April 27



Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery


Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews
bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and
scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.

Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to
outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended
Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off
the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on,
dumbfounded.

Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an
unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S.,
he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed
powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to
concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in
Budapest's ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a
war criminal.

Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the
32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove
off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.

And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the
Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named
after him and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have
wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did
he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?

Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of
Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell
to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public which
might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected,
directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence
agency known as "the Pond," operating as World War II was drawing to a
close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western
intentions in eastern Europe.

Speculation that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage has been rife since
the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the 1990s that he had been
recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic
Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release
a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn
in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from
its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the
National Archives in College Park, Md.

In February, the Swedish government posted an online database of 1,000
documents and testimonies related to Wallenberg's disappearance. In a few
months, independent investigators plan to launch a Web site with their
nearly 20-year research into Russian archives and prison records. Russia
is building a Museum of Tolerance that will feature once-classified
documents on Wallenberg. And the CIA last year relaxed its guidelines to
revealdetails of its sources and intelligence-gathering methods in the
case.

Despite dozens of books and hundreds of documents on Wallenberg, much
remains hidden. The Kremlin has failed to find or deliver dozens of files,
Sweden has declined to open all its books, and The Associated Press has
learned as many as 100,000 pages of declassified OSS documents await
processing at the National Archives.

The Russians say Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but never produced a
proper death certificate or his remains.

But independent research suggests he may have lived many years - perhaps
until the late 1980s. If true, he likely was held in isolation, stripped
of his identity, known only by a number or a false name and moving like a
phantom among Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions.

In 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head
of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified
archives about Wallenberg.

"I think I found all the existing documents," Nikonov e-mailed The
Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a
spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Nikonov's conclusion: "Shot in 1947."

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that
lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: "There is no fully reliable proof of what
happened to Raoul Wallenberg," and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, "Wallenberg died, or most likely was
killed, on July 17, 1947." It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the
"Smersh" counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and
cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case "resolved."

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging,
analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to
release missing files.

___

Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. With the knowledge of his
government, his task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation
was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War
Refugee Board, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a belated
attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe's Jews.

In the previous two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been shipped to
Auschwitz for extermination. They were among the last of six million Jews
slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Of the 230,000 who remained in the Hungarian capital in mid-1944, 100,000
survived the war.

After the Red Army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian
military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of
Jewish property. Two days later he returned under Russian escort to
collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again.

And what did his country or his influential cousins do about it?

Looking back a half century later, the Swedish government acknowledged
that its own passive response to the detention of one of its diplomats was
astounding, and that it had missed several chances to win his freedom.

"The worst mistakes were done in the first two years," said Hans
Magnusson, the Swedish co-chairman of the 10-year investigation with the
Russians. Sweden felt intimidated by the mighty Soviets and unwilling to
challenge them, he said.

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting
a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that
Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier at age
34.

As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm
periodically raised the issue with Moscow but without results, said
Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.

Sweden could have pushed harder, he said, "but I doubt it would have
achieved more."

"It is inconceivable," says Wallenberg's half-sister, Nina Lagergren.
"Here is a man sent out by the Swedish government to risk his life. He
saved thousands of people and he was left to rot."

___

Some time around 1994, Susan Mesinai, who had by then been researching the
Wallenberg case for five years, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey,
Wallenberg's cousin, at her home in Connecticut. After lunch, Kelsey
caught up with Mesinai as she got into the car and told her: "Raoul was
working for the highest levels of government."

"So I said to her, 'How high? Do you mean the president?' And she nodded
her head," Mesinai said, disclosing to AP a conversation she had kept
confidential for 14 years.

Kelsey's father, Col. William Colvin, had been the U.S. military attache
in the Swedish capital around the time of World War I. Wallenberg spent
vacations in the 1930s with the Colvin family while he earned a degree in
architecture at the University of Michigan. Kelsey, who was a year younger
than her cousin, died in 1996.

Rather than clarify anything, Kelsey's cryptic remark only deepened the
fog.

Wallenberg's rescue mission inevitably placed him in a vortex of intrigue
and espionage involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground,
communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish
intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann
and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.

Whether or not he himself was passing on intelligence, Russia had plenty
of reason to suspect him of spying, either for the Allies or Germany or
both.

