Sept. 20


USA:

'Nice, Sweet Lady,' 83, Deported for Nazi Past----The former SS guard kept
her secret buried, even from her Jewish husband. Now exposed, the Bay
Area widow, 83, is back in Germany.


She lived alone in a tiny, top-floor apartment in one of the tougher
sections of San Francisco. At 83, she was short and a bit stout.
Diabetes took the sight in one of her eyes; arthritis left her leaning
heavily on a cane. For long trips, she took a taxi.

Her husband had died. He was the love of her long life, a short, dapper
man who had worked as a bartender and waiter at some of the city's larger
hotels and was active in Jewish activities. They buried him in a Jewish
cemetery outside the city.

He had been gone just a short while when two officials from the Justice
Department in Washington knocked on her door. They confronted her with a
terrible secret that all these years she had managed to keep from him.

In Germany during World War II, a much younger Elfriede Lina Rinkel, then
single, a girl with blue eyes and striking red hair, had worked as an SS
guard at one of the Nazi regime's infamous concentration camps. Called
Ravensbruck, it was a slave labor prison for women, and during the year
she worked there with a trained attack dog more than 10,000 women died.

Some succumbed to starvation and disease. Others were gassed. More died
after cruel medical experiments. Some perished from sheer exhaustion.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that the woman with the
pleasant smile and the German accent had been deported to Germany. She
admitted that she had lied on her U.S. visa application.

Her lawyer, Alison Dixon, said she never told Fred, her husband. Not
during their romance after the war, on their wedding night in Germany, or
their voyage to a new life in America. Always, she kept quiet.

"He did not know," the lawyer said, "because all these years she was
totally embarrassed."

Washington officials, however, said she coldly offered no expression of
remorse about her past and did not fight the deportation.

The government caught up with a woman in the dusk of her life who expected
perhaps soon to quietly join her husband in the Eternal Home Cemetery in
Colma, south of the city. The double gravestone was already there, with
the Star of David above their names.

Instead, she will be remembered as the only woman to be caught and
deported in more than 100 completed cases of Nazi persecutors who lied
their way into the United States. Matching Ravensbruck guard rosters with
U.S. immigration documents - about 70,000 names have been studied since
the Office of Special Investigations opened in 1979 - they hit on Elfriede
Huth, her maiden name.

She had been born in 1922 in Leipzig, Germany. She came to the work camp
in 1944 and left a year later as the war ended, the site abandoned by
fleeing Nazis. She married Fred William Rinkel, a German Jewish refugee
from the war. In 1959, not yet 40, she applied for a U.S. visa but failed
to include on the form her time at Ravensbruck.

Eventually, the Justice Department traced her to the five-story apartment
building in lower Nob Hill near the Tenderloin. The building today is
rundown, covered with graffiti and largely home to recent immigrants from
Mexico.

Agency Director Eli M. Rosenbaum said that despite her bid to remain
anonymous, her past will no longer be hidden. Though he agreed that she
appeared pleasant and kind, old and tired, he said, "her presence in the
United States nevertheless was an affront to surviving Holocaust victims
who have made new homes in this country."

Rosenbaum was one of the two Washington officials who knocked on her door
after her husband died. She admitted being assigned to the camp,
explaining that she had a less desirable job as a factory worker and
volunteered to be a dog handler at the camp for better wages.

But she insisted she never used her dog as a weapon against the prisoners,
never forced them into marches every morning to work or to die. She said
she never joined the Nazi Party, just did its bidding.

And she said she never applied for U.S. citizenship because she feared
U.S. immigration authorities would learn of her time at Ravensbruck.

And oddly, Rosenbaum said, there were no tears from the woman sitting in
front of him inside the little apartment. "No statement of remorse was
volunteered to me," he said.

Dixon, her San Francisco lawyer, explained that it was all just too long
ago. She said her client had tried to remake her life and never thought
she would be tripped up so late in her years.

"She was trying to atone for actions in the past," said Dixon. "She
married a Jewish man, and she gave to Jewish charities.

"And she always believed there was a certain coercion involved in what she
did at the camp. She insisted that she had zero contact with the actual
prisoners, that she just walked the camp perimeter."

Knowing her fate, six months ago she began preparing to leave the United
States even as she kept asking Dixon if she could stay. "Do I really have
to leave?" she would say. "Can I come back for a visit?"

She also quietly set about putting her affairs in order. One task was to
return once more to the mortuary, and to inform the staff that she would
soon be "leaving the area." She wanted to sell her burial plot next to her
husband.

