Jan. 18



USA:

Museum Provides Detail From Nazi Archive

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is offering to help survivors and
their families navigate a vast Nazi archive that promises to document
their persecution and provide clues to the fate of loved ones.

After months of work on more than 100 million digital images from the
International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the museum
announced that it would begin answering requests from survivors and their
families.

"This moment is a wonderful victory for survivors, although long overdue,"
museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said Thursday in a statement. "But the
significance of ITS extends far beyond the survivor generation. With an
increase in Holocaust denial and minimization, the evidence in this
massive archive will serve as an authentic witness to the scope of the
crimes of the Holocaust for many generations to come."

In August, the ITS began transferring the documents to the Washington
museum and two others -- Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem's outskirts, and the Institute of National Remembrance in
Warsaw, Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross administers
the ITS archive.

The Washington museum will be the first of the three museums to begin
answering large numbers of requests that researchers hope will help
survivors and their families get long-sought answers to bitter questions.
They believe even small details could prove invaluable to aging survivors.

"The reason that we got into this in the first place is that we heard from
so many survivors and families that it was important for them
psychologically," said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies. "Having a copy of a real document in your
hand, perhaps seeing the signature of someone who you lost -- that may be
the only connection to a moment when that person was alive that you have
got."

The museum has been accepting requests for information from survivors and
their families since last month. It also has provided information to a
small number of people as part of its efforts to learn how to search the
immense archive and to train its researchers. Now it will begin responding
on a larger scale.

Survivors and their families can make requests online on the museum's Web
site. The museum also will provide request forms by mail or through a
toll-free number, 866-912-4385.

The museum is warning that while the documents -- transportation lists,
Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books -- refer
to about 17.5 million people, they are not a comprehensive documentation
of the fates of the millions of victims and survivors.

Most of the documents in the archive are written by hand, sometimes in old
German script. They also contain variations in the spelling of names, many
of which are recorded phonetically. That makes it impossible, for now, to
convert large numbers of files to a digitally searchable form.

Shapiro says survivors who hope the files will contain important
information on lost life insurance policies also may be frustrated, as
researchers have not found evidence that the files contain that
information.

Those hopes have been reflected in legal action by survivors. In a
multimillion-dollar settlement between victims and the Italian insurance
company Assicurazioni Generali, a federal judge ruled last year that a
deadline for victims to file claims, now expired, could be extended until
August if the Arolsen files turned up relevant information.

Despite the archive's limitations, historians believe the files' data on
the 17.5 million individuals will add texture to the narrative of misery
in the camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply
exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the
Holocaust, one of every three Jews on Earth at the time.

Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of World
War II and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has
been governed since 1955 by a commission of 11 nations that ratified an
accord in November that unsealed the archive.

The ITS has completed digitizing some 50 million index cards from shelves
that would stretch 16 miles and fill a half-dozen buildings in Bad
Arolsen. The remainder of the collection, relating to slave labor and
displaced persons camps, will be transferred to the museums in
installments between 2008 and 2010.

------

On the Net:

International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/

Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/

Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.ipn.gov.pl/wai/en/10/5/

(source: Associated Press)


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


The Story of 'Night'

This fall, Elie Wiesel's "Night" was removed from the New York Times
best-seller list, where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after Oprah
Winfrey picked it for her book club. The Timess news survey department,
which compiles the list, decided the Holocaust memoir wasnt a new best
seller but a classic like "Animal Farm" or "To Kill a Mockingbird," which
sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course
adoptions.

Indeed, since it appeared in 1960, "Night" has sold an estimated 10
million opies - three million of them since Winfrey chose the book in
January 2006 (and traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz).

But "Night" had taken a long route to the best-seller list. In the late
1950s, long before the advent of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust studies,
Wiesel's account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald was turned down
by more than 15 publishers before the small firm Hill & Wang finally
accepted it. How "Night" became an evergreen is more than a publishing
phenomenon. It is also a case study in how a book helped created a genre,
how a writer became an icon and how the Holocaust was absorbed into the
American experience.

Raised in an Orthodox family in Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel was liberated
from Buchenwald at age 16. In unsentimental detail, "Night" recounts daily
life in the camps - the never-ending hunger, the sadistic doctors who
pulled gold teeth, the Kapos who beat fellow Jews. On his first day in the
camps, Wiesel was separated forever from his mother and sister. At
Auschwitz, he watched his father slowly succumb to dysentery before the SS
beat him to within an inch of his life. Wiesel writes honestly about his
guilty relief at his father's death. In the camps, the formerly observant
boy underwent a profound crisis of faith; "Night" was one of the first
books to raise the question: where was God at Auschwitz?

Working as a journalist in his mid-20s, Wiesel wrote the first version of
"Night" in Yiddish as "Und di Velt Hot Geshvign" ("And the World Remained
Silent") while on assignment in Brazil. But it wasn't until he returned to
Paris and met Franois Mauriac, a noted Catholic novelist and journalist,
that "Night" took the shape we know today. Mauriac urged Wiesel to rewrite
the book in French and promised to write a preface. Still, "it was
rejected by the major publishers," Wiesel recalled in a recent interview,
"although it was brought to them by Franois Mauriac, the greatest,
greatest writer and journalist in France, a Catholic, a Nobel
Prize-winner with all the credentials." Les ditions de Minuit brought it
out in 1958, but it sold poorly.

The American response was similarly tepid. Georges Borchardt, Wiesels
longtime literary agent and himself a Holocaust survivor, sent the French
manuscript to New York publishers in 1958 and 1959, to little effect.
"Nobody really wanted to talk about the Holocaust in those days,"
Borchardt said. "The Diary of Anne Frank," published in the United States
in 1952, had been a huge success, but it did not take readers into the
horror of the camps. Although "Night" had sophisticated literary motifs
and a quiet elegance, American publishers worried it was more a
testimonial than a work of literature. "It is, as you say, a horrifying
and extremely moving document, and I wish I could say this was something
for Scribner's," an editor there wrote to Borchardt. "However, we have
certain misgivings as to the size of the American market for what
remains, despite Mauriacs brilliant introduction, a document." Kurt Wolff,
the head of Pantheon, also turned "Night" down. Although it had qualities
"not brought out in any other book, Pantheon had always refrained from
doing books of this kind," meaning books about the Holocaust, he wrote to
Borchardt.

Finally, in 1959, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang agreed to take on "Night."
The first reviews were positive. Gertrude Samuels, writing in the Book
Review, called it a "slim volume of terrifying power." Alfred Kazin,
writing in The Reporter, said Wiesels account of his loss of faith had a
"particular poignancy." After the Kazin review, "the book got great
reviews all over America, but it didn't influence the sales," Wiesel said.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought the Holocaust into the
mainstream of American consciousness. Other survivors began writing their
stories - but with higher visibility came the first glimmerings of
criticism. In a roundup of Holocaust literature in Commentary in 1964, the
critic A. Alvarez said "Night" was "beyond criticism" as a human document,
but called it "a failure as a work of art." Wiesel, he argued, had failed
to "create a coherent artistic world out of one which was the deliberate
negation of all values."

By the early '70s, the Holocaust had become a topic of study in
universities, spurred in part by the rise of "ethnic studies" more
generally and a surge of interest in Jewish history after Israel's
dramatic military victory in the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973.
Wiesel, who had moved to New York in the mid-'50s, began lecturing
regularly at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and teaching at the City
University of New York. (Since 1976 he has taught at Boston University.)

Although his books were all reviewed respectfully, some critics questioned
Wiesel's role as a self-appointed witness. "His personal project has been
to keep the wounds of Auschwitz open by repeatedly pouring the salt of new
literary reconstructions upon them, and thus to prevent the collective
Jewish memory - and his own - from quietly letting the wounds heal," Leon
Wieseltier, now the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote in
Commentary in 1974. Reviewing Wiesel's novel "The Oath," about a pogrom,
Wieseltier criticized Wiesel for "turning history into legend." His
characters were "archetypes of the varieties of Jewish pain," Wieseltier
wrote, so "what remains is ... a kind of elaborate superficiality which
does justice neither to the authors intentions nor to his terrible subject
matter."

In 1978, President Carter appointed Wiesel to a commission that eventually
created the Holocaust Museum. In Wiesel's mind, the "real breakthrough"
that brought "Night" into wide view came in 1985, when he spoke out against
President Reagan's planned visit to the Bitburg military cemetery in
Germany, where SS members were buried. While Reagan was awarding him a
Congressional Gold Medal at the White House, Wiesel told him: "That place,
Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the
SS." The next day, Wiesel's words were on front pages worldwide. (Reagan
still made the trip.)

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The Nobel
committee called Wiesel "a messenger to mankind," teaching "peace,
atonement and human dignity." Wiesel's commitment, which originated in the
sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all
repressed peoples and races. By the late 90s, "Night" was a standard high
school and college text, selling around 400,000 copies a year.

Yet some critics have homed in on the very qualities that have helped
"Night" find a broad readership. Some have criticized Wiesel for
universalizing - and even Christianizing - Jewish suffering. In "The
Holocaust in American Life" (1999), the historian Peter Novick cites
crucifixion imagery in "Night" as evidence of the "un-Jewish" or Christian
tenor to much Holocaust commemoration. Others have suggested Wiesel may
have revised the book to appeal to non-Jewish readers. In a 1996 essay,
Naomi Seidman, a Jewish studies professor at Berkeleys Graduate
Theological Union, detected strong notes of vengeance in the Yiddish
version. In the final scene, after the camp has been liberated, Wiesel
writes of young men going into Weimar "to rape German girls." But there's
no mention of rape in the subsequent French or English translations. Wiesel
said his thinking had changed between versions. "It would have been a
disgrace to reduce such an event to simple vengeance."

To Lawrence L. Langer, an eminent scholar of Holocaust literature and a
friend of Wiesel's, what sets "Night" apart is a moral honesty that "helps
undermine the sentimental responses to the Holocaust." To Langer, "Night"
remains an essential companion - or antidote - to "The Diary of Anne
Frank." That book, with its ringing declaration that "I still believe that
people are really good at heart," is "easy for teachers to teach," Langer
said, but "from the text you don't know what happened when she died of
typhus, half-starved at Bergen-Belsen." Wiesel takes a similar view.
"Where Anne Frank's book ends, he said, mine begins."

(source: New York Times----Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the
Book)