"Wallenberg had ties to all the major actors in Hungary," says Susanne
Berger, a German researcher who collaborated with the Swedish-Russian
research project.

The Stockholm chief of the War Refugee Board, Iver C. Olsen, was also a
key member of the 35-man OSS station in the Swedish capital, and it was he
who recruited Wallenberg, who in turn kept the U.S. connection secret by
sending his communications through Swedish diplomatic channels.

Olsen's OSS personnel file unpublished until the AP viewed it at the
National Archives revealed that the American was cited for using his
position at the War Refugee Board "in gathering important information for
the OSS and for the State Department."

In 1955 Olsen denied to the CIA that Wallenberg ever spied for the OSS,
and Mesinai and Berger offer a different likelihood: that the Swede was a
source for the Pond, which was a rival to the OSS known only to Roosevelt
and a few insiders in the War and State Departments.

A small clandestine intelligence-gathering operation, the Pond relied on
contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It
worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, "which had
access to 'enemy' territory as well as a far-flung corporation
intelligence apparatus in its own right," said former CIA analyst Mark
Stout who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

So far, no evidence has emerged that Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and
Stout said in an interview he had not seen Wallenberg mentioned in any
papers he has reviewed.

But their circles of contacts intersected at several points, including
members of the Hungarian resistance and possibly the Philips connection.

"The Pond was centered around President Roosevelt's office and rumors of a
special mission, intelligence or otherwise, for Raoul Wallenberg have
persisted through the years," said Berger, who suspects the Soviets knew
about the agency.

It may have been just one more reason for Stalin to order his arrest, she
said. Regardless of whether Wallenberg was involved, "the Pond's
activities clearly would have served to enhance Soviet paranoia about
Allied activities and aims in Hungary."

Hungarian historian Laszlo Ritter, of the Institute of History of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said the Philips company also was providing
cover for Britain's MI6 intelligence service. One of its crucial agents in
the Balkans was Lolle Smit, who was knighted after the war by both Britain
and his native Holland.

One month before Wallenberg arrived, Smit fled Budapest for Romania, from
where he continued to control his network, Ritter said, but he left his
family behind.

Smit's daughter, Berber Smit, worked with Wallenberg in his rescue efforts
and "had a romance with him," according to her son, Alan Hogg.

Ritter said Hungarian war files show no direct tie between Wallenberg and
Smit, or between the diplomat and British intelligence. At the same time,
MI6 used the Swedish legation at least twice to smuggle out information,
and helped give false papers to Jews and the anti-fascist resistance, he
said.

When the OSS wanted to dispatch a radio to the Hungarian underground
leader Geza Soos, it sent the transmitter with a Swedish intelligence
officer and told him Wallenberg would know how to contact Soos.

Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust.
Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of
a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing
the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts
between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him
excluded a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold
War.

___

In December 1993, investigator Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago
interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired orderly at Moscow's Vladimir Prison
since 1946. She remembered a foreigner who was kept in solitary
confinement on the third floor of Korpus 2, a building used both as a
hospital and isolation ward.

Though it was decades earlier, the prisoner stood out in Larina's memory.
He spoke Russian with an accent and "complained about everything," she
said.

He repeatedly griped that the soup was cold by the time Larina delivered
it. Prison authorities ordered her to serve him first.

"This is very unusual," Makinen said in an interview. Normally, such
complaints would condemn an inmate to a punishment cell. "The fact that he
wasn't means he was a very special prisoner."

When shown a gallery of photographs, Larina immediately picked out
Wallenberg's one never published before, Makinen said.

She recalled he was in the opposite cell when another prisoner, Kirill
Osmak, died in May 1960.

That was enough for Makinen and Chicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughly
pinpoint the cell of Larina's foreigner. Creating a database of cell
occupancy from the prison's registration cards, they found two units
opposite Osmak's that were reported empty for 243 and 717 days
respectively.

Normally, cells were left vacant for a week at most, Makinen said. The
researchers concluded that those two cells likely held special prisoners,
namelessly concealed in the gulag.

Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds of accounts over the decades of
people who claimed to have seen or heard of someone who could have been
Wallenberg.

They established a pattern of sightings, even though many individual
reports were considered unreliable, uncorroborated, deliberate hoaxes or
cases of mistaken identity with other Swedish prisoners.

Some stories, like Larina's, ring particularly true.

