May 20



THE NETHERLANDS:

Dutch airline likely to probe claims it helped Nazi war criminals to flee
Germany


Dutch airline KLM has said it would welcome an investigation into claims
that it helped Nazi war criminals to flee out of Germany to South
America.

Dutch filmmakers working on a documentary found papers in Switzerland that
appear to show at least one KLM representative asked the Swiss government
in 1948 to allow German nationals cross the border without all the
required papers and then to fly to Buenos Aires, The Times of London
reported.

The KLM employee is identified only as Herr (Mr.) Frick.

KLM, acronym for Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a
policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the hands of the Allies
after WWII when hundreds escaped to Argentina.

KLM officials say some war criminals may have flown to Argentina on its
planes but that does not mean the airline assisted them or knew who they
were.

Argentinian refuge

Argentina was after the war the refuge of senior Nazis such as Joseph
Mengele, the doctor at Auschwitz nicknamed the Angel of Death, and Adolf
Eichmann, who planned the extermination of the Jews.

Marc Dierikx, of the Institute for Netherlands History, said documents
show that some Germans paid handsomely for assistance and that KLM was
"intensively involved."

But some adopted false identities, and KLM acknowledges that some of its
passengers were probably fleeing Nazis.

It insists, however, that its role was not to police its passengers.

"The checks we have done in our archive so far have not delivered any
specific information about this sort of transportation. But that does not
mean that it has not been done," KLM spokesman Bart Koster said.

He said that he would advise the companys board to commission an
independent inquiry.

He told the Dutch radio: "If we really want to be sure what happened, we
have to have a thorough investigation, he said.

KLM is now part of Air France.

An inquiry could reopen controversy about the role of the Dutch Royal
Family as the late Prince Bernhard, father of Queen Beatrix, was on KLM's
board in the postwar years.

The Dutch national railway company had apologised last year for its role
in the deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

(source: European Jewish Press)


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

Anne Frank house vandals arrested


Police arrested two teens early Sunday for spraying graffiti tags on the
Anne Frank House and several other houses, a spokesman said. The graffiti
was not race related.

"There was nothing racist or anti-Semitic, they were tags -- kids leaving
their calling cards," said police spokesman Leo Dortland. Cleaning crews
were removing the graffiti, police said.

Two boys, aged 16 and 17, were caught red-handed and arrested but not
immediately charged, police said in a statement.

They allegedly tagged a photo exhibition and nine houses including the
canalside house where Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazis for 25
months in a secret annex during Germany's brutal World War II occupation
of the Netherlands.

Anne chronicled her days in hiding in her diary, which was later published
and has sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide.

The Frank family was arrested in August 1944 and Anne died of typhus in
the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

The house is now a museum that is one of Amsterdam's most popular tourist
draw cards.

(source: Associated Press)





POLAND:

Holocaust hero honored at 97


The pilgrims keep coming, seeking out the fragile 97-year-old woman in
her tiny nursing home room filled with pictures and flowers.

The attention tires Irena Sendler sometimes. She never sought credit for
smuggling 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto anyway. Not for
risking execution to save other people's children, or holding out under
torture by the Nazis, or enduring decades as a non-person under the
communist regime that followed.

She once dismissed her wartime deeds as merely "the justification of my
existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."

"I'm very tired -- it's too much for me," Sendler said recently of the
incessant visits, during a brief meeting with an Associated Press
reporter. And giving a little laugh, she added a bit sadly: "I feel my
age."

Sendler in recent years has gained a measure of celebrity amid broader
interest in Holocaust heroes stoked by the film "Schindler's List."
Poland's parliament honored her in a March 14 ceremony and the country is
pushing her candidacy -- mostly symbolic -- for the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is late recognition for an extraordinary life.

Sendler, a social worker, began organizing financial and material help for
Jews after the war began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion. Posing as a nurse
and wearing a Star of David armband -- in solidarity and to blend in --
Sendler would enter the Warsaw Ghetto, the prison enclave the Nazis
established as a prelude to deporting and murdering Poland's Jews in death
camps.

A Polish doctor forged papers stating she was a nurse. The Nazis, who
feared the typhoid fever spreading in the ghetto, were happy to let Polish
medical workers handle the sick and the dead.

Sendler persuaded Jewish parents that their children had a better chance
to live if she smuggled them out and placed them with Catholic families.

In hopes of reuniting them later with their birth parents, she wrote the
children's names and new addresses, in code, on slips of paper and buried
them in two jars in an assistant's yard. That hope never came true: Almost
all the parents died in Hitler's camps.

What the jar did save was their true, Jewish names.

Elzbieta Ficowska, nee Koppel, was 5 months old when one of Sendler's
associates gave her a narcotic to make her sleep and put her in a wooden
box with air holes. Box and baby left the ghetto with bricks on a
horse-drawn wagon in July 1942.

