Nov. 19

GERMANY:

Holocaust archive going public -- Unsealing of millions of documents
likely to spur new questions, research


The Associated Press was recently given extensive access to the largest
archive of Nazi prison camp records, which has been closed for 50 years, on
condition that names of the victims remain protected. This is the first in a
series of reports.



The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge
Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death
camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.

"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown
by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.

"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the
fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and
died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.

Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young
Russian's words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that
transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging
and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final
Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are
among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or
ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Archive going public

This vast archive - 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a
German spa town - contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in
existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has
kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out
information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict
need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust
survivors and researchers, is about to change.

In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors'
groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files
for scholars as well as victims and their families. In recent weeks the ITS'
interim director, Jean-Luc Blondel, has been to Washington, The Hague and to
the Buchenwald memorial with a new message of cooperation with other
Holocaust institutions and governments.

ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, to look at the files and has also given The Associated Press
extensive access on condition no names from the files are revealed unless
they have been identified in other sources.

"This is powerful stuff," said Shapiro, leafing through the file containing
the Russian's statement and some 200 other testimonies that take the reader
into the belly of Hitler's death machine - its camps, inmates, commandants,
executioners and trusted inmates used as low-level guards and known as
kapos.

A glimpse at terror

"If you sat here for a day and read these files, you'd get a picture of what
it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look - names and
names of kapos, guards - the little perpetrators," he said.

Moved to this town in central Germany after the war, the files occupy a
former barracks of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party's elite force. They are
stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly stenciled binders
packed into floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Their index cards alone fill
three large rooms.

Mandated to trace missing persons and help families reunite, ITS has allowed
few people through its doors, and has responded to requests for information
on wartime victims with minimal data, even when its files could have told
more.

It may take a year or more for the files to open fully. Until then, access
remains tightly restricted. "We will be ready any time. We would open them
today, if we had the go-ahead," said Blondel.

When the archive is finally available, researchers will have their first
chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave
labor camps and displaced persons. From toneless lists and heartrending
testimony, a skilled historian may be able to stitch together a new
perspective on the 20th century's darkest years from the viewpoint of its
millions of victims.

Filling in the blanks

"The overall story is pretty well established, but many details will be
filled in," said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.

"There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number
of concentration camps that we really don't know much about," he said. "It
may contain surprises. We don't know. It has material that nobody's ever
seen."

A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of
mass murder.

In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of
Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among
the names is "Frank, Annelise M," her date of birth (June 12, 1929),
Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwedeplein 37) and the date
she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).

Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.

She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of
Holland crumbled. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death,
one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen
camp.

After the war, "The Diary of Anne Frank," written during her 25 months
hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely
read book ever written on the Holocaust.

Red Cross, ITS defend policies

But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to none but their
families.

They are people like Cornelis Marinus Brouwenstijn, a Dutchman who vanished
into the Nazi gulag at age 22 for illegally possessing a radio. In a plain
manila envelope are his photo, a wallet, some snapshots, and a naughty
typewritten joke about women in the army.

After the war, his family repeatedly wrote to the Red Cross asking about
him. In 1949, his parents received a terse form letter saying he died
sometime between April 19 and May 3, 1945, in the area of a German labor
camp. The personal effects, however, remained in Bad Arolsen, and with the
family long deceased, there is no one left to apply for their return.

To critics who accuse them of being tightfisted with their information, the
Red Cross and ITS counter that they have to abide by German privacy laws and
protect the reputations of victims whether alive or dead. They say the files
may contain unsubstantiated allegations against victims, and that opening up
to researchers would distract ITS from its main task of providing
documentation to survivors or victims' relatives.

One area of study that will benefit from the ITS files is the "Lebensborn"
program, in which children deemed to have the "proper genes" were adopted or
even kidnapped to propagate the Aryan master race of Hitler's dreams.

Another subject is the sheer scope of the Holocaust system. The files will
support new research from other sources showing that the network of
concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more
extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after
the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist
nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in
claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion
fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and
ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust
Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these
detention centers.

The archive has some 3.4 million files of DPs - Displaced Persons. They
include names such as John Demjanjuk and Viorel Trifa, who immigrated to the
United States and later became internationally known because their role in
the Holocaust came into question.

Meticulous records

Between 1933 to 1945, the Nazi persecution grew to assembly-line
proportions, slaughtering 6 million Jews and an equal number of Gypsies,
homosexuals, mental patients, political prisoners and other "undesirables."
Tens of millions were conscripted as forced laborers.

