July 23



CROATIA:

Dinko Sakic, Who Led WWII Death Camp, Dies at 86


Dinko Sakic arrived at the concentration camp known as the "Auschwitz of
the Balkans" riding a white horse, wearing a tailored black uniform with
polished black boots and carrying a whip and a submachine gun, survivors
remembered.

His brazenness continued even after Croatia went down to defeat with Nazi
Germany, its ally. He fled to Argentina, where he lived for a half century
under his real name, making no attempt to hide. In his last decade of
freedom, he gave interviews saying he was proud of what he had done and
would gladly do it again.

Mr. Sakic, the last living commander of a World War II-era concentration
camp, died Sunday at 86 in a hospital in Zagreb, the Croatian news agency
Hina reported, citing Croatia's prison system as its source. Mr. Sakic was
serving a 20-year sentence for crimes against humanity.

"He is the most notorious living Nazi war criminal not in custody," George
Spectre, then associate director of the B'nai B'rith center for public
policy, said in an interview with The New York Times in April 1998.

A year and a half later, Mr. Sakic was found guilty of killing more than
2,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies at the camp named Jasenovac. Among other
crimes, the verdict said, he ordered executions; did not treat the sick;
worked inmates to death; starved and tortured some with a blowtorch; and
hanged others, sometimes leaving them dangling for days. He personally
shot at least four prisoners dead, two of them for smiling.

In response to the verdict, Mr. Sakic clapped his hands and laughed in
derision.

The case had broad implications. After Croatia gained independence from
Yugoslavia in 1991, President Franjo Tudjman and his government were
taking steps to rehabilitate the pro-Fascist government that presided over
Croatia before it was absorbed into Communist Yugoslavia after the war.

Mr. Tudjman wrote a book questioning whether the number of Jews said to
have been killed in the Holocaust had been exaggerated. Croatian officials
gave veterans of the Fascist government, called the Ustashe, lavish
benefits and invited them to military celebrations. The military prowess
of the Ustashe forces was glorified.

The Times quoted a survivor as saying that he had recently seen the police
giving the Fascist salute. The survivor said that years earlier he had
watched Mr. Sakic oversee the execution of several hundred Jewish women
and children.

Andrija Hebrang, vice president of the then-governing Croatian Democratic
Union, called Mr. Sakic "a victim of historical circumstances" who sought
to "create an independent Croatian state with the aid of the Nazis since
Communism was not an option."

But there was no doubt that by the lowest Croatian estimates tens of
thousands had died in Croatian camps. Higher estimates put the death toll
at hundreds of thousands. Nazi hunters, keenly aware that time was running
out, were scrambling to find the last living culprits.

Mr. Sakic did not make the hunt difficult. In 1990, his photograph and an
interview were published in a Croatian newspaper, The Feral Tribune: Mr.
Sakic castigated the Serbs and praised the Ustashe government.

In 1994, during a state visit to Argentina by President Tudjman, Mr. Sakic
spoke to Magazin, a Croatian magazine. "I'd do it all again," he said,
adding that he wished more Serbs had died at Jasenovac. "I sleep like a
baby."

Three years later, a television reporter knocked on Mr. Sakic's door, and
Mr. Sakic gladly consented to an interview. He said the only deaths in the
camp had been from natural causes.

Many news reports said Croatia decided to extradite Mr. Sakic only to keep
him out of the hands of Serbs in the remnants of Yugoslavia, which was
also trying to bring him to trial. Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian writer,
wrote on The Times's Op-Ed page that this meant that Mr. Tudjman's
government "must now condemn the same Fascist regime that it has tried to
rehabilitate." It ultimately did.

Argentina took the opportunity to step away from its history of harboring
former Nazis, including the leader of the Nazis' Croatian puppet state,
Ante Pavelic. Carlos Corach, the Argentine interior minister, expressed
"satisfaction" at Mr. Sakic's arrest and sent him home to stand trial.

Dinko Ljubomir Sakic was born on Sept. 8, 1921, in Studenci,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, his indictment said. He graduated from high school. At
21 he arrived at Jasenovac, where he worked his way up to commander, a
post he held for seven months in 1944.

He was the protg of Vjekoslav Luburic, the leader of all Croatian
concentration camps, including Jasenovac, a sprawling 150-square-mile
conglomeration of several camps. It quickly became known for a brutality
that shocked even visiting Nazi officials, one of whom likened it to
Dante's hell. Camp employees devised a knife for the express purpose of
slitting throats.

Mr. Sakic married Mr. Luburic's sister Nada, who started working at
Jasenovac at 16. She was also extradited from Argentina to face war crimes
charges, but was released for lack of evidence.

Mr. Sakic ran a textile business in Argentina and was vocal in Argentinas
10,000-member Croatian community, The Washington Post reported in 1998. In
the late 1950s, The Post said, he ran a "rest camp" for former Croatian
Fascists in Paraguay with his friend the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo
Stroessner.