"So we took it back," said Gene Kaufman, director of the Sinai Memorial
Chapel. "She was just such a pleasant-looking lady and very small. Such a
nice, sweet lady who seemed to have a very loving relationship with her
husband."

Sometimes, Kaufman said, he would bump into the childless couple at Jewish
events. Everyone seemed to know, though, that she was not Jewish, and had
no other religious faith. The distinction seemed to never rise as a
problem between the couple.

Yet, "sometimes it did seem like their life together was from someplace
else," recalled Kathryn Allen-Katz, who also chatted with her at the
funeral chapel. "Like they didn't fit in here, didn't belong. They lived
in their own little island in a not-too-good part of town and they kept to
themselves."

At the apartment building on Bush Street, Gunvant Shah, who met the
Rinkels in 1976, described a couple that sang German songs late at night,
danced together and sometimes fought loudly, prompting complaints from
neighbors.

They lived "a modest life," Shah said, with no car, but often strolled
together in the evenings, dressed elegantly. "Mr. Rinkel would hold her by
the arm. They would walk together, proud and joyful."

Perhaps, he added, the closeness the couple shared was her private attempt
at redemption. "Maybe she felt remorse," Shah said.

She was given until Sept. 30 to leave the United States.

She left Sept. 1. Some distant relative took her in, and she dutifully
reported to the U.S. Consulate office in Frankfurt that she was back home.

Eighty-three is a hard time to make one's life over, and Dixon said that
she could still face charges in Germany for her wartime duty at the
concentration camp.

But whatever happens, she will probably die in the land of her birth.

Alive, she is legally barred from reentering the United States.

In death alone could she be returned.

(source: Los Angeles Times)




ISRAEL:

2 siblings reunited after being separated in Holocaust


Hilda Shlick (75) thought her brother, Simon Glasberg (83), perished in
Holocaust because she never managed to locate him for last six decades. He
himself came to Israel searching for her, but to no avail. With help of
Yad Vashem's computerized name database, their grandchildren discovered
the truth some of the family lives in Israel, and some in Canada. The
emotional meeting finally materializes.

After 65 years, in which each of them thought their sibling had perished
in the Holocaust, and after they searched for each other in Israel and
abroad, Hilda Shelik (75) and her brother Simon Glasberg (83) met Monday.
With the help of Yad Vashem's website, the two siblings' grandchildren
discovered that family members had indeed survived the Holocaust, even
though they had previously been led to believe otherwise.

"I am happy today. All the years that passed I didn't believe my family
survived. Even when my grandchildren told me they had survived, I didn't
believe it. Today I am happy," said Hilda.

Their older brother, Karol Weiner, thought that Hilda perished in the
Holocaust, and therefore submit a Page of Testimony to Yad Vashem in 1999
in Hilda's name stating such. About a month and a half ago, her
grandchildren found the Page of Testimony written by Hilda's brother.
Karol passed away the same year, without knowing that thanks to him, his
siblings found Hilda in Israel.

Like many other Jewish families, the family's story took a sharp turn in
1941 when the Nazis invaded North Bukovina. The family, living in
Chernowitz, Romania, was split up. Hilda escaped along with her older
sister Bertha and two nieces to Uzbekistan, and the rest of the family
stayed in Romania.

All her life, Hilda mistakenly thought that her family members who
remained in Romania were murdered in the Holocaust. She married Elye
Itshok Shlick and they had two children, Zali and Hertha. Only in 1998
Hilda immigrated to Israel, following her son's family, who immigrated in
1991.

In a family conversation a few months ago, Hilda's grandchildren, Benny
and David Shlik, found out that their grandmother's maiden name was
Glasberg. With this new information, they performed a search in Yad
Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names in order to find more
details about their grandmother's families. This is how they came across
the Page of Testimony written by her brother.

'They can't possibly be alive'

David Shlik told: "I continued my search in the internet site of
Montreal's burial services, and world forums and organizations of
Chernowitz natives. I ultimately got to Karol's son, who told me that all
of my grandmother's family survived and that two of her brothers are
living in Canada. Within a month and a half we organized a meeting. Simon
will even stay with us for Rosh Hashana."

According to him, "The moment we understood what was happening, we started
gradually explaining to Grandma that there is this thing called relative
searching and that it was possible to find her family members. She told me
that it couldn't possibly be that any of them are alive, because she
already looked for them many years ago. A few days later we told her that
two of her brothers are in Canada."