To operate history's greatest slaughter, the Nazis created a bureaucracy
that meticulously recorded the arrest, movement and death of each victim.
Sometimes even the lice plucked from heads in concentration camps were
counted.

But as the pace of genocide stepped up, unknown numbers were marched
directly from trains to gas chambers without being registered. In the war's
final months, the bookkeeping collapsed, though the extermination
continued.

What documents survived Nazi attempts to destroy them were collected by the
Allies to help people find missing relatives. The first documents were sent
in 1946 to Bad Arolsen, and the administration was handed over to the Red
Cross in 1955.

Some 50 million pages - scraps of paper, transport lists, registration
books, labor documents, medical and death registers - make reference to 17.5
million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement
and death.

Millions of requests for help

Over the years, the International Tracing Service has answered 11 million
requests to locate family members or provide certificates supporting pension
claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent rate of success in
tracing the requested name.

But the workload has been overwhelming. Two years ago it had a backlog of
nearly half a million unanswered queries. Director Blondel says the number
was whittled down to 155,000 this summer and will disappear by the spring of
2008. New queries have slowed to just 700 a month.

One of ITS' critics is Sabine Stein, archivist at the Buchenwald
concentration camp 150 miles from Bad Arolsen. She says the archive's
refusal to share its files has caused heartbreak to countless survivors and
their descendants.

For instance, in 1989, Emilia Janikowska asked ITS to trace her father,
Ludwig Kaminski, a coal miner from Poland who was never heard from again
after his arrest in 1939. It took more than three years to send her a
standard form reporting Kaminski had died in Buchenwald Dec. 1, 1939.

But there was more she could have been told.

Documents copied by the U.S. Army before they went to Bad Arolsen, which
were seen by AP at Buchenwald, include mention of Kaminski. They say he was
prisoner No. 8578, that he had arrived in Buchenwald six weeks earlier with
600 other Poles and had been placed in Camp 2. The known history of
Buchenwald says Camp 2 was a wooden barracks and four big tents, jammed with
1,000 Poles and Vienna Jews. Dozens of inmates died from the cold that
winter. The cause of Kaminski's death was pneumonia.

No one ever told his daughter any of this.

"We had no news from my father since the moment he was arrested," Janikowska
said when contacted at her home in Krakow, Poland. She now wants more
information for a compensation request.

Archivist Stein says: "Former inmates and their families want to see some
tangible part of their history; they want to tell their stories," she said.

"What I find most frustrating is that they have all these documents and
they are just sitting on them."

Making amends

Earlier this month, ITS went some way to make amends, delivering a full
inventory of its records on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in
searching for 1,000 names Stein had requested.

Compounding the delay in releasing the files is the cumbrous makeup of the
governing committee. Any decision on their future requires the assent of all
11 member nations - Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel,
Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

Last May's agreement to open the archive stipulates that it will remain
off-limits until formal ratification by the 11 governments. After that, each
of the 11 countries can have a digital copy of the files and decide who has
access to it.

But some delegations are worried the process will take too long, at a time
when aged survivors are dying every day.

"What victims of these crimes fear the most is that when they disappear -
and it's happening very fast now - no one will remember the names of the
families they lost," said Shapiro of the Washington museum, who was a
delegate to the talks.

"It's not a diplomatic timetable, and not an archivist's timetable, but the
actuarial table. If we don't succeed in having this material public while
there are still survivors, then we failed," he said.

(source: Associated Press)


*********************


Fury at Holocaust exhibit ban


German railway chief sparks angry demonstrations over refusal to allow
photographs and papers to be shown in stations


It was her first trip by train, and she will never forget it. German
SS-men were yelling outside, and the cattle wagons had bare wooden floors
instead of seats, with observation slits instead of windows. Edith Erbrich
remembers how an SS man ordered her father to lift her and her sister up
because her mother, standing outside the train, wanted to see her once
more. 'My father told us that mummy cannot join us, she has to take care
of the house,' she said.

Erbrich was seven years old when she, her sister and her father were
deported by the Nazis to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt,
Czechoslavakia. She survived. Some 11,000 other Jewish children died. Now
a new exhibition about their fate has sparked an extraordinary and bitter
dispute between the German government and the state-owned national
railway.

The exhibition, put together by anti-Nazi campaigners Beate and Serge
Klarsfeld, was inspired by stories such as Erbrich's and has already been
shown at 18 French railway stations. Now the couple want to show it at
train stations across Germany, but Hartmut Mehdorn, the chief executive of
Deutsche Bahn, the national railway, has refused.

