Sept. 15




GERMANY:

German talk show host canned for praising Nazis By Scott Roxborough


In Cologne, Germany's public broadcaster has fired a conservative talk
show host who praised the Nazis' "family values," a decision that drew
praise from the media and high-ranking politicians.

NDR, part of the national ARD network, ousted Eva Herman from the right
wing/left wing talk show "Herman and Tietjen" on Sunday. The move came
after Herman, promoting her latest book on family values, said that
Hitler's family policies -- which included cash bonuses for extra children
and the death penalty for abortions -- were good for the country.

"It was a horrible time with a manic and dangerous leader who led the
Germans into ruin. ... But values like family, children and motherhood
were promoted in the Third Reich and were destroyed in the 1960s. Much
that was of value from that time was destroyed," Herman said.

Herman is considered the German equivalent of Ann Coulter, a blond,
blue-eyed commentator known for her conservative views on the family and
motherhood. She is an unusual figure in the German talk show circuit,
where aggressive, U.S.-style confrontation and polemic is rare.

Herman rose to fame as the anchor of "Tagesschau," Germany's top-rated TV
news program. She took a leave of absence from her show last year amid
controversy surrounding the publication of her first book, the
anti-feminist "The Eva Principle," which called for woman to focus on
their families and child-rearing instead of their careers.

In her new book: "The Noah's Ark Principle -- Why We Must Save the
Family," Herman blames the 1960s generation for destroying the Nazis'
"pro-family" policies.

"NDR did the right thing in firing Herman," Renate Kunast, the co-head of
Germany's Green Party told online site Bild.de on Monday. "With Eva
Herman, even feminists like myself would like to see her stay in the
kitchen."

Columnist Lars von der Gonna, writing for national daily newspaper WAZ,
echoed that sentiment.

"The supposed 'virtues' (of the Nazis' family policies) weren't ones at
all," von der Gonna wrote. "For the Nazis, family policy meant supporting
their racial policy (of breeding 'Aryans'). ... In the Herman case, NDR
reacted quickly and correctly."

"NDR and ARD can breath easily now, they have one less problem to deal
with," Michael Hanfeld wrote in his commentary Monday for the Frankfurter
Allgemeine newspaper.

Even conservative tabloid the Bild Zeitung, long a Herman supporter,
abandoned the TV celebrity following her pro-Nazi comments. Under the
headline "Why Did She Praise Hitler's Family Policies?" Bild quoted
Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano condemning Herman.

"Her comments are the worst thing I have heard in a long while," Giordano
said. "The singular characteristic of the Third Reich was not how it
treated its mothers -- they were only there to produce cannon fodder. The
singular characteristic was the gas chambers."

For her part, Herman said her comments were taken out of context and that
she rejects all forms of extreme politics "both from the left or the
right."

(source: Reuters)





USA//NEW YORK:

Holocaust survivors reunite with vet

Carrol "Red" Walsh didn't know what to expect when his patrol came across
a train stopped along a hillside during the U.S. Army's dash across
northern Germany in the final, chaotic days of World War II.

In and around the abandoned line of freight cars milled some 2,500
emaciated and ragged Jewish prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. There were scores of children.

"They were just jammed, crammed in there," said Walsh, a 24-year-old tank
commander in April 1945.

On Friday, the now 86-year-old retired state Supreme Court judge reunited
with three of the survivors of the Nazi death train his unit found near
Magdeburg, about 50 miles southwest of Berlin. The train was on its way to
another concentration camp.

The veteran and the survivors were to take part in a daylong program
hosted at the high school in this Hudson River village north of Albany.

The reunion has its roots in a class project launched by Matthew Rozell, a
history teacher at Hudson Falls High School. In the early 1990s, he
created an elective course for seniors to collect stories from local
veterans and post them on a Web site.

One of Rozell's students was Walsh's grandson, who told the teacher about
his grandfather's wartime service. Several years ago, Rozell interviewed
Walsh and George Gross, a fellow tank commander from Spring Valley, Calif.