One compelling account came in 1961. Swedish physician Nanna Svartz asked
an eminent Russian scientist about Wallenberg during a medical congress in
Moscow. Lowering his voice, the Russian told her that Wallenberg was at a
psychiatric hospital and "not in very good shape."

The Russian, Alexandr Myasnikov, later claimed he had been misunderstood,
but Svartz stood firm. His remark, she later reported, "came
spontaneously.

He went pale as soon as he said it, and appeared to understand that he had
said too much."

A few years later the Soviets sent out feelers for a possible spy swap.
Envoys indicated Moscow was ready to "compensate" Sweden if it freed Stig
Wennerstromm, a Swedish air force officer who had spied for the Kremlin
for 15 years.

Though Wallenberg's name was never mentioned, he was considered the only
prize worth exchanging for such a high-value spy. The intermediary was
Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer who engineered many Cold War
prisoner exchanges. But years of halfhearted negotiation ended in no deal.

___

Nina Lagergren keeps a small wooden box in the cellar of her comfortable
Stockholm home. The Russians gave it to her in 1989 when she visited
Moscow.

It contains her half-brother's diplomatic passport, a stack of currency, a
Swedish license for the pistol he bought but never used, and two telephone
diaries. Among the entries are Eichmann and Berber Smit, the daughter of
the Dutch spy.

They also gave the family a copy of Wallenberg's "death certificate,"
handwritten and unstamped.

"They anticipated that I would get very moved and understand there was no
more hope," Lagergren said.

Instead it reinforced her belief that Wallenberg had lived beyond 1947 and
perhaps was even then alive. "This proved we could go on," she said. Today
he would be 95, and she concedes he must be dead.

If indeed Wallenberg's death in 1947 was a lie, the question remains: Why
was he never freed?

The 2001 Swedish report speculated that the longer he was held, the harder
it was for the Soviets to release him. Still, "it would have been
exceptional to order the execution of a diplomat from a neutral country.
It might have appeared simpler to keep him in isolation," the report said.

The search continues.

Berger, the independent researcher, has submitted a new, detailed request
to Moscow to release files on prisoners who shared cells with the missing
diplomat and on other foreigners in the gulag; Mesinai hopes to study
psychiatric facilities where Wallenberg may have been confined; Ritter,
the Hungarian researcher, is tracing the British spy network of Lolle
Smit; and historians are awaiting the release of the Pond papers.

Whatever any of this reveals, a 1979 State Department memo puts these
questions into perspective: "Whether or not Wallenberg was involved in
espionage during World War II is a moot point at this stage in history.
His obvious humanitarian acts certainly outweigh any conceivable 'spy'
mission he may have been on."

(source: Associated Press)




ISRAEL:

Holocaust refugee ship captain dies


The man who gained legendary status as commander of the ship Exodus,
attempting to bring thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees to the holy
land after the Second World War, has died.

Yossi Harel, whose journey at the helm of a ship carrying 4,500 frail
survivors from Germany to then-British Mandate Palestine was immortalised
in the film Exodus, where he was portrayed by Paul Newman, died of a heart
attack at the age of 90.

"He is one of the last people of that generation that did so much," said
his biographer and friend, the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk.

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Mr Harel also helped found the militia that was the forerunner of the
modern Israeli army and later became a senior intelligence officer. But it
was the task of rescuing Holocaust survivors and circumventing British
immigration controls on Palestine which was his passion, Mr Kaniuk said.

"He was put to this job because he believed he could do it with care," he
said. "He really loved these people. They were like sardines on that ship,
they had to wait six hours to go to the toilet, and he really took care of
them. I loved this man. He was an officer and a gentleman. He was a very
brave guy and he did a lot of dangerous things, but he was also very
humane."

Mr Harel, who was born in Jerusalem, was the commander of four of the
largest illegal immigration ships that would eventually bring 24,000 Jews
from Europe to Palestine, before the establishment of the State of Israel
in 1948.

But it is the story of the Exodus which is most famous. In 1947, the
modified transport ship tried to bring 4,500 Jews who had not been granted
immigration visas to Palestine. The Royal Navy seized the ship on its
arrival in port and, after a battle at sea that killed three, the ship was
turned back to Europe. The story has become symbolic for the Jewish
struggle for a national homeland, and earned Mr Harel the reputation of a
modern-day Moses. Last year, he was awarded the Exodus prize - named for
his legendary ship - from the Italian government for his contributions to
peace and humanitarianism.