'Railway stations are not the right place for an exhibition on such a
serious topic,' Mehdorn said. 'They are too crowded, people are in too
much of a hurry to concentrate. "Shock and go" tactics do not work any
more.' He claimed the exhibition was a security risk and that neo-Nazis
could try to tear it down and added: 'We at the Deutsche Bahn do not need
a new exhibition. We have already one in the national railway museum in
Nuremberg.'

Serge Klarsfeld defended his exhibition: 'The aim of it is not to lock the
past up in a museum, but to confront the people in public with it. In
France more than 100,000 people have seen the exhibition. They all have
been respectful; there have not been any security problems at all.'

The issue is causing a political storm in Germany. Social Democratic
transport minister Wolfgang Tiefensee and politicians from other parties
have backed the Klarsfelds. 'National Socialism was a dictatorship that
was played out in everyday life and that was drawn from everyday life,'
Tiefensee said.

He warned Mehdorn not to give the impression that Deutsche Bahn was trying
to keep the subject away from the broader public and added that he had
given permission to show an exhibition on press pictures from war zones
from all over the world, which was also a 'serious topic'.

Politicians from the Green party claimed last week that the issue of the
exhibition should be discussed in parliament if Deutsche Bahn continues to
refuse permission for the exhibition.

Tiefensee has now asked the historian Jan Philipp Reemtsma to develop a
German version of the Klarsfelds's project that focuses more attention on
the German Jewish children who were deported. Reemtsma, who previously
caused a controversy with an exhibition on how the German army, the
Wehrmacht, was involved in the Holocaust, agreed, on condition that his
exhibition would be put up in the stations.

In the meantime, Edith Erbrich and other Holocaust survivors have begun an
initiative urging Deutsche Bahn to allow the exhibition to go ahead as
planned and have organised demonstrations in several cities across
Germany. Erbrich, now 69 years old, is determined to go on with the issue.
'I am not doing it for my sake,' she said. 'I am doing it for those who
cannot do it any more.'

(source: The Observer)



********************

The trial of a man accused of being one of the world's foremost Holocaust
deniers began this week in Germany.


Germar Rudolf, 42, appeared in court in Mannheim on Tuesday following his
deportation from the United States last year.

The prosecution told the court that Rudolf, who is believed to have
connections to German extremist groups, used the internet to spread
documents that portrayed the Holocaust as an invention.

It is alleged that the chemistry graduate published papers claiming that
no Jews were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He also faces a
charge of defaming the memory of the dead and, if found guilty, faces a
prison sentence of five years.

In 1995 he was sentenced by a German court to 14 months in prison for
Holocaust denial but he disappeared soon after and later appeared in the
US where he tried to claim political asylum.

He was arrested in 2000 when he tried to register for a green card after
marrying a US citizen.

Rudolf appeared as an expert witness in the 1998 libel battle between
discredited British historian David Irving and American academic Deborah
Lipstadt. Irving, who is currently serving a prison sentence for Holocaust
denial in Austria was forced to pay thousands in legal costs after losing
that case.

Another German, Ernst Zundel, is currently undergoing a similar trial in
the same court after being deported from Canada.

(source: TJ Reporter)







BELARUS:

KGB: Teens Vandalized Minsks Holocaust Monument No Inquiry Needed


A little known group, the White Rus Aryan Resistance Front, is
responsible for desecrating the Yama monument to Holocaust victims in
the Belarusian capital Minsk, the State Security Committee (still called
the KGB) told Interfax on November 14. The KGB said the group marked the
monument with swastikas, and characterized the incident as a case of
teenage hooliganism that requires no investigation since it is no threat
to national security.

The KGB information center told Interfax that a leaflet from the group was
found at the site but that the KGB has no information on the organization.

(source: Israel National News)







USA:

Profiting from the Holocaust----Lawyers who represent Holocaust survivors
should do it for long-delayed justice rather than personal enrichment.


IF LAWYERS EVER WONDER, in a rare moment of introspection, why they are
generally held in low esteem, they need look no further than the obscene
fee application pending before a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn,
N.Y.

Burt Neuborne, the court-appointed lead settlement counsel in a class
action brought on behalf of Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks, has
turned himself into the poster boy for avaricious attorneys. He demands
$4.75 million for his role in administering the $1.25-billion settlement
and determining distribution of the money.

Neuborne, a tenured professor at New York University's law school and
legal director of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, is looking to
profiteer from Holocaust-era litigation. Survivors he purports to
represent in the litigation have received $1,450 each. A decision on his
fee application could come any day.

