April 13


Holocaust Train Rolls Into Berlin Engulfed By Row


A vintage engine steamed into Berlin on Sunday, hauling carriages filled
with photos of smiling children and poignant last letters to loved ones
-- the images and words of the youngest victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

About 160,000 have visited the train, a memorial to the millions of Jews
and others carried off to their deaths by Adolf Hitler's railways in World
War Two.

The train set off across Germany in November on an often tearful journey
due to end, like so many of the Nazis' victims, at the notorious Auschwitz
death camp in Poland

With just days to go before the "train of commemoration" terminates its
journey on May 8 -- the day the war ended in Europe -- it has become
embroiled in a major row.

Germany's current rail operator, state-owned Deutsche Bahn, refused to
allow the train to halt in the capital's central station, offering instead
the eastern Ostbahnhof.

Some critics have compared the heads of Deutsche Bahn with those of the
Nazi-era Reichsbahn, which deported many of the 6 million Jews who died in
the Holocaust.

Left Party parliamentarian Petra Pau said the "blockade" by the firm, and
the travel charges it had imposed on the train were a reminder of the
difficulties still faced when trying to shed light on Germany's past
crimes.

"The horror of the Nazi regime cannot be forgotten. It would be a betrayal
of the victims and the future," said Pau, a deputy speaker of the
Bundestag lower house.

Demonstrations, protests by Holocaust survivors and pressure from
politicians including Berlin's mayor have not swayed Deutsche Bahn. The
company said a stop in the Hauptbahnhof would have caused traffic chaos
during the train's 10-day Berlin stay.

But it has not prevented the train making its point.

"I'm just happy...these children could be brought back from the quagmire
of the past into the public eye, and their dignity restored, at least to
some degree," said 84-year-old Herbert Shenkman, who survived deportation.

Defenders of the rail operator point out that Deutsche Bahn has already
organized exhibits documenting the Reichsbahn's role in the genocide, and
that the Hauptbahnhof -- newly built on the site of an old station -- is
not integral to the history.

"The train of commemoration should continue its journey," wrote daily Die
Welt. "But without all the rumblings that only serve the posturing of
those who organized it."

Rose Braun, a 63-year-old Berliner, said the project, staged by a
citizens' initiative, was "very late, but very important."

"Very few firms have admitted to their past -- let alone actually made an
effort to come to terms with it," she said. "I hope the turn-out here
today gives the Bahn pause for thought."

Organizer Hans-Ruediger Minow said the idea came about after Deutsche Bahn
blocked an earlier effort to mark deportations.

"Time and again there are very painful moments on the train," he said. "In
particular, Germans born at the end of the war often start to cry,
especially the men. That's when they see their parents hid the truth and
covered up these crimes."

(source: Reuters)





BELARUS:

Jewish Remains Dug Up in Belarus


Workers rebuilding a sports stadium on the site of an 18th century Jewish
cemetery in Belarus say they have no choice but to consign the bones to
city dumps.

"It's impossible to pack an entire cemetery into sacks," said worker
Mikhail Gubets, adding that he stopped counting the skulls when the number
went over 100.

But critics say it's part of a pattern of callous indifference toward
Belarus' Jewish heritage that was prevalent when the country was a Soviet
republic and hasn't changed.

The stadium in Gomel, Belarus' second largest city and a center of Jewish
life until World War II, is one of four that were built on top of Jewish
cemeteries around the country.

The Gomel cemetery was destroyed when the stadium was built in 1961, but
the remains lay largely undisturbed until this spring when reconstruction
began and a bulldozer turned up the first bones.

A Jewish leader in Gomel, Vladimir Gershanok, says he asked the builders
to put the bones into sacks for reburial at a cemetery that has a monument
to Holocaust victims.

"We know we can't stop the construction but we're trying to minimize the
destruction," Gershanok said.

But city authorities have ruled that the construction can go ahead because
the bones are more than 50 years old.

Igor Poluyan, the city official responsible for building sports
facilities, says he doesn't understand the problem. "If something was
scattered there, we'll collect it and take it away," he said.

A history professor, Yevgeny Malikov, sees the cemetery as part of the
city's heritage. He has filled three sacks with bones and pulled aside two
of the unearthed marble gravestones. Other gravestones are piled near a
trash bin or already carried away. Some of the bones have been carried off
by stray dogs.