Despite his reputation, however, Mr Harel was a modest man who rarely
spoke of his efforts to confound British limits on immigration.

His daughter, Sharon, told the Israeli news website YNet that her father
was one of "a generation of giants," but that he spoke little of his
military career. He spent his later years collecting Russian art and
pursuing business ventures, she said.

Mr Harel is to be buried on the kibbutz Sdot Yam tomorrow. In a rare
interview with the Israeli newspaper Hadashot 20 years ago, Mr Harel said:
"History has proven that you cannot defeat refugees. It starts now with
one boat. After that, dozens more will come."

(source: The Telegraph)




ALBANIA:

During Holocaust, Albanians treated Jews like guests

BY BRYNN MANDEL | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN Related links
View slide show.

Somebody saved Anna Kohen's family. When Nazis marched into Albania in
1943, a few years before she was born, Kohen's parents fled the costal
city of Vlora for a village in the mountains. Six decades later, Kohen
still wonders about the Muslim family that absorbed her own Jewish one.

"I want to go and find the ones that saved my parents," she said recently
from her Manhattan dental practice, where a file holds two clues she
unearthed last year: the rescuers' first and last names. "I always knew
that they saved us. I never forgot."

Obscured in the history of Nazi conquest and European complicity is the
story of Albania, a country on the Balkan Peninsula that shielded every
Jew within its borders and saved as many as 1,800 others. Many of these
rescue stories have been lost to the era's confounding flux of people, to
time and to the humility of the samaritans themselves.

This month, the Federation, Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut
began a search for those anonymous heroes. Its goal is to find some of
these altruistic among Waterbury's large Albanian community, and honor
them. Odds are against them. As of 2007, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority whose responsibility includes
recognition of "Righteous Among the Nations" had honored more than 22,000
of these righteous individuals from 44 countries. Of those, an estimated
1,700 are still alive. Some have been captured in stirring black-and-white
photographs by Norman Gershman, now on exhibit at the Jewish Federation's
Southbury facility.

Despite obstacles in locating the righteous, non-Jews who helped Jews
during the Holocaust, it is possible.

A year before her 1999 death, Yad Vashem found a former school cleaning
lady from Wolcott who saved hundreds of Jews. That woman, Danuta
Venclauskas, now watches over Robert Zwang, the Jewish Federation's
executive director, from a black-and-white photo above his desk.

Until age 95, her heroism had gone unheralded and unspoken. In Lithuania,
Venclauskas' Christian family hid Jews in its home, safeguarding them from
the Nazis. Like other rescuers he's known, Zwang said it never occurred to
people like Venclauskas to share their stories of humanitarianism.

"It was a matter of fact," he said. Or, too painful. "Who was Danuta? She
used to clean the schools. She lived in this old rundown house. Nobody
knew who she was until one of the young boys she hid ... put her in to be
recognized."

Venclauskas had many counterparts in Albania. Though its Jewish population
was relatively small, more Jews lived in Albania at the war's end than did
at its beginning, a fact rare among European nations. The compassionate,
purposeful attempt to save Jews in this nation comprised mostly of Muslims
was rooted in something called besa.

Besa, a code of honor, sprouted from an Albanian interpretation of a
Muslim concept. It means to keep the promise and commingles pride, honor,
trust and hospitality.

"Besa means trust. When I trust you, I give you anything because I trust
you," Medi Coma explained from a desk at the Albanian Culture Center and
mosque in the Overlook section of Waterbury, where the 60-something
grandfather serves as president to the 4,000-member organization, one of
two in the city.

Like Jews, Albanians endured their own religious persecution and political
oppression. Today people identifying themselves as Albanian live in vast
swaths of the Balkans, a result of an Albanian border that fluctuated with
a succession of occupying forces. After Turks expanded their Ottoman
Empire to Albania, the country's people converted en mass to Islam. But
they remained fiercely devoted to their cultural roots: Despite being
outlawed for 500 years, the Albanian language survived.

In 1943, as Nazis closed in on the heavily Jewish Macedonian town of
Manastir, Coma's cousin, Shabedin Aga, led a caravan of 18 donkeys
carrying several Jewish families to safety. He brought them to his village
near the border-straddling Lake Ohrid, about 50 miles away. It's a story
Coma, of Wolcott, grew up hearing, one whose relics sat for years in his
cousin's home.