No one can be required, or should be expected, to work for free. Lawyers
like doctors, plumbers or cab drivers have a right to make a living.
There is a difference, however, between fair compensation and utter
exorbitance.

Neuborne wants to be paid $700 an hour for the roughly 6,800 hours he
claims to have spent on the Swiss banks case between Feb. 1, 1999, and
Oct. 1, 2005. (Earlier this year, he agreed to remove 1,500 hours from
his fee application after some of his billing practices were challenged.)
That averages out to about 20 hours a week, for which he wants to be paid,
again on average, $675,000 a year. This would be on top of $4.4 million he
received in 2001 from another Holocaust-era settlement with German
corporations that had exploited Jews and Roma/Sinti as slave laborers
during World War II.

In sharp contrast, Kenneth R. Feinberg, who served as the special master
of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, worked entirely pro bono.

Neuborne acknowledges that U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman asked him
in early 1997 to "serve in a pro bono capacity as co-counsel for the
plaintiffs" in the Swiss banks litigation. As recently as September 2005,
Neuborne told a federal judge in Miami that he was "the lead settlement
lawyer in the Swiss case, in which I served without fee now for almost
seven years." Three months after that, he submitted his
multimillion-dollar tab to the court. He now argues that $4.75 million is
a smaller proportion of the $1.25-billion Swiss banks settlement than he
would normally be entitled to in a federal class action.

But the Holocaust was not just another mass tort. Governments, banks,
insurance companies and private corporations all participated in, profited
from or failed to prevent the brutal annihilation of European Jews. Unlike
typical class-action suits, in which a manufacturer is deemed liable for a
defective product or a corporation is charged with discrimination, the
various Holocaust-era litigations are rooted in a crime against humanity
for which much of the international community including the United States
bears at least some responsibility. Stuart E. Eizenstat, who negotiated
many of the Holocaust assets settlements while serving as undersecretary
of State and deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton
administration, explained that these cases gave him, in his words, "a
chance to help remove a cloud over the history of the United States, which
had sacrificed so greatly to win the war but done so little to prevent
civilian genocide and then help its survivors after the conflict."

Lawyers who take on matters in this context have moral and ethical
obligations that transcend their narrow self-interest. They should view
their representation of Holocaust survivors as an opportunity to bring
about a long-delayed measure of justice rather than a means of enriching
themselves.

In October 2000, Neuborne wrote in a letter to the editor in the Nation
that "every penny in the $1.25-billion Swiss bank case will go to
Holocaust victims." U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who has broad
discretion in recommending what Neuborne's fee should be, should bear
those words in mind as he ponders his ruling.

In addition to compensating account holders or their heirs, the Swiss
banks settlement provides for modest payments to former slave laborers and
allocations to social service agencies that care for the neediest
Holocaust survivors. Every dollar awarded to Neuborne by the court is one
that could otherwise assist a victim of the Holocaust. Many elderly
survivors living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in South Florida or
elsewhere cannot afford desperately needed medical treatment. The
combination of Medicare, Social Security and the meager reparations that
some of them receive from Germany is insufficient to pay for doctors,
extended hospital stays, nursing care, prescription drugs, eyeglasses and
the like.

One of the principal purposes of the Holocaust assets litigations is to
provide a safety net for the men and women who suffered so horrendously at
the hands of the Nazis and to enable them to live out their remaining
years with a modicum of dignity. That is why the court should repudiate
Neuborne's excessive greed and instead designate most, if not all, of the
$4.75 million he seeks for the benefit of survivors.

(source: Los Angeles Times; Menachem Z. Rosensaft, MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT,
a lawyer in New York, is the founding chairman of the International
Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.)

****************


USA//NORTH CAROLINA:

Pregame Hitler speech stirs fury----Charlotte Catholic coach says
Forestview players used racial slurs


When Charlotte Catholic's boys' soccer team got to Forestview High School
in Gastonia on Saturday night for an N.C. 3A playoff game, the Cougars
heard something over the public address system they never would've
expected: A 90-second portion of a speech from Adolf Hitler.

"We were warming up," said Catholic coach Gary Hoilett, "and all of us
stopped and looked up at the booth. We were just real shocked. It was
obviously a Hitler speech. The voice was coming across clearly. Everybody
knew."

Forestview's players took the field after the speech ended.

But before the game, Hoilett said, some Forestview players were chanting
something in German that means "On to victory," according to one of his
players who speaks German. Hoilett, who is black, said that during the
game some Forestview players directed racial epithets at his two black
players.

