April 30





USA:----BOOK REVIEW

A doctor's tale

In '1940,' Jay Neugeboren examines the roots of Hitler's hatred of Jews
with a story about the family physician, who was Jewish.

Reviewed by Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer



Any attempt to incorporate Adolf Hitler into a work of fiction is
inherently perilous. The historical, political and moral stakes simply are
too high to admit even the small authorial misstep.

In "1940" -- his first novel in 20 years -- Jay Neugeboren traverses the
Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made
him one of our most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful
nonfiction. This new book is, at once, a beautifully realized work of
imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered
novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively readable story.

Neugeboren builds his narrative around an actual historical figure from
the periphery of Hitler's life -- Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor who was
the Hitler family physician when the future dictator was growing up in the
Austrian city of Linz. Bloch not only treated the young Adolf for a
variety of boyhood ailments but also cared for his beloved mother, Klara,
when she fell ill with breast cancer. Her last days were intensely
painful, but Bloch apparently treated her with great care, providing daily
pain medication and accepting little or no payment from the Hitler family,
which had fallen on hard times.

After Klara's death, Adolf expressed his eternal gratitude to Bloch, first
in person, then in hand-drawn cards sent from Vienna, where he failed as
an art student. After the Anschluss, when Hitler made a triumphant return
to Linz, he reportedly inquired about Bloch's welfare and declared him,
"an Edeljude-- a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no
Jewish question." When the rest of the city's Jewish population was driven
from their homes, Bloch remained under Gestapo protection, and though he
no longer was allowed to treat gentile patients, he received the same food
and clothing ration cards as other Germans.

Ultimately, his departure to the U.S. was personally approved by Hitler,
and Bloch -- unlike other Jewish refugees -- was allowed to sell his house
for a large sum and to take the money with him into ex- ile.

He was 68 when he settled in the Bronx in 1940, and he lived there until
his death five years later. In 1941 and 1943, Bloch was interviewed by the
Office of Strategic Services for material incorporated into a
psychological profile of Hitler. The doctor also wrote a controversially
"positive" memoir of the young Hitler for Collier's Weekly, one in which
he described him as quiet and well-mannered -- if a little melancholy --
and extraordinarily devoted to his mother.

Fact-based fiction

In "1940," Bloch speaks in the first-person through journal entries, many
of those dealing with Hitler borrowed verbatim by Neugeboren from the OSS
interviews. The story's other protagonist is Elisabeth Rofman, a skilled
medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins whose father lives near Bloch in the
Bronx and whose story is told in the third person. When Elisabeth returns
home to visit her father and cook him a Shabbos dinner, he is missing.
Bloch is soon involved in the hunt for the missing man, as is Rofman's
ex-husband, a wealthy and unctuously observant physician, whose
ostentatious religiosity contrasts with Bloch's assimilated German Judaism
and Elisabeth's skeptical irreverence.

Boiling up between Rofman and her ex-husband is the novel's other major
subplot -- what to do about their troubled son Daniel, who is confined to
a Maryland "home" (read: mental hospital). The young man has begun to
manifest what his doctors call inappropriate sexual aggressiveness. As a
consequence, they wish to castrate him, and his father already has
consented. Elisabeth refuses to give permission, and when Daniel escapes
from the hospital, helps him find refuge with Bloch.

Skilled physician that the refugee is, he finds the young man troubled and
eccentric, but hardly the schizophrenic his American doctors have
diagnosed. Their desire to castrate him over an ambiguous sexual incident
is a sobering reminder that eugenically motivated surgeries were as
popular in the United States in that era as they were in Nazi Germany. The
Germans simply were better at mobilizing state power to work their evil.
In any event, the threat hanging over Daniel prods Bloch into sobering
reflections on the ethics of medical collaboration with the state.