Their account of the train liberation was posted on the project's Web
site, along with black-and-white photographs taken that day by the major
leading their patrol.

That's where some of the child survivors of the Nazi train, now in their
60s and 70s, found their story.

"All of this to a large degree came out of a high school project. This to
me is fascinating," said survivor Micha Tomkiewicz, a Polish Jew from
Warsaw who was 6 when he and his mother and uncle were liberated.

Tomkiewicz had an earlier reunion with Gross and his family. He said he's
looking forward to meeting Walsh, and he credited Rozell for the reunions.

"It's pretty humbling," Rozell said.

Tomkiewicz was to be joined by fellow survivors Peter Lantos, a
neurologist from London, and Fred Spiegel, an author from Howell, N.J.

Friday's program includes a viewing of "A Train Near Magdeburg," a
10-minute DVD produced by two of Rozell's students, followed by talks from
each of the three survivors.

For Walsh, it will be his first face-to-face meeting with anyone from the
train since he came upon them on what turned out to be their lucky day
Friday the 13th, April, 1945.

"I had almost forgotten about the incident itself, really, over the
years," Walsh said. "It was almost like another day in combat. Nothing
surprised me by then."

(source: Associated Press)






ARGENTINA:

Argentinean Holocaust survivor breaks his silence with harrowing book


On his 68th birthday, Jorge Klainman decided he could remain silent no
more about his Holocaust horrors.

The Polish-born, retired businessman sat at his electric typewriter, he
said, and suddenly the curtains of my memory began to part, revealing
events that happened 50 or 60 years ago. After that my life changed
completely. I felt liberated.

The result was El Septimo Milagro, a harrowing Spanish-language tale of
life and death in a series of Nazi concentration camps that has captivated
readers from Buenos Aires to Barcelona.

Translated into English as The Seventh Miracle, Klainmans first-person
account differs from most other Holocaust memoirs in its extraordinary
attention to detail. It ranges from the 1939 roundup of Jews from his
Polish hometown of Kielce to Klainmans frightful March 1944 encounter with
psychopathic concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth, the SS officer
portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielbergs movie Schindlers List.

Goeth marked Klainman, then 15, for execution by firing squad.

The end had come, Klainman wrote. They were going to shoot me and burn me.
I thought of my loved ones, and that soon I would be joining them. I
reached a state of mind where I just wanted, with all my being, to get it
over with.

But Klainmans Ukrainian executioners somehow missed their target, and
later that night fellow Jewish prisoners risked their lives to bring his
bleeding body to the infirmary. A kindly doctor there gradually nursed the
teenager back to health.

Fate intervened five more times before he was liberated by American
soldiers in 1945. In 1947 with the help of international Jewish
organizations Klainman set sail from Italy to Rio de Janeiro, caught a
plane to Asuncion, Paraguay, and smuggled himself across the heavily
guarded border into Argentina, where he eventually married and raised a
family.

And now, with anti-Semitism rising in his adopted country, Klainman said
he feels compelled to share his story with Argentines who may not have
gotten the message.

Ten years from now there wont be any Holocaust survivors left to transmit
the truth to young people, he said in an interview at his Buenos Aires
apartment. Theyll begin forgetting the Jewish Holocaust just as theyve
forgotten the Armenian Holocaust. So its important that everybody knows
what happened. That way theyll be able to understand the terrible struggle
of the Israeli people against the fundamentalist Islamic savages who want
to throw us into the sea.

Klainman, a jewelry retailer by profession, lived in Tel Aviv from 1971 to
1990 and again from 1999 to 2004. He is fluent in Polish, Russian, German,
Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and Italian, and was recently appointed official
representative of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires.

Klainman said he was inspired to write El Septimo Milagro after his son
Miguel began asking him questions about his past.

For 50 years I guarded my silence like a hermit, but then I got tired of
these delinquents denying the Holocaust, he said. I realized that by
keeping silent, I was becoming an accomplice, collaborating with them.