"It was one of the worst things I've seen," Hoilett said of the speech and
the racial epithets.

Monday, Forestview Principal Robert Carpenter met with Gaston County
Schools Superintendent Reeves McGlohon, Gaston County athletics director
Butch Adams and Forestview soccer coach David Shearer. After that
40-minute meeting, Carpenter faxed a letter of apology to Charlotte
Catholic officials.

In the letter, Carpenter confirmed that a CD containing a Hitler speech
was played over the PA system. He called it inappropriate. He said he was
at the game but did not hear the clip. Carpenter said that it was the
first time it had been played and that Shearer was not aware of it.

"Sometime back, coach Shearer and the team started using `On to victory'
as a slogan," Carpenter wrote. "We have a German exchange student on our
team. He taught our students to say it in German. Some of our more zealous
students sought to capture this slogan in German and to play it on the PA.
They copied it from a speech by Hitler but could not just copy the `On to
victory' and got too much of the speech."

Carpenter's letter did not address the alleged racial epithets, and he did
not return calls left by the Observer. Efforts to reach Shearer were not
successful. Forestview athletics director Alan Stewart also attended the
game but said he didn't hear the speech or any racial remarks.

"It's totally shocking to me," Stewart said.

He said the school had started an investigation but did not expect to take
any disciplinary action.

N.C. High School Athletic Association spokesperson Rick Strunk said his
office was investigating the incident.

"It's one thing if someone uses the N-word on the field," he said. "It's
terrible, but it's a private matter. To use the PA (to play a Hitler
speech) is another thing entirely. It's really hard to fathom in this day
and time."

Strunk said such action falls under the NCHSAA's rules of conduct
inconsistent with a wholesome athletic program. There's not a specific
fine for such behavior, but Strunk said a school could be placed on
probation, fined or have home games taken away by the NCHSAA board.

Forestview beat Charlotte Catholic 1-0 Saturday and will play Skyland
Roberson in the third round Wednesday at Forestview.

Catholic's Hoilett doesn't think enough has been done since Saturday's
incidents.

"The letter was lame," Hoilett said. "I get the feeling like, `OK, we
messed up and we'll talk about it,' and that's it. You don't toss
something like that to the corner. I can't tell them what kind of punitive
measures to take, but it doesn't look like there'll be any. But hopefully
we can all learn from this and some good can come from it."

Paige Laurie, whose son Blake Laurie plays midfield for Charlotte
Catholic, heard the pregame speech from the parking lot, where some of the
team parents were tailgating.

"We basically heard Hitler over the intercom and couldn't believe it," she
said. "You know when you hear something and aren't sure what you heard?
It's like, 'Is that what I really heard?' Our boys (on the team) knew
something was extremely wrong."

Like Catholic's coach, Laurie doesn't think the letter of apology was
enough.

"Absolutely not. Personally, what I'd like to see is them forfeit their
game on Wednesday to TC Roberson because they weren't following the
(NCHSAA) code of conduct. And at the beginning of each game, you have to
read the high school code of conduct. That was not read over the PA
system. If it were me and I was principal, that would be the end of the
soccer season."

(source: The Charlotte Observer)

************************

USA//CALIFORNIA:

Holocaust survivor wants paintings removed from Auschwitz


Dina Babbitt made a deal with Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor
who subjected concentration-camp prisoners to horrendous medical
experiments.

He needed someone to illustrate his perverse racial theories with
portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners, an inferior group according to
Nazi ideology. A trained artist, Babbitt agreed to do the work as the
price of saving her mother, as well as herself, from the concentration
camp's gas chamber.

As things turned out, Babbitt, her mother and the portraits survived. She
eventually settled in northern California, while seven of her paintings
wound up in a museum at Auschwitz dedicated to preserving a historical
record of the Holocaust.

Retrieving a great loss

Ever since discovering in 1973 that they were there, Babbitt has tried to
get them back. Museum officials have steadfastly stonewalled her request,
once invoking the legal principle of work for hire - the concept that the
patron, not the artist, holds the rights to a commissioned work of art.

"A museum official wrote me saying that legally the only one who might
have a claim on the paintings was Dr. Mengele, and he wasn't likely to
exercise it," said Babbitt, 83.

Congress has adopted resolutions recognizing "the moral right of Dina
Babbitt" to the paintings and urging diplomatic efforts to have them
returned. Gallery and museum directors, including a former head of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, have petitioned on Babbitt's behalf.
Recently, 450 cartoonists from this country and abroad sent a petition to
the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Teresa Swiebocka, curator at the Auschwitz museum, explains that the
petition by Babbitt's supporters doesn't alter the situation. "We haven't
any reason to change our attitude of a few years ago," she said.