Neugeboren is marvelous at capturing the interplay between Rofman and her
ex-husband, as well as between Bloch and Daniel. So too he gently evokes
the affection that grows between Elisabeth and the much older refugee
doctor. There's also a marvelous evocation of that rich melancholy that
settled over the lives of the Central European, particularly German,
Jewish exiles who fled Europe for the United States at the onset of World
War II. Several times Neugeboren has Elisabeth, who speaks German, express
her sympathy to Bloch over the loss of his beloved language in daily life.
For his part, he remains stunned that his people -- so steeped in German
culture -- have been rejected by that country's government.

Jews and Germans

Bloch, who was related to Franz Kafka, writes that Kafka "made the finer
point: that the more Jews entered fully into German society -- the more we
resembled them -- the more did they resent us. In specific, what Kafka,
who, had he lived, would be more than a decade younger than I, wrote of
our commonalities was this -- that we were, each of our peoples,
ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others -- in his words:
pariahs to the world.

"Kafka wrote this many years before Hitler came to power, when, as Kafka
noted, other nations feared, admired, envied and ridiculed Germans much as
they feared, admired, envied and ridiculed Jews, while it was only we Jews
who actually seemed to love the Germans."

Both peoples, Bloch muses, "share a marked and common respect for the
printed word -- we are The People of the Book, they The People of Poetry
and Thought."

At one point, Bloch even wonders if it might be worth writing Hitler to
remind him of their former connection -- it might prompt him to recall how
vital the Jewish contribution to German culture had been and could be.
History, however, intervenes to shatter that illusion.

Neugeboren's Bloch also reacts forcefully against a notion that some
psychoanalysts (and historians under their influence) have advanced --
namely, that the origins of Hitler's murderous anti-Semitism lay in his
resentment against the Jewish doctor who had failed to save the mother he
loved above all other men and women. It's a reductionist notion that
simply ignores history's evidence. If Hitler's hatred of Jews originated
in that bit of personal history, how does one explain the equally
murderous bigotry of, say, Goebbels or Himmler?

Part of the power of this intelligently and finely wrought novel is that
such thoughts and questions arise unforced from the story, as though from
life itself.


1940
A Novel

Jay Neugeboren

Two Dollar Radio: 274 pp., $15 paper

(source: Los Angeles Times)





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


From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit


The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to
the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is
one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply
"miraculous."

It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of
Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed
in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish
prisoners who sneaked the rest of it - four carefully chosen panels - into
the concentration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the
four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who
went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a
hunch by the rabbis 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.

This Torah, more than most, "is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,"
said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. "As one who has
gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the
Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival."

On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust
Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central
Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter's
Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor,
the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial
is "the most important service I attend every year."

The Torah from Auschwitz "is a very concrete, tactile piece of that
remembrance - of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ,
did to people who were Jewish," Pastor Derr said, "and the remembrance
itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again."

A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a
portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by
specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part
is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to
recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during
the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.

This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton
had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and
runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about
eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has
found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking
and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was
determined.

He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the
Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box
and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying
Judaism as well as killing Jews.

But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah.
Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.

As for what happened during the war, "I personally felt the last place the
Nazis would look would be in the cemetery," Rabbi Youlus said in a
telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in
late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. "So that was the
first place I looked."

With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting
for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood,
according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep.
"Nothing," the rabbi said. "I was discouraged."

He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if
the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land
records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the
original one.

Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the
spot where the gneeza - a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or
other papers containing God's name - had been. It beeped as he passed a
house that had been built after World War II.

He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he
discovered the Torah was incomplete. "It was missing four panels," he
said.
"The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll thats
missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story
themselves."

They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the
area "asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters."

"I said I would pay top dollar," Rabbi Youlus said. "The response came the
next day from a priest. He said, 'I know exactly what you're looking for,
four panels of a Torah. I couldn't believe it."

He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How
much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M.
Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at
No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5
billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the
Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the
foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)

The priest "told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different
people," Rabbi Youlus said. "I believe they were folded and hidden." One
of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that,
when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another
contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.

The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He
told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave
them to him before they were put to death.

"He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper," Rabbi Youlus
said. "As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one
with the rest of the Torah scroll." (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has
since died.)

Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah's lettering needed repair,
work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven
letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes
"life" in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before
the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.

