitner and others like him.

Josie Williams, 53, of Costa Mesa dabbed her eyes with a tissue a few times
during a question-and-answer session with the camp survivor.

She said she could see the humor and love in Engleitner's eyes, the utter
lack of bitterness toward those who had abused him. "We don't even
understand the same language," Williams said. "But you can see it."

To Susanne Reyto, who lived through the days of the Nazis in Hungary,
Engleitner's attitude reflects that of a survivor.

"Either you can cry or you can smile," Reyto said, "so it's much better to
be smiling and laughing."

Buckley said he often encountered the same upbeat nature among the
Witnesses he has interviewed.

It could be attributed, in part, to their knowing they were in the camps
because of their steadfast allegiance to their beliefs, he said.

Jack Lewin, a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, said the Monday
evening presentation of Engleitner's story highlighted the fine line that
ancestry drew between Jews and other Nazi victims: Though they were dealt
with inhumanely, non-Jews were mistreated according to existing laws.

"We didn't have any rights," said Lewin, who volunteers as a speaker at the
Museum of Tolerance. "We were outside the law."

Even the notion of being released from the camps - as Engleitner eventually
was, in exchange for agreeing to a lifetime of mandatory agricultural
labor - was incomprehensible to Lewin.

Yet regardless of their differences, he added, "the story should be told.
People should know what kind of stuff the Germans did to us, and everyone
else that was involved."

Engleitner's tale came to light 12 years ago when filmmaker Bernhard
Rammerstorfer sat next to him on a park bench in Bad Ischl, where Engleitner
grew up. Rammerstorfer went on to write a biography and film the documentary
"Unbroken Will: The Extraordinary Courage of an Ordinary Man." To be heard
now, Engleitner said in German, is "truly a joyous experience."

He managed to convey as much in the brief bit of English he attempted before
his admiring audiences: "Thank you very much for your interest in my life
story. I'll be back."

(source: Los Angeles Times)




(in) POLAND:

Pope breaks dread silence at Holocaust camps


THE German-born Pope visited Auschwitz yesterday, denouncing the
"unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust and underlined the reality of
Hitler's campaign to wipe out Europe's Jews.

"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass
crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible and it is
particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from
Germany," said Benedict XVI.

"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread
silence," he said, "a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why,
Lord, did you remain silent?"

Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members
died there.

As he stopped to pray, a light rain eased and a brilliant rainbow suddenly
appeared above the vast camp's buildings and barbed wire.

"I read this as a sign that God's watching over this place," said Maria
Stroinska, 72, who was sent to Birkenau in 1944 when the Nazis punished
Warsaw citizens for rising up against the brutal German occupation.
Maria Kosek, 75, another camp survivor, it was a sign that the Pope's
beloved Polish predecessor was watching from the heavens.

"When I saw the rainbow in the sky, and earlier when it was raining hard,
it came to me that John Paul II was reminding us of himself and telling us
that he is here with us again," she said.

During his remarks, Benedict said that just as John Paul II had visited
the camp as a Pole in 1979, he came as "a son of the German people".

"The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people,
to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth," he said,
standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the
bodies of their victims.

"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up
the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their
own invention."

Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, the killing of six million
Jews by the forces of Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and
Birkenau, neighbouring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish
town of Oswiecim. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners
of war, Roma, or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.

Benedict, head of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, did not refer
to collective guilt by the German people, but instead focused on the Nazi
rulers. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of
criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness".

He also did not mention the controversy over Pope Pius XII, who some say
did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to
concentration camps. The Vatican rejects the accusation.

Before the ceremony, Benedict visited the main Auschwitz camp, where the
Nazis executed or starved special prisoners.

He walked in under the camp's gateway with the motto Arbeit macht frei
(Work makes you free) and proceeded to the Wall of Death firing line,
where he met 32 of 200,000 survivors.

Many were Polish Catholics who kissed his papal ring. Benedict kissed
Henryk Mandelbaum, a Jewish survivor, on both cheeks.

He also prayed in the cell where Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, died
in 1941 after volunteering to replace a family man due to be killed. John
Paul made Kolbe a saint in 1982.

Benedict said humans could not "peer into God's mysterious plan" to
understand such evil, but only "cry out humbly yet insistently to God
'rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"

Alojzy Maciak, a Polish Auschwitz survivor, said Poles did not hold
Benedict's nationality against him.

"We have forgiven the Germans a long time ago," he said at the Birkenau
ceremony. "This is a visit by a Pope to Auschwitz, his nationality is not
important."

Before he spoke, Michael Schudrich, Poland's chief rabbi, chanted the
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The New York-born rabbi was
attacked on a Warsaw street on Saturday by a young man shouting "Poland is
for Poles".

"This incident is very nasty but let's not let it undermine the great
importance of today's event," he said yesterday.

Symcha Keller, the Lodz chief rabbi, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz,
said the attack showed people still had to be taught the dangers of racial
hatred. "That is why Pope Benedict's visit to this grave site is so
important," he said.