In a statement posted on its Web site, the museum notes that Babbitt
wasn't the only prisoner to create artworks. What if they, or their heirs,
asked for them back, the museum asks, posing the example of the infamous
"Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work will make you free") sign that marked the
camp's entrance. It was produced by an inmate, a master ironsmith.

Reliving the horror

Babbitt, who passed through that gate 63 years ago, still carries herself
with a gentle style reflecting the refined Central European society where
she was raised. She was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

Her family was Jewish, albeit they only went to services on Yom Kippur, a
day of fasting.

In January 1942, her mother's name appeared on a list of people to be
transported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in northern
Czechoslovakia. The methodical Nazis didn't deport all Jews at once, lest
the machinery of the Holocaust be overburdened.

Babbitt (nee Gottliebova, then spelled her first name Dinah) didn't have
to go. Determined to be with her mother, she insisted on signing up, much
as air travelers put their names on a standby list. She made it onto the
last car.

Those dreams were put on hold in 1943, when Babbitt and her mother were
transferred to Auschwitz, in southern Poland. It was a factory of death,
presided over by Mengele, the "Angel of Death," as inmates dubbed him.
Babbitt's skills - she'd studied painting since age 6 - fit Mengele's
needs. He had tried to illustrate the Nazis' racial theories
photographically. Frustrated by the film of the day, he sent for her.

"He stuck his head out of a box camera's cloth and asked, 'Can you get the
colors accurate?' " Babbitt recalled. He was pleased by her efforts. When
she completed the first Gypsy portrait, he asked her to sign it.

For all the blood on his hands, there was another, almost gentle, side to
his personality, Babbitt said.

"One day, Dr. Mengele came in and said, 'My wife has had a baby,' "
Babbitt recalled. "He'd brought me a little package of cookies."

In January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, Babbitt and
her mother were among prisoners evacuated by the Nazis. Despite the
privations of that death march, the two of them survived, returning to
Czechoslovakia before moving on to Paris.

In 1973, by then married and living in California, Babbitt received a
letter from the Auschwitz museum. It had acquired the Gypsy portraits,
which had been preserved by some of the last inmates in the camp.

Museum officials had tracked her down, thanks to the clue of that
signature Mengele insisted she put on the watercolors.

"I took a briefcase and went to Poland, thinking I'd be bringing them
back," Babbitt said, "but they said I had to leave the paintings there."

A decade ago, Rabbi Andrew Baker tried brokering a compromise between
Babbitt and the museum. Ownership of the paintings would have been shared
between the parties.

Baker, a staff member of the American Jewish Committee and advisory
committee for the Auschwitz museum, says that he can see the issue from
both sides.

"You can understand their meaning to Dina but also to the museum,
especially with the rise of Holocaust deniers," Baker said. "It's
essential to have actual artifacts of the Holocaust to preserve a memory
of the horrors."

Babbitt has memories, too, and they're emotionally bound up in those Gypsy
portraits. Besides representing her talent, they are totems of a pivotal
moment in her life. They witness a passage into adulthood - a season of
first love, a time when her mother began to lean on her.

Recalling all that, Babbitt said, she lies awake at night. The paintings,
she thinks, could bring relief from insomnia.

"If I had them back, maybe I could sleep," she said. "I could sleep
again."

(source: Chicago Tribune)

**************


Film: Too soon to forgive Dr. Mengele?


Just when the film world seems to have examined the Holocaust from every
possible angle, a new film comes along that shakes up our complacency.

"Forgiving Dr. Mengele" focuses on the story of Eva Kor, one of the
so-called "Mengele twins," who along with her sister was subjected to the
Nazi doctor's experiments. Most notably, it deals with the forgiveness of
Nazis, a concept antithetical to many Holocaust survivors.

The documentary, directed and produced by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh,
also taps into a "universal theme of how one grapples with and moves
beyond the trauma of the past," Hercules said in a phone interview from
his office in Chicago. "It could be about a rape victim."

Released by First Run Features, "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" will have a
one-week run at the Laemmle Grande in downtown Los Angeles.

The film is set primarily in the present in Terre Haute, Ind., where Kor,
a septuagenarian dynamo, is shown bustling about in her job as a real
estate agent. A zaftig woman with a cherubic face, Kor wears cheerful,
bright blue and red outfits with matching scarves, including one in the
pattern of the American flag. We see her working out on a treadmill and
lifting weights, driving her car around town with prospective home buyers,
cooking grilled-cheese sandwiches with an iron to demonstrate how she used
to make them at a time when the family was very poor.