During the family reunion, it turned out that Hilda's parents lived long
lives until the ages of 92 and 98, and passed away in the 80s in Montreal.
Hilda's brother, Karol Weiner, passed away in Montreal in 1999. Another
brother, Eddie Glasberg, passed away two years ago in Montreal. Her
brother Mark Glasberg currently lives in Canada, but his health is in poor
condition. Hilda has already expressed her desire to visit him. Mark's
son, Irwin, lives with his family in Israel. Hilda's sister Bertha died in
1970, and the fate of another sister, Pepi, is still unknown.

Mark and Simon immigrated to Israel right after the Holocaust, fought in
the War of Independence, and immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. "The first
day we were able to come to Israel, we got on a shaky boat and arrived
here," Simon recalled with teary eyes. "I came to search for my sisters.
They told us that we are all coming to Israel, but I didn't find her
then."

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev calls families to gather around the table
on Rosh Hashana and to make sure that family member murdered in the
Holocaust have been memorialized in the Yad Vashem's name database, and to
fill out a Page of Testimony on the victims whose names still aren't in
the database.

The name database was launched in November 2004, with 3.1 million names
from the Pages of Testimony, archives lists, and local projects throughout
the world in which names of those murdered in the Holocaust were
collected. Until now, over 10 million people have visited the site from
over 200 countries.

(source: YNetNews)







GERMANY:

Dispute Over Berlin Land Seized By Nazis Heats Up


The heirs of a Jewish family disowned by the Nazis have vowed to continue
their fight for hundreds of millions of euros in compensation. German
retail giant KarstadtQuelle insists on fighting the claim in court.

When Germany's highest court last year upheld her family's claim to one of
several Berlin land parcels lost under the Nazis, Barbara Principe thought
her legal battle was over. Principe, a 73-year-old great-grandmother from
the US state of New Jersey, is the oldest living heir of the Wertheim
family, which ran six department stores in Berlin until the 1930s.

Last month, a German federal agency decided that the claim also extended
to prime land at Potsdamer Platz, the newly rebuilt center of reunified
Berlin.

Principe and the Jewish Claims Conference, which represents the families,
have expressed their interest to negotiate with German retail giant
KarstadtQuelle, which was given the plot by Berlin after reunification but
sold it later to another business group. But company officials say they
will pursue every possible court appeal.

KarstadtQuelle spokesman Jrg Howe said on Monday that the company would
face lawsuits from its stockholders if it negotiated now.

"We have to resolve this matter by court as long as there is any doubt
about who is the rightful owner of this property," Howe said. "It's no
insult to the family history It's a very complicated matter."

Most complicated case

But in a press conference Monday at the Ritz Carlton hotel, which stands
on the disputed land, Principe said the Wertheim heirs were determined to
get back what their ancestors lost. To drive home that point, she brought
along two of her grandsons, Michael Principe, 27, and Brad Giordano, 23.

"Even if I personally do not see the day, in my heart, I know my family is
going to win," Principe said.

The Wertheim claim is among the largest and most complicated of the
thousands of Nazi-era reparation claims pending in Germany.

It involves about 25 acres of land that Principe's lawyers say could be
worth up to 500 million euros ($635 million), most of it situated in an
East German no-man's land until the Berlin Wall fell.

About half the land has been settled in the Wertheim heirs' favor. The
families have so far been paid around 70 million euros, according to
Matthias Druba, Principe's Berlin attorney.

But the heirs also await compensation from the sale of one of central
Berlin's largest undeveloped parcels of land, on nearby Leipziger Platz.
The rest of the property is still tied up in court.

A web of owners

KarstadtQuelle says it has to fight the case or face lawsuits from
stockholders

Among the most valuable is the five-acre Potsdamer Platz property known as
the "Lenne Triangle," now a tony hotel and office complex. In August, the
German federal agency that deals with property matters decided that the
Jewish Claims Conference, which represents the heirs, had a claim on the
land.

The Lenne Triangle's ownership line is complex. KarstadtQuelle bought the
remnants of the Wertheim company in 1994, then sold it to developer Otto
Beisheim for 145 million euros ($184 million).

Druba said that the longer KarstadtQuelle takes to settle the matter, the
more they will owe in increased property value to the Wertheim heirs. But
Principe said it is less about the money than about finding justice for
her late father.

The family fled Germany in 1939, when Principe was six years old. Her
father, Gunther Wertheim, died in 1954 as a chicken farmer who never told
his daughter that the family once had Jewish roots or was a
department-store dynasty. She found out years later from lawyers.

"I'm fighting, in a sense, for him, and for the family," she said. "This
is our heritage."

(source: Deutsche Welle)