Aga, a supplier, regularly trekked across Albania, from the seaside town
of Durres to Manastir, where he delivered salt and other commodities to
Jewish shopkeepers. On one trip, the shopkeepers asked Coma's cousin to
help them flee their city, which sat precariously on a rail line
connecting Germany and Greece. Word was Nazis were pushing south. The
desperate Jews offered Aga money for passage to, and shelter in, Albanian
villages. He declined the money. Instead, he recruited Coma's father, Vebi
Coma, and a cousin to guide about 35 Jews through the mountains on
donkeys. Coma's father told him what happened when they returned a second
time to pick up more Jews.

"They were all wiped out. All the doors ... all the windows, they were
bent. There was nobody left behind," said Coma.

For years after the war, Aga saved a stack of money, thick as a phone
book, that a Jewish family left in gratitude under a pillow in his house.
Aga kept the money for the family, adamant that it was not his. "This
money is still somewhere in this town for this people, even now," said
Coma, whose cousin died 46 years ago.

Such stories do no surprise Norman Gershman. Since he started traveling to
the Balkans in 2003 to photograph Muslim families who saved Jews, his
subjects have repeatedly pointed to items left behind, asking whether
their owners would return to retrieve them. Their possessions were still
safe, the Muslims assured him.

"In Albania, (Jews) weren't just sheltered, they were treated like
guests," said Gershman, whose exhibition of black-and-white images arrived
in Southbury from the United Nations. "It's inconceivable for the
Albanians not to open their door to someone in need, even at the risk of
their own lives."

(source: The Republican American)




USA//NEW YORK:

Man arrested in vandalizing Holocaust exhibit


Enraged at a Holocaust memorial he considered insulting to Jews and
glorifying to Nazis, a Jewish man from Brentwood vandalized an exhibit at
Suffolk County Community College featuring Hitler-era anti-Semitic
propaganda, police said.

Paul Brajuha, 30, smashed the items to the ground Tuesday, then urinated
on them in protest, police said.

Brajuha was arrested yesterday on a misdemeanor charge of criminal
mischief. He told detectives he had been "getting madder and madder about
it" and "was on a mission" and "decided he was going to do something about
it," said Det. Sgt. Robert Reecks, who heads the Suffolk police hate
crimes unit.

"He's proud of his ancestry, as he's explained to our detectives," Reecks
said. "His mother is Jewish."

Authorities say they found the items - photos of both Hitler's "Mein
Kampf" and a Nazi poster caricaturing Jews - in shattered glass frames
near the exhibition building on the Brentwood campus of the two-year
school.

Brajuha, who does not attend the college where his girlfriend is a
student, left undisturbed items in the display he apparently did not
consider propaganda. The exhibit's curator said the items included an
American newspaper front page from the World War II era and photos of
Kristallnacht, a notorious attack on Jewish homes and businesses by the
Nazis in 1938.

In the aftermath of the Brentwood vandalism, curators also removed all the
remaining items. Steven Schrier, executive director of the Center on the
Holocaust, Diversity & Human Understanding at the college's Selden campus,
which has maintained the exhibit since 2005, said he hasn't decided
whether it would reopen.

Brajuha became a suspect when his fingerprints - on file from guilty pleas
for disorderly conduct and attempted robbery -were discovered on the glass
display case, which had been carefully removed, police said. Brajuha
immediately admitted to being the vandal when questioned, Reecks said.

Brajuha, of Gray Street in Brentwood, was released on bail and is to be
arraigned at a later date, police said. A woman who answered a phone
registered to Brajuha said he would not want to comment.

Wulf Kansteiner, an associate professor of history at Binghamton
University who is an expert on how the Holocaust is remembered , said he
did not know of a single instance in the West when a Holocaust memorial
was desecrated to remove Nazi items.

Kansteiner, who did not see the exhibit, said curators need to strike a
careful balance when displaying Nazi items themselves originally designed
to propagandize.

(source: Newsday)





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

USA//MINNESOTA:

Local family collecting 6 million to remember Holocaust

Jillian Curtis doesn't want her children to bring hate into the world.