Rabbi Youlus called it "a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn't been used
in 65 years." The plan is to make it available every other year to the
March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges
for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to
march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.

"This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who
laughs last, laughs best," Rabbi Youlus said. "The Nazis really thought
they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are
taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and
using it in a synagogue. And we'll take it to Auschwitz. You can't beat
that."

(source: New York Times)





GERMANY:


Holocaust Archives Open in Germany


The German town of Bad Arolsen officially opened the International Search
Service, known as the Holocaust files, on Wednesday to world scientists
and historians with interest in studying the documentation of those
victimized by the Nazi regime.

According to the German Foreign Ministry, these archives are the largest
in the world, with 50 million files and other documents for some 17.5
million people victimized by the Third Reich.

Great Britain began compiling the objects and information in 1943 and
three years later handed it over to the Red Cross which assisted families
in locating information about victims and only survivors or relatives of
the dead were permitted to view the papers.

The opening ceremony was attended by members of the International Red
Cross, representatives of the German Ministries of Interior and Foreign
Affairs, as well as researchers from Jewish institutions.

In November the government ordered the archives opened and in February Bad
Arolsen gave some belongings to relatives of eight Dutch victims of the
Third Reich.

Today's official opening put an end to a ten-year long and angry
controversy about keeping the slave labor and concentration camp files
confidential.

(source: Prensa Latina)


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



Doctor Heads List of Wanted Nazis


Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen
concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched
SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a
foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The
young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut
him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second,
Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so
that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish
political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was
included in an Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The
Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the
most horrible."

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany
mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen, and today he is the
most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal on a list of hundreds who the
Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates are still free.

Heim would be 93 today and "we have good reason to believe he is still
alive," said Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi hunter.
He spoke in a telephone interview from Jerusalem ahead of the center's
plans to release a most-wanted list Wednesday, and to open a media
campaign in South America this summer highlighting the $485,000 reward for
Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria.

According to an advance copy of the list obtained by the AP, the most
wanted, after Heim, are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the
U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps;
Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings
of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian
police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in
deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren
Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of
a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by
a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of
Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of
Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have
come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and
Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden
state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of
murder in 1979.

Thousands of German war criminals were prosecuted in West Germany after
World War II. In the 1970s Western democracies began a hunt in earnest for
Eastern European collaborators who had fled West claiming to be refugees
from communism, and the end of the Cold War gave access to a trove of
communist files in the 1990s.

"All of a sudden there was pressure on countries like Latvia and Estonia
to put these people on trial," Zuroff said. "So two times in the past 30
years we've been given a tremendous infusion of new energy and new
possibilities."

The Wiesenthal Center's previous annual survey counted 1,019
investigations under way worldwide. The number is lower this year and
inexact because not all countries responded, but new investigations were
up from 63 to 202, Zuroff said.

Still, a lack of political will in many countries, and what Zuroff called
the "misplaced-sympathy syndrome" reluctance to pursue aging suspects
has meant that few people have been brought to trial and convicted.

Lotter, the witness to Heim's atrocity, was in Mauthausen because he
fought with the communists in the Spanish Civil War. His statement from
the 1950 arrest warrant was viewed by the AP at the National Archives in
College Park, Md.

Now that the necessary evidence is in place, numerous witness statements
have been taken and Heim has been indicted, all that's left is to find
him.

Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi
party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by
Germany.

He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a
concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and
November 1941.

While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS
pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various
solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the
fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in
1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and
commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.

Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for
Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of
Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP.
Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he
was listed as having a different SS assignment.

This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that
through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the
(concentration camp) was concealed."

There is no indication who might have been responsible.

The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime
and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to
the U.S. National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such that
staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these
don't include the file requested by the AP.

Heim was relatively well-known, however, having been a national hockey
player in Austria before the war, and there were plenty of witnesses from
his time at Mauthausen.

Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities
in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians,
in a Dec. 21, 1950 letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace
him.

What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt
comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it
in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase
documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of
Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic also under his own name,
Heister said.