Klainman said he has lots of work to do in explaining the Holocaust to
fellow Argentines, many of whom grew up with anti-Semitic attitudes
encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church and the thousands of Nazi war
criminals who were welcomed by Argentinas military dictatorship after
World War II.

Ive visited many colleges and universities throughout Argentina, giving
speeches for high school kids, Klainman said. I even spoke at a Catholic
seminary, and afterward the kids cursed the Vatican for ignoring the Jews.

Usually when I finish speaking after an hour, for three or four minutes
they sit there in silence. Then they surround me, hundreds of kids,
hugging me, crying, asking for my autograph. Once I took a taxi in

Corrientes and the driver recognized me. He took my hand and kissed it,
and told me, "God bless you, may you never die."

(source: Jewish News - San Francisco)






ISRAEL:

Documentary spotlights Stalags, Israeli pocket books based on Nazi themes


It was one of Israel's dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s,
as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking
testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a
series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes,
became best-sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the
children of survivors themselves, the Stalags were named for the World War
II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse
tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic
female SS officers kitted out with whips and boots.

The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by
raping
and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar
Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are emerging back into the
public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural
representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been
unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has
permeated even the school curriculum.

"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up
here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film,
"Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel," premiered at the Jerusalem
Film Festival in July and is scheduled to be broadcast in October and shown
in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how
embarrassed we were."

Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University of the
Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the "yellow aspects of
nurturing the memory of the Holocaust."

"Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?" she asked. "The
answer is, we are."

The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli
society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out
almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition
was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an
Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography.

The most famous Stalag, "I was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was
deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the
police to try to hunt every copy down.

The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialist
secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.

Libsker's 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the
first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags
were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by
Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English
and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.

Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had
hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the
old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time and questioned
what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive.

In the movie, the publisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges
that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail, that
gave momentum to the genre.

More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a
popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell
the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust
literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers
learned a lot from him," Narkis said.

K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym of Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the
German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a
kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes,
"Doll's House," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting
to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the
notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.

Though a Holocaust classic, scholars now describe it as pornographic and
likely false.

"It was fiction. Block 24 didn't exist," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at
Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in
Jerusalem.

Yet "Doll's House" and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are
treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high
school curriculum. Libsker's movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli
school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block
24 and quoting from K. Tzetnik.

This approach to Holocaust education is being eschewed by an increasing
number of Israeli academics. "The Holocaust was bad enough, without making
things up," Yablonka said.

Sidra Ezrahi, a professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, said, "His books were so graphic and so
barbaric." Maybe at first they had an important impact, she said.

"But over time," she added, "if this is what they have chosen to leave in
the Israeli curriculum, it's a scandal."

For many Israelis, the most dramatic part of the Eichmann trial was the
testimony of K. Tzetnik. His true identity was revealed for the first time
on the witness stand, where he passed out. Simultaneously, the Stalags
were reaching the peak of their commercial success.

Yechiel Szeintuch, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew
University, rejects any link between the smutty Stalags and the writings of
K. Tzetnik as "an original sin." He insists the work of K. Tzetnik was
based on reality.

But Libsker, 35, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that
it is the same mixture of "horror, sadism and pornography" that serves to
perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to
this day.

(source: New York Times, Sept. 10)





CANADA:

Holocaust song has cellular firm squirming


Canada's biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference
to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cell phones.

The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman
decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen
was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a
reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

"It was inadvertent," Bell Canada spokesman Mark Langton said on Friday,
noting that the dozen ads were taken down as soon as the company realized
its mistake. "Obviously, we would never depict such an offensive slogan in
our advertising."

He said Bell officials approved the ads after examining sample images that
were smaller than the final billboards. The button inscription could only
be read when the ads were blown up to their full size, he said.

"In the proofing and approval materials, it was impossible to see the
button, so our folks missed it."

BCE apologizes "for any offense or distress that we caused," Langton said.

The billboards appeared in mass-transit systems in Vancouver, British
Columbia, as well as in Toronto, which has a large Jewish community and
many Holocaust survivors.

(source: Reuters)