Ficowska's mother hid a silver spoon in the baby's clothes. It was
engraved with her nickname, Elzunia, and her birth date: January 5, 1942.
Elzbieta was taken in by Sendler's associate Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a
widowed Catholic midwife.

To this day, Ficowska calls the late Bussoldowa "my Polish mother" to
distinguish her from "my Jewish mother."

For a few months, Elzunia's mother was able to telephone and hear her
daughter gurgle. Soon, both parents died in the ghetto.

The escape routes were many and ingenious.

Sometimes, as with Ficowska, Sendler and her team hid the children in
boxes or sacks and took them out of the ghetto in a truck. The fearful
driver got a German shepherd and made it bark to drown out the children's
cries when they passed by Nazi checkpoints.

At other times, the children rode an empty, or almost empty, streetcar
linking the ghetto with the outside world, driven by a cooperating driver.
Sometimes Sendler and her helpers passed them through the secret basements
of buildings on the edge of the walled-in ghetto to the city outside.

Sendler was arrested in a Gestapo night raid on her apartment on Oct. 20,
1943. The Nazis took her to the dreaded Pawiak prison, which few left
alive. She was tortured and says she still has scars on her body -- but
she refused to betray her team.

"I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity," she was
quoted as saying in the one book about her, "Mother of the Children of the
Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler" by Anna Mieszkowska.

The Polish resistance bribed a Gestapo officer. He put her name on a list
of executed prisoners and let her go. She went into hiding under an
assumed name but continued her activity.

Today, Sendler is always dressed in black -- in mourning for her own son,
Adam, who died of heart failure in 1999. She can no longer walk, and
spends much of her time hunched in a chair, next to a window and a table
covered with vases with flowers, memorabilia and medicine.

Yet she has retained her pluck and a sense of humor. During a recent visit
from Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, and the U.S. ambassador,
Victor Ashe, Sendler joked she felt as if she already had won the Nobel
Peace Prize due to all the recognition she has received of late.

"I'm the only person in the world who has two Nobels!" she joked, showing
her visitors evidence of two honors that have moved her deeply -- a small
album filled with pictures of German schools named after her, and bound
volumes of signatures of people supporting her Nobel candidacy.

After the war, Sendler raised a family with her second husband, Stefan
Zgrzembski, set up orphanages and nursing homes and was an official in the
education system. But communist authorities barred her from positions of
influence. As a member of the Polish Socialist Party before the war,
Sendler was of the wrong shade of red for Poland's postwar Moscow-backed
communist rulers.

She blames questioning and harassment by the secret police for the
premature birth of her son, Andrzej, who died after two weeks. Her
daughter Janina and second son Adam encountered difficulties in pursuing
education and in building careers.

She was recognized in 1965 by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, as
a so-called Righteous Among the Nations, but ignored at home.

Jewish history was a taboo in communist-run Poland, making Sendler an
uncomfortable witness, says Michal Glowinski, 72, hidden as a boy by
Sendler in a convent after his Jewish family escaped the ghetto in January
1943. They were reunited after the war.

"I remember the streets of the ghetto," Glowinski says. "I remember the
bodies of people dead of starvation, lying in the streets and covered with
paper of light-gray color. I never saw such paper again. I remember the
fear."

Glowinski, a literary critic who published his story in the memoir "The
Black Seasons," says "I owe my life to Mrs. Sendler."

"She is an absolutely heroic person, exceptional," he said, stressing the
"energy and imagination" she needed to save 2,500 children when trying to
save just one Jewish person could mean instant execution.

(source: Associated Press)






USA:

Liz Taylor can keep Van Gogh 'looted by the Nazis'


Actress Elizabeth Taylor has won the right to keep a Van Gogh masterpiece
that may have been illegally seized by the Nazis - because the family who
once owned it waited too long to ask for its return.

Dame Elizabeth, 75, bought the 1889 work, View Of The Asylum And Chapel At
Saint-Remy, at Sotheby's in 1963 for 92,000. She keeps it in her Los
Angeles home.

The painting, completed by Van Gogh near the end of his life, is estimated
to now be worth up to 8 million.

The Orkin family sued Taylor for return of the painting in 2004.

They are South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a
Jewish woman whose possessions were seized by the Nazis when she fled
Germany in 1939.

The Orkins claimed the work was among the items confiscated and that it
should be returned to them under the U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

But Taylor said she was the rightful owner and that the work had passed
through two Jewish art dealers without any sign of Nazi coercion before
she bought it.

On Friday, the U.S. appeal court backed an earlier ruling that the Orkins
had waited too long to claim the painting.

"It is apparent that Taylor's acquisition of the painting was certainly
discoverable at least by 1990, when she held it out for sale in an
international auction, and most probably as early as 1963, when she
acquired it in a highly publicised international auction," said Judge
Sidney Thomas.

Any claim to the painting, Thomas added, "expired in or before 1993, three
years after the last public announcement of Taylor's ownership".

A spokesman for the actress was not available for comment.

(source: Daily Mail)