In 1961 German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but
when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed
him he apparently had been tipped off.

Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments
until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.

Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his
estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but
whose current whereabouts are unknown.

In Frankfurt, Heim's lawyer said he still officially represents the
fugitive, but has not heard from him for 20 years and has "no clue" to his
whereabouts.

Asked in a telephone interview if Heim was dead, Fritz Steinacker said
only: "I don't know."

Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his
Baden-Baden villa.

"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my
father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation,
and I can't enter into that."

--

Search Goes On For War Criminals

More than 60 years since the end of World War II, a notorious SS doctor
remains on the loose and is the most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal.
One researcher said Dr. Aribert Heim, could still be alive today and
would be 93. According to a witness, Heim once anesthetized a
Jewish patient before cutting off his head and boiling it.

(source: Associated Press)


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



Ten Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals: Time Has Not Diminished Their Crimes

It's been nearly 63 years since the end of World War II, but time has not
dimmed the crimes of 10 men wanted for their roles in committing
atrocities and murder against innocents in the name of Nazi domination.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center released the names of the 10 on Wednesday:

1. Alois Brunner: Believed to be living in Syria, he was an operative of
Adolf Eichmann and responsible for the deportation of Jews from Austria
(47,000), Greece (44,000), France (23,500) and Slovakia (14,000) to death
Nazi death camps. Brunner was convicted in absentia by France, but Syria
has refused to cooperate with the investigation of his whereabouts.

2. Aribert Heim: Investigators don't have many leads of his whereabouts,
but there is strong evidence that he is still alive. Heim was a doctor in
the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen death camps. He is charged
with performing horrific experiments on camp inmates, including an
experiment at Mauthausen that involved testing the effectiveness of
various chemicals and drugs for lethal injections. Heim vanished in 1962.

3. Ivan Demjanjuk: Convicted in 1988 by an Israeli court of being "Ivan
the Terrible," the notorious SS guard who operated the gas chambers at the
Treblinka death camp, a conviction that later was overturned by Israel's
Supreme Court on grounds of reasonable doubt. Demjanjuk and his wife
emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary in 1958. His citizenship was revoked in
1981 and he was later deported to Israel for trial. His citizen ship was
ordered restored in 1998, but the Justice Department filed an appeal that
was upheld. Demjanjuk then was tried and convicted on charges he committed
mass murder while serving as a guard in the Sobibor and Majdanek death
camps in Poland. He was ordered deported to Ukraine in 2005, but remains
in the U.S. on appeals.

4. Milivoj Asner: Living in Austria, Asner served as police chief of
Slovonska Ponega, Poland. Prosecutors say Asner played an active role in
the persecution, deportation and murder of hundreds of Serbs, Jews and
gypsies. Austria has refused to extradite him to Israel or Croatia for
trial.

5. Sandor Kepiro: Living in Hungary, Kepiro served as a Hungarian
policeman and is accused of the mass murder of 1,200 civilians in Novi
Sad, Serbia. Originally convicted in absentia in 1946, he went unpunished
and was allowed to live out his life, though Hungarian authorities have
recently opened a new investigation into his crimes.

6. Mikhail Gorshkow: Believed living in Estonia after being denaturalized
and deported from the U.S., Gorshkow participated in the murder of Jews in
Belarus.

7. Erna Wallisch: Living in Austria, Wallisch served as a guard at the
Madjanek death camp and has admitted his role in the mass murder of
inmates. Austria refuses to prosecute due to its statute of limitations
and will not extradite him to Poland for investigation and trial.

8. Soeren Kam: Living in Germany, Kam participated in the murder of
anti-Nazi Danish newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen. Kam also stole
the citizen registry of the Danish Jewish community and orchestrated the
roundup and deportation of Jews to death camps, where dozens were
murdered. Kam was indicted in Denmark for his crimes, but a German court
refused to extradite him. At the request of the Wiesenthal Center, Dutch
authorities have reopened the case.

9. Karoly (Charles) Zentai: Living in Australia, Zentai participated in
manhunts, persecution, deportation and murder of Jews in Budapest.
Discovered living in Australia in 2004, Zentai is appealing his
extradition to Hungary.