"The history of the city is being thrown into the dump together with the
human remains," Malikov said.

Jews began settling in Gomel in the 16th century and by the end of the
19th century made up more than half of the population. In 1903, they made
history by being the first to resist a pogrom, defending 26 synagogues and
prayer houses.

Most of Gomel's 40,000 Jews managed to flee before the Nazis arrived. The
4,000 who remained were shot in November 1941. Only a few thousand Jews
now live in the city of 500,000.

Oleg Korzhuyev, 38, who lives on Karl Marx Street at the edge of the site,
said the workers aren't happy about digging up human bones, "but if they
find a gold tooth then it's a real celebration."

Another city, Grodno, experienced a similar problem while reconstructing a
stadium built on a Jewish cemetery. The excavated earth and bones were
scattered into a ravine.

Jewish graves also have been disturbed in neighboring Ukraine.

"It's not just a Jewish issue, it's this general Soviet legacy," said
Ukraine's chief rabbi. Yakov Blaikh. "They didn't respect people while
they were alive and they don't respect them when they are dead."

This month, the Jewish community in the city of Vinnyntsa was able to stop
construction of an apartment building on a pre-World War II Jewish
cemetery.

Ukrainian authorities apologized, saying they did not realize the
construction would affect the cemetery. Belarus, on the other hand, has
been "one of the least responsive countries on all Jewish issues,"
according to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli Simon Wiesenthal
Center.

"The government is simply erasing Jewish history from the face of this
land," said Yakov Basin, vice president of the Belarusian Jewish Council.

Before the war, about 1 million Jews lived in Belarus and 800,000 of them
died in the Holocaust. Today they number 27,000 in the country of 10
million.

Belarus' president, Alexander Lukashenko, has shown little respect for
Jewish culture. In a radio broadcast in October that provoked a sharp
protest from the Israeli government, he suggested that when Jews were
numerous in another town, Bobruisk, they turned it into "a pigsty."

"You know how Jews treat the place where they live. Look at Israel; I was
there," he said.

(source: Associated Press)





USA----film review

Brutality of Holocaust gains new perspective in 'The Counterfeiters'

There are a number of excellent reasons why Austrian writer-director
Stefan Ruzowitzky's "The Counterfeiters deserved its Oscar win for best
foreign language film of 2007.

The main prize-worthy aspect of Ruzowitzky's screenplay is that it takes
a look at the genocidal slaughter of European Jews by the Nazis from a
perspective seldom seen in concentration camp films: It's viewed through
the eyes of prisoners granted the privilege of staying alive in exchange
for their collaboration with their captors.

It's in this manner that the filmmaker offers a fascinating and frequently
heart-rending study of the moral plight of some inmates, the "survivor's
guilt that wracked their collective conscience, and how the death camp
experience could bring out the worst aspects of their nature.

The film also reveals an intriguing, little-known chapter from that
terrible time, telling the true story of Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl
Markovics), a master counterfeiter moving smoothly through an underworld
of thieves and easy women in 1936 Berlin, until he gets too overconfident
and careless one night and is arrested by Inspector Friedrich Herzog
(Devid Striesow). Sorowitsch is sent to Mauthausen, and he quickly learns
it's no ordinary prison inmates are being systematically killed.

Sorowitsch uses his artistic skills to stay alive, becoming the house
artist for the SS, until he's transferred to Sachenhausen, where he's
greeted by his old "friend Herzog, who now wears the uniform of a military
commandant. He immediately puts Sorowitsch to work on what would become
the biggest counterfeiting operation in history, designed to destroy the
economies of Great Britain and the United States. (More than 130 million
pounds sterling were printed, but the war ended before the intended damage
could be done.)

For their valuable work, Sorowitsch and the other prisoners involved in
the project are allowed to live and work in clean barracks and workshops,
sleep on soft mattresses, eat good food and listen to constant, soothing,
light operetta music, safely separated from the horrors befalling the rest
of the camp's population.

Although Sorowitsch closes his eyes to what's happening, he and his
co-workers can't ignore the occasional cries of agony and stark fear, the
gunshots signaling spur-of-the-moment executions on the other side of the
wall that separates the counterfeiters from the rest of the camp. One of
the most chilling moments comes when the group is given good, clean suits
to wear, only to the discover the sewn-in name tags of Jews that have been
gassed.