Earlier, Benedict said mass for more than 900,000 people in a field in
Krakow where John Paul traditionally held huge gatherings with his
countrymen before returning to Rome.

Typically, Benedict did not mention his own personal wartime experiences.
Raised by his anti-Nazi father, Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth
as a teenager against his will, then was drafted into the army in the last
months of the war.

He wrote in his memoirs that he decided to desert in the war's last days
in 1945 and returned to his home in Traunstein in Bavaria, risking summary
execution if caught. He recounted his terror at being briefly stopped by
two soldiers.

He was then held for several weeks as a prisoner of war by US forces who
occupied his home town.

(source: Associated Press)





USA///book review:

Author 'rethinks' Eichmann's role in Holocaust


The following book was reviewed by Roger K. Miller for the Tribune-Review:
"Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a 'Desk
Murderer,'" by David Cesarani, Da Capo, $27.50, 458 pages.

It is scarcely possible to think of Adolf Eichmann without immediately
thinking of Hannah Arendt's term, "the banality of evil." Perhaps, then,
the subtitle of David Cesarani's book, "Becoming Eichmann," should be
"Deconstructing Arendt," for the central thrust of it is to explain how
and why "her depiction of Eichmann was self-serving, prejudiced and
ultimately wrong."

Cesarani, a British historian specializing in Anglo-Jewish and Zionist
subjects, has produced a work that is both a biography of Eichmann -- the
first in four decades -- and an examination of the Holocaust. Both aspects
of the book are well presented and exhaustively documented, but both serve
primarily to support his argument against Arendt, whose notion of the
"banality of evil," Cesarani says, combined with Stanley Milgram's (now
discredited) theses on people's predilection for obedience to authority,
"straitjacketed research into Nazi Germany and the persecution of the
Jews" well into the 1980s.

Arendt's image of Eichmann was of a faceless, colorless bureaucrat, a cog
in the Nazi machinery of genocide. It arose, Cesarani believes, more from
her highly influential 1963 book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," than from the
1962 trial on which it was based.

There are two problems here, in his view. One is that because Arendt
attended only a very small part of a very long trial, she based her
assessment on a phase in which Eichmann "was deliberately passive so as
not to give the prosecution ammunition for the claim that he was a
fanatic."

The other is more complicated, but equally well argued. Cesarani shows
that Arendt's own prejudices against some of the Israelis who brought the
trial skewed her vision, particularly her extreme dislike, as a Jew of
German heritage, of the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, a Polish Jew -- an
Ostjude.

On the other hand, neither was Eichmann a crazy man or fanatic. Cesarani
leans toward the conclusions of recent researchers, notably Christopher
Browning's "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland" and Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."

"As much as we may want Eichmann to be a psychotic individual and thus
unlike us, he was not," Cesarani writes. Eichmann was conventionally
bourgeois. Early on he was a successful businessman, not the embittered
failure of previous accounts.

He joined the Nazi party, then the SS, because he saw they offered
opportunities. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he developed the
"conveyor belt" for Jewish emigration, staffed and run by Jews themselves.
(After his capture he tried to characterize this as helping Jews avoid a
worse fate.)

Eichmann attended the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 that formally set
down the Nazi policy of extermination of European Jewry. After the
conference, he became "the managing director of the greatest single
genocide in history" and his "subsequent activity encompassed the entire
'Final Solution' from January 1942 until the end of the Second World War."

Cesarani writes: "Eichmann managed genocide in the way that the director
of a multinational corporation manages production and distribution of
product: calibrating the supply of raw material to the capacity of plant,
monitoring output and quality controls and assuring prompt delivery."

At war's end, he went underground, and in 1950 made his way to Argentina
with the aid of the Argentine government and individuals in the Vatican
who "together set up and ran the 'rat lines' that extracted Nazi criminals
from Europe." This section -- on his flight, hideout, capture in 1960 by
the Israelis (assisted by West Germans), trial and execution -- proves
quite a tension-filled narrative.

So what, then, was Eichmann, if not a madman or a fanatic or a faceless
technocrat of terror? The author concedes there is probably no definitive
answer, just as he sees no necessary, logical progression in Eichmann's
career from expert on Jewish "emigration" to the man who sent millions to
their deaths.

Cesarani employs the French term "genocidaire." It derives from Rwanda,
describing a person implicated in genocide specifically. Gradually,
Cesarani feels, Eichmann changed. He balked, but at some point -- it may
have been in Poland in 1939 -- Eichmann overcame revulsion "and chose to
be a genocidaire."

The last two sections, "After Eichmann" and "Conclusion," are helpful
discussions of what the Eichmann story has meant to different people at
different times and the way it has been represented in, and has
influenced, various media. Bringing it down to our day, Cesarani notes
that the "genocidaire has become a common feature of humanity" and
concludes that "Eichmann appears more and more like a man of our time.
Everyman as genocidaire."

(source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review----Roger K. Miller is a Janesville,
Wis., freelance writer for the Tribune-Review)