10a. Algimantas Dailide: Living in Germany, Dailide arrested Jews who were
then murdered by Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators. He emigrated to the
U.S., was deported back to Germany, stood trial and was convicted in
absentia by Lithuania, which has refused to implement his sentence.

10b. Harry Mannil: Living in Venezuela, Mannil arrested Jews and
Communists who then were executed by Nazis and Estonian collaborators.

[Source: Simon Wiesenthal Center]

(source: Fox News)







FRANCE:


Paris Under the Nazis: Happy Days?

The photographs from the early 1940s show Paris as sunny, airy, bursting
with color. Its inhabitants appear carefree, content and refreshingly
unaware of their proclivity for looking trs chic. It's all very much at
odds with the prevailing image of the French capital suffering and
smoldering under the yoke of its Nazi occupiers. Indeed, that very
dissonance has made the current photo exhibit "Parisians Under the
Occupation" one of the city's most controversial cultural events of late.
Was life in Nazi-controlled Paris really as idyllic as these pictures
suggest?

The exhibit at the City of Paris' Historic Library has drawn what
organizers say is an unexpectedly strong turnout of 11,000 visitors since
it opened on March 20. But in recent days the exhibit's 250 photographs
have become the subject of a heated debate over how history ought to be
presented. Detractors claim the curators neglected to inform spectators
that the pictures were outright Nazi propaganda, commissioned and shot to
show a German public just how happily the French lived under Occupation.
That contextual omission, critics contend, not only allows the photos to
broadcast a deceptive view of Nazi rule more than 60 years after they were
shot; it also insults the memory of Holocaust victims from the
traditionally Jewish right-bank neighborhood within the Marais, a stone's
throw away from the exhibit.

"It's total manipulation, and it made me ill," protested Christophe
Girard, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris in charge of cultural issues,
in the weekly Journal du Dimanche Sunday. He has called for the show to be
canceled before its planned end of July 1.

But pulling the plug on the show isn't going to happen, Paris Mayor
Bertrand Delano said Monday night. Delano regretted that the exhibition
hadn't made more explicit the great suffering, privation, and death that
amounted to the larger context for "people who also weren't living too
badly" in the photos. But he said canceling the show would constitute
"adding a fault to errors," and ordered its continuation.

By the time Delano made that call, the curators had moved to provide that
context. Visitors to the Historic Library are now informed in several
languages that the pictures were shot by Andr Zucca, a Frenchman hired by
the German magazine Signal to capture scenes of Paris flourishing under
Nazi rule. Zucca's bosses' gave him extremely rare and valuable rolls of
Agfacolor film to shoot his busy shoppers, caf-lounging lovers, parks
filled with parents and playing children, and ultra-chic Parisiennes
sporting the last word in fashionably enormous eyewear.

Despite the photographs' propagandistic intent, curators note that their
esthetic quality not to mention their rarity as color prints from that
period make the case for their display. Indeed, even Girard noted that
"had it been clearly explained to the public that these were propaganda
photos on display, the exhibit could have been very interesting." While
most photos clearly present an idealized and flattering picture of
occupied Paris, other shots featuring Nazi flags, German installations,
and huge numbers of uniformed soldiers mingling on familiar Parisian
streets leave little doubt as to the actual context.

"What shocked a lot of people were the advertising posters and outdoor
displays of the photos that seemed to suggest, 'This is how it really was;
it wasn't so bad,'" says a woman who has seen the exhibit and identifies
herself as Anne, a long-time resident of the traditionally Jewish rue des
Rosiers just down the street from the Historical Library. "Almost everyone
here lost family in the Shoah, and knows that wasn't how it was. In fact,
I don't think anyone who lived in or knows people who lived in Paris
during the Occupation thinks those photos show how it was." Still, she
emphatically agrees with those who say that the curators should have been
more explicit in laying out the darker context of death, deportation and
repression: "That's the one thing people can never be reminded of too
often."

(source: TIME Magazine)