So she and her sons, Jarrett, 10, and Josh, 11, are building a Holocaust
memorial their first major undertaking in their first month of
homeschooling to remember the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Jillian Curtis, 32, of Winona, and her sons, Joshua, 11, left, and
Jarrett, 10, have received nearly 500 stars in the mail, including one of
their favorites, center, depicting Schindler's List, from artist Angela
Matteson of Chicago. Curtis posted a request for stars, which each
represent a Jewish life lost during the Holocaust, on her blog a month ago
as a home-school project for the boys. The stars will be displayed as a
memorial in their garden.

The project is inspired by the movie "Paper Clips," in which students at a
Tennessee school, wanting to know what the number 6 million looks like,
try to gather 6 million paper clips.

Instead of paper clips, the Curtises are asking people to send them stars.

"We started with the Holocaust because that's the world's biggest
tragedy," Jillian said. "They need to learn acceptance and not to be
bullies or start fights. I want them to be good people when they grow
up."

Jillian, 32, posted a request for stars, representing the yellow stars
Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, on her blog,
blog-me-til-midnight.blogspot.com, a month ago.

So far, about 500 stars have arrived at their home from as far away as
Australia and China.

One, a blue card with a yellow Star of David on front, included this note:
"What a wonderful thing you are doing! I designed my star to look like the
sun in the sky because the brightness of those who died in the Holocaust
still burns in my heart."

Josh said thinking about the Holocaust makes him feel sad, and sometimes
angry, because of all the children who died for no reason.

His favorite star so far is a cloth one, which is the biggest sent yet.

"(I was) wondering where the stars would come from, what they would look
like, he said. I was hoping for a humongous one."

For now, the family keeps the stars in a popcorn tin with planets and the
words Stories in the Sky pictured on it.

This summer, Jillians husband, Robert, will help his kids build a wooden
casing in the shape of a star, either a five-pointed star or a Star of
David. Theyll put the stars inside and place the memorial in a flower
garden next to roses.

Jillian said they don't know whether they'll make it to 6 million stars.

"We'll see how far it grows," she said.

Anyone who wants to send any kind of star to the Curtises can request the
mailing address by e-mailing jillianmcurtis@... or calling (507)
429-0174.

(source: Winona Daily News)





HUNGARY:

Nazi hunter laments Hungarys efforts on Holocaust Memorial Day


64th anniversary of the day fascist forces started to imprison Hungarian
Jews in ghettos


A Nazi hunter last Wednesday criticised Hungary for failing to put a
suspected war criminal in the dock as the nation commemorated its victims
of the Holocaust.

"It is much easier to have a commemoration ceremony than put a Hungarian
who was involved in the crimes on trial," said Ephraim Zuroff, director of
the Wiesenthal Centers Jerusalem office. He is angry at Hungary for not
prosecuting Sndor Kpr, 94, who is one of the leading suspects targeted in
the Wiesenthal Centers drive to find and prosecute criminals from the
Second World War before they die.

2006 findings

The centre in 2006 found a judgement against Kpr for his role in the
massacre of over 1,000 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad, Serbia in January 1942.

Kpr, who maintains his innocence, was sentenced to ten years for the crime
in 1944, but fled to Argentina when the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross Party
gained power and freed him. A post-war court sentenced him to 14 years in
absentia in 1946. He returned to Hungary in 1996 and now lives in
Budapest.

A court last year ruled the sentence cannot be carried out and prosecutors
have dragged their feet on beginning new proceedings. "They should put him
on trial and throw him in jail. I think there is enough evidence," Zuroff
said.



Holocaust Memorial Day

The criticism came as Hungary held services on Holocaust Memorial Day, the
64th anniversary of the day fascist forces began to imprison Hungarian
Jews in ghettos. Politicians and civil leaders took part in a torch-lit
march from the District VII Dohny utca synagogue which sits at the edge
of the former ghetto to a memorial on the River Danube, where many Jews
were shot and thrown into the water.

Zuroff said that while he was happy that a commemoration was being held,
more should be done by Hungary and other regional nations. "There is no
question that there are problems with the manner in which Hungary is
facing its past, as there are with every post-communist country in Eastern
Europe," he said. "There are many examples of things that should be done
commemorations, putting killers on trial, education, acknowledging the
guilt. Some of those tasks are easier than others."

Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to death camps or killed locally
during the Second World War. Much of the butchery was carried out under
the direction of Arrow Cross Party.