The film also flashes back to scenes at concentration camps, including
archival footage of the Soviets liberating Auschwitz. Remarkably, Kor and
her twin sister Miriam were captured in that film: two girls dressed in
striped prison-like attire and holding hands at the front of the line.

Kor, who years after the Holocaust donated a kidney to her sister, who had
suffered organ damage from Mengele's injections, has engendered
controversy from those who claim that she has no right to forgive
murderers. But the controversy actually comes down to a question of
semantics, since Kor has not really forgiven the Nazis so much as she
empowered herself by exorcizing that evil from her past.

The real controversy of the film lies in the fact that it draws a moral
equivalence to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, suggesting that lessons
learned from Kor should be applied there, as well, a subject that seems to
have no place in a film about the Holocaust. Kor reveals her own
discomfort with this issue, looking restless in her seat at a Palestinian
home, but she remains dedicated to "spreading this idea of forgiveness all
around the world."

"Forgiving Dr. Mengele" will be screened at Laemmle's Grande, 345 S.
Figueroa, from Nov. 17 through Nov. 23.

(source: Jewish Journla)





UNITED KINGDOM/AUSTRIA:

U.K. Muslim leader aided Holocaust denier

A British Muslim leader admitted helping fund Holocaust denier David Irving.
Asghar Bukhari, a founding member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee,
was revealed by a British newspaper on Sunday to have pledged money to
Irving's legal fund in 2000.

He also said in a letter at the time that he would encourage Islamic
groups to support Irving and his efforts to expose certain falsehoods
perpetrated by the Jews.

Bukhari confirmed the expose run by The Observer, but said he was
motivated by anti-Israel sentiments rather than anti-Semitism.

He also said he opposed Holocaust denial, though he thought it was wrong
of an Austrian court to jail Irving earlier this year for his assertions
that the scale and planning of the Nazi genocide has been exaggerated.

(source: JTA)




POLAND:

Proposed Auschwitz death camp renovation worries Holocaust survivors in
Israel


A proposal to renovate the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp is drawing
criticism from Holocaust survivors in Israel, who fear modernization will
disturb the camp's original state and the somber memorial to those who
suffered and died there.

The renovations, proposed last month by Piotr Cywinski, 34, the new
director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, call for updating
five exhibits housed in former prisoner barracks, and establishing a new
education center to modernize the message of the memorial for younger
generations.

Cywinski added that preserving original artifacts, including hair samples
and personal belongings that were stripped from prisoners, is also a high
priority.

Holocaust survivors in Israel, however, are worried that the renovations
could make the camp seem more like a museum and less like the site where
nearly 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were slaughtered by the
Nazis during World War II.

"We have a lot of museums. We have a lot of places where we talk about the
Holocaust, but Auschwitz is the original place where it happened," said
Noach Flug, president of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust
Survivors in Israel. "You must have the feeling as it was then the smell
and the look. It is important not to change."

Flug was speaking from a conference of Auschwitz survivors in Berlin,
where he said the camp's survivors worried that renovations may make the
conditions in which they suffered less obvious to visitors.

Several Nazi camp sites, including Bergen-Belsen, have received makeovers
in the past, which experts say is part of trend to make them more
attractive for tourists. Some feel the renovations at Auschwitz are part
of a similar plan to make the Nazi's largest camp seem less foreboding.

"Changing the memorial and making it less horrifying and more friendly,
having more flowers, trees, parks and grass, is good maybe for an
amusement park, but not for a place that is important in order to teach us
what happened," said a spokesman for Zeev Factor, chairman of the
Foundation for the Benefits of Holocaust Survivors in Israel.

Cywinski said his plan does not involve landscaping or any other
beautification of the camp. He said his only goal is modernize exhibits,
which date back to 1955, and make it easier for younger generations to
grasp the importance of one of history's darkest chapters.

"I don't have to think about the beauty. For me the question is
responsibility," he said. "Now we have to think about the future, the next
generation and different ways of speaking to them."

An education center, which will be part of his initiative, is one way to
make young people more "responsive" to the site, he said.

Cywinski added that preserving some of the original artifacts from the
Holocaust is high on his agenda. Over the past few months work has been
underway to preserve five gas chambers and two crematoria that the Nazis
attempted to destroy at the end of the war.

Cywinski said he has also been working with specialists from several
countries on the best way to guard personal effects of camp prisoners,
including locks of human hair, which can be particularly hard to preserve.