Mr. Sakic is survived by his wife, who changed her first name to
Esperanza. The 1998 indictment said they had three children.

The familys neighbors in Argentina said that Mr. Sakic had not been
especially talkative, The Post reported. They sometimes noticed him mowing
his lawn or hugging his wife goodbye.

(source: New York Times)



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


August 11



POLAND:

A Holocaust bond: In Warsaw, Jewish survivor and her Catholic rescuer live
like sisters


They are two silver-haired ladies with a special bond forged in the
Holocaust. One is the daughter of Jews who perished under the Nazis, the
other her Roman Catholic rescuer.

Today Janina Pietrasiak, 74, and Maria Lopuszanska, 79, live like sisters
just around the corner from each other in a Warsaw neighborhood shaded by
chestnut trees.

They see each other every day, tend to each other's needs, even finish
each other's sentences.

Their story is a testament to how devotion born of deep adversity can
endure for a lifetime and how the Holocaust survivors' exhortation "never
forget" can find resonance as much in acts of great generosity as in those
of unspeakable depravity.

During several hours with The Associated Press, the women relived the
events that merged their lives while sitting side-by-side in Maria's tiny
room in a nursing home, a five-minute walk from the modest apartment where
Janina lives alone.

Maria was the teenage daughter of members of the Polish anti-Nazi
underground who gave shelter in their Warsaw apartment in 1942 to Janina
and her mother, Roza Feldman.

Feldman soon died of tuberculosis, her strength depleted by the cold and
hunger she had endured before escaping from the Krakow Ghetto.

After that, Janina, not yet 8 when she joined the Catholic home, clung
desperately to her new family and was baptized to fit in with them and
increase her chances of survival under the Nazis.

After the war, she gave up the chance to live with an uncle in the United
States sealing a fate lived out for decades behind the Iron Curtain as
Poland came under communist rule.

"I was very afraid to leave their family because I was happy I had a
family, and I kept holding on to them all the time, trying not to lose
them," she said.

"It was the family that raised me, that rescued me. I also didn't want to
leave Poland I thought it was the country that let me live."

The bond deepened during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the
girls had to fend for themselves because Maria's father was ill and her
mother had taken up arms against the Nazis in the streets of the capital.

They saw bombs exploding, corpses and body parts strewn on the streets,
narrowly escaping death themselves more than once. Both recalled how the
younger Janina would bury herself in the older girl's skirt as the bombs
exploded.

"She was like a mother," Janina said, reaching over and grasping the hem
of Maria's skirt as she remembered.

"She thought I wasn't scared of anything," Maria added. "But I was 15
years old. I was incredibly scared of the bombs. I was no hero."

Janina lost the most. Her father died in Auschwitz. Her only sibling, Ewa,
survived the war but later committed suicide by inhaling gas. And the
death of her beloved mother fills her with pain to this day.

Through the years, Janina suffered bouts of depression so severe that she
was forced to retire early at age 59 from her work as a translator, and
went on medication.

"I think of my mother often because she was the dearest person in my life.
It stays with you all the time, what you go through. You can't throw it
out of your memory," she said.

Her marriage to a devout Roman Catholic brought a daughter, but also the
fresh pain of a husband, from whom she is now separated, who taunted her
with anti-Semitic remarks.

"My husband is very religious and doesn't especially care for the Jews,"
she said. "Anytime he tried to say something against the Jews, I would
tell him, 'you forget who I am.'"

Despite her own ordeals, including a battle with leukemia now in
remission, the main focus in her life is the woman she calls her sister.

Maria lives on a pension so small that after paying her nursing home, she
only has 300 zlotys ($145) left over most of which the breast cancer
survivor needs for medicine.

After the war she became an economist, married and had three children. Her
room is filled with photos of her grandchildren, along with crucifixes.
Her husband died in 1987.

Janina became a regular Mass attendee and didn't seek contact with Jews
until 1997 and then it was only in an attempt to seek recognition for
Maria.

She contacted the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, which then
bestowed the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" to Maria and to her
parents, Henryk and Janina Jetkiewicz.

The title, reserved for non-Jews who saved Jews, has gone to people from
44 countries. On Jan. 1, Poles made up the largest number, 6,066, followed
by the Netherlands with 4,863.

Thanks to her recognition as a rescuer, Maria receives $1,200 per year
from the New York-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which helps
with the medicine and a few extras such as this year's summer holiday to
the Warsaw countryside.

As the afternoon wore on, the women moved to Maria's tiny terrace ringed
by peach-colored geraniums and gazed out over the nursing home's lush and
blooming garden.

Janina wiped a fleck of lint from Maria's cheek. Maria then reached over
and tenderly straightened out her sister's rumpled dress.

(source: Associated Press, Aug. 2)




ISRAEL:

Gov't okays higher budget for survivors


Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On officially
endorsed the conclusion of the Dorner Commission on Holocaust survivors,
Monday. The budget allocated to support aging survivors