(source: The Budapest Times)




AUSTRALIA:

No refuge for war criminals Font Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print
Mark Aarons | April 25, 2008
THE High Court decision this week upholding the power of state courts to
hear extradition cases under federal law pushes Hungarian Karoly (Charles)
Zentai one step closer to a historic hearing at the scene of his alleged
war crimes.

The case against Zentai implicates him in the killing of a Jewish civilian
during the Nazi occupation of Budapest in 1944 and indicates that he took
part in the systematic persecution of Jews. This reminds us yet again of
the 50,000 Australian casualties in the fight against Hitler's criminal
regime, who are among the hundreds of thousands of heroes we celebrate
every year on Anzac Day.

The allegations against Zentai underline this. They include formal
statements of witnesses who place Zentai in a Nazi-controlled Hungarian
military unit in 1944.

They also indicate that Zentai was involved in the kidnapping, beating and
torture of a young Jewish man, Peter Balazs, whose body was thrown into
the Danube, a common occurrence in the last bloody months of German rule.

This evidence was reportedly first presented to a Hungarian court in 1947
during the trial of Zentai's co-accused. Zentai had fled by then and would
soon make a new life in Australia.

The Australian's investigation of Zentai in 2005 uncovered evidence that
he had been involved in systematically rounding up, beating and torturing
Jews. The evidence included the testimony of witness Jakob Mermelstein, as
well as documents from the 1947 trial giving graphic descriptions of the
beating that Balazs suffered, allegedly at Zentai's hands, that left him
virtually unrecognisable.

Like other accused war criminals, Zentai has insisted he was far away from
the scene, claiming he left Budapest on November 7, 1944, the day before
Balazs's murder. However, the testimony of the witnesses who implicated
him in 1947 places him in Budapest at the scene of the crime on November
8, 1944.

The Hungarian Government lodged an extradition request with Australia on
March 30, 2005, but the case has been mired in highly technical legal
arguments, first in the Federal Court and finally in the High Court, which
has returned the case to the West Australian courts to determine whether
Zentai is eligible for extradition.

Zentai is 86 and has successfully postponed his case for three years by
challenging our legal framework. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly
slowly. Even if a judicial decision is made expeditiously to extradite
him, there are several avenues of appeal that could take years. So it
seems likely that Zentai will either die in the meantime or, if he is
alive when a judicial decision is made, he could appeal to the Home
Affairs Minister (who will make the final decision), claiming old age,
frailty and illness to avoid extradition.

This unsatisfactory situation results from the indifference of successive
Australian governments towards accused war criminals, beginning with
Chifley in the 1940s and taking in the Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon,
Whitlam and Fraser years.

In 1986 Bob Hawke finally acted, launching investigations that confirmed
hundreds of Nazis had made Australia home, which was widely known in the
senior echelons of our immigration, police and intelligence services.
Indeed, such knowledge went all the way up to the office of successive
prime ministers, yet nothing was done to bring to justice the mass killers
of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, who had also frequently fought directly
against Australia.

To our everlasting shame, Hawke's efforts were abandoned in 1991 by the
Keating government. Then the Howard government dead-batted many other
allegations, leaving Zentai as one the last cases involving a living
suspect. Most others have evaded justice through the passage of time. As
things stand, Australia is the last refuge for Nazi criminals as major
efforts continue in many Western countries, including Canada, Italy,
Germany and the US.

The Zentai case may be Australia's last chance to demonstrate that we,
too, have used our laws to deliver some belated justice for the victims of
the Holocaust. But this is only part of the story. The new Labor
government has other tests ahead to cast off the shame of the Keating
legacy.

It has been established that there are many monsters in Australia from
recent conflicts, yet virtually nothing has been done to investigate or
bring them to justice. The Rudd Government should devote adequate
resources to investigate the many charges against Cambodians, Afghanis,
Serbs, Croats, Chileans and Rwandans who, like Zentai, stand accused of
crimes against humanity.

Labor's next test will be the case of Dragan Vasiljkovic, the Serb
paramilitary leader whose role in the Balkans wars of the 1990s has
prompted an extradition request by the Croatian Government.

As we remember our war heroes today, we should also demand that our
Government pursue a more systematic and determined approach to accused
mass killers whose presence in Australia demeans our national pride.

(source: The Australian--Mark Aarons is the author of War Criminals
Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945)