His initiative will be officially proposed at a December 5 meeting of
International Auschwitz Council, the committee responsible for managing
the site. Cywinski said he expected several more conferences on the
proposed changes before any take shape.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is one of Poland's most popular tourists sites, with
over 1 million visitors this year, including Pope Benedict XVI. Holocaust
survivors say those visitors should experience the camp the way it was 60
years ago.

"It is a symbolic place and therefore it is important that the gas
chambers and the crematoriums and the blocs and all the hairs and the
shoes all these thing should be in the original form," said Flug. "It
should be as it was."

(source: Associated Press)





CANADA:

Jewish group renews push to deport Oberlander

The Canadian Jewish Congress is pressing the federal government to try
once more to deport Helmut Oberlander of Waterloo.


A prominent Jewish group is still pressing the federal government to kick
Helmut Oberlander out of Canada for his involvement with a notorious Nazi
death squad.

It's been almost two and a half years since the retired Waterloo developer
had his citizenship restored by the Federal Court of Appeal, a key
development in a case that goes back to 1995.

But Bernie Farber, executive director of the Ontario branch of the
Canadian Jewish Congress, said he is hopeful the new Conservative
government will soon try to deport him again.

"There ain't no time left," he said of the cases against Oberlander, 82,
and five other elderly men. "That's about as blunt as I can be.

"It would be an absolute travesty if these people were to die quiet deaths
as a result of old age and not in any way have to face the consequences of
their actions. That's our fear."

The first major step in the deportation process came in 2000, when a
federal court judge found, on a balance of probabilities, that Oberlander
lied about membership in the unit when he emigrated from Germany in 1954.

Based on that finding of fact, and a recommendation from the immigration
minister, the federal cabinet paved the way for deportation by stripping
Oberlander of his Canadian citizenship in 2001.

Complicated legal proceedings then led to a 2004 appeal court ruling that
cabinet erred by not explaining how Oberlander fit government policy on
suspected war criminals or taking into account his "50 years of
irreproachable life" in Canada.

That left the government with a decision -- either abandon its case and
leave Oberlander alone, or fix the mistakes and go after him again,
starting with a new recommendation from the immigration minister to take
away his citizenship for the second time.

Twenty-nine months later --during which the government changed from the
Liberals to the Conservatives after the January 2006 election -- no action
has been taken against Oberlander or five other men found by courts to
have lied about their activities during the Second World War.

Farber said the delay is frustrating because Canada should be sending a
clear signal to the world that it will not harbour war criminals.

"How can it be that six people go through the system like this, right
through the federal court, and have a finding, and then nothing happens?"
he asked. "It's the silence, I think, that is disturbing to everybody."

But after lobbying the new government, including Immigration Minister
Monte Solberg, Farber said he is hopeful something will happen soon.

Marina Wilson, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Citizenship and
Immigration, said privacy concerns prevent her from saying anything about
the status of the Oberlander case.

She repeated government policy that "we're committed to ensuring this
country does not become a safe haven for people who were involved in any
kind of war crimes or crimes against humanity."

Eric Hafemann, the lawyer who has represented Oberlander through most of
the protracted legal proceedings, said he has not been notified, as
required, of a recommendation from the minister going to cabinet.

But after blasting the government's handling of the case from the outset
more than 11 years ago, he doesn't rule out a new effort to oust
Oberlander.

Hafemann said the case never had any merit and if pursued again will only
increase the cost to the public, which he estimated has already reached
$30 million to $40 million.

"If these guys are stupid enough to take another run at this, I'll just
run them through (various legal challenges) again," he said. "And this
time I think maybe (Oberlander) should sue them for malicious prosecution.

"If there is any common sense there at all, if there is any proper legal
advice, this is over. But who knows?"

Hafemann is still negotiating for the costs of Oberlander's legal battles,
which the appeal court ordered the government to pay.

He declined to specify the amount he is seeking, but Oberlander has
previously said he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Even if cabinet strips Oberlander of his citizenship again, legal
proceedings would likely drag the case out for several more years.

Oberlander maintains he did nothing wrong after he was conscripted by the
Nazis as a 17-year-old to work as an interpreter while living in occupied
Ukraine.

There is no evidence Oberlander directly participated in any war crimes or
atrocities.

Instead, a federal court judge found he was an auxiliary member of a
mobile squad that murdered at least 23,000 civilians, mostly Jews, from
1941 to 1943 and did not disclose his membership when applying to come to
Canada.

(source: The Record)