Ruzowitzky manages to brilliantly convey the magnitude of the atrocities
that are occurring all around the "privileged prisoners without showing
too much of them to the viewer, while his documentary style of camera work
heightens the disturbing realism of the piece even more.

Add to all of that an understated yet achingly sympathetic performance
from Markovics, and "The Counterfeiters is an ingenious and affecting new
take on the terrible truth of the Holocaust, richly deserving of its
Academy gold.

(source: The Oklahoman)





ISRAEL/POLAND:

Peres to Poland on anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto revolt


President Shimon Peres leaves for Poland today on a four-day state visit
that will focus on the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

While in Warsaw, he is scheduled to visit with Irena Sendler, a former
nurse and social welfare department employee, who during World War II
helped save the lives of some 2,500 Jewish children.

The daughter of a doctor whose patients were mainly poor Jews, Sendler
witnessed even greater deprivation in Warsaw's large Jewish community
following the Nazi invasion of Poland. After the establishment of the
Warsaw Ghetto, Sendler received a special permit that allowed her access
to the ghetto at all times so that she could help combat contagious
diseases.

This enabled her to provide starving Jews with food, money and clothing.
But the true purpose of her frequent visits was to smuggle as many Jewish
children as possible out of the ghetto and place them with non-Jewish
families.

She recruited other social workers to provide false identities for these
children. Sendler devised a code with the children's real names and other
details, and stored the information in glass jars, which she then buried
in her garden.

In 1965, Yad Vashem named her Righteous among the Nations, and in 1991,
she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

Other Righteous among the Nations are expected to attend Tuesday's
ceremony honoring the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. The event is scheduled to
take place in a square dominated by the famous monument by Warsaw-born
sculptor Natan Rapoport, a replica of which stands in Yad Vashem's Warsaw
Ghetto Plaza.

Also attending will be Holocaust survivors and IDF officers. Peres and
Polish President Lech Kaczynski will address the gathering. Kaczynski has
frequently denounced anti-Semitism and is quite familiar with Jewish
heroism in Poland.

Among the Holocaust survivors accompanying Peres to Poland are three who
were among the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto - Simcha Rotem, Pnina
Greenspan and Luba Gevissar - all in their eighties.

Rotem is the most famous, having fought not only in the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising in April, 1943, but also in the Polish Warsaw Uprising in August
1944. His Aryan looks and his accentless Polish made the teenage Rotem,
then known as Szymon Ratheiser, a natural courier. When it became obvious
that the uprising was a lost cause, he was sent to the Aryan side to meet
with Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was deputy to Mordechai Anielewicz.

Together they tried to work out an escape route for the remaining
fighters. But the Nazis discovered the route and Zuckerman and Rotem
remained trapped on the Aryan side. But Rotem was determined to go back
into the ghetto, and after several futile attempts finally succeeded in
working his way through the sewers.

He found Zivia Lubetkin, one of the leaders of the uprising and a group of
approximately 80 fighters. He retraced his steps and led them out of the
ghetto, via the sewers and into the forests beyond the city.

After the war he was engaged in Aliya Bet operations that entailed
smuggling Jewish refugees past the British authorities into pre-state
Palestine. He was also a member of the Avengers, an execution squad made
up of members of wartime Jewish resistance organizations who doggedly
tracked down Nazi war criminals and meted out their own kind of justice.

Peres is scheduled to hold other meetings with Kaczynski, as well as with
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whom he met last week during the
latter's official visit to Israel.

Before the ceremony, Peres will visit the Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis
assembled Jews and others designated for death for transportation to
Treblinka.

Following the memorial ceremony, Peres is scheduled to meet with 160
Holocaust survivors, both from the Warsaw Ghetto and from the Sobibor
death camp. Some quarter of a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered
in Sobibor, the second death camp to begin operating.

John Demjanjuk, who was extradited from the United States in 1986 to stand
trial in Israel for war crimes, was identified by Holocaust survivors as a
notoriously cruel guard at both Treblinka and Sobibor.

On Wednesday, Peres is due to address 1,000 students at Warsaw University,
and on Thursday, prior to returning to Israel for Pessah, he is scheduled
to address the Polish Parliament.

(source: The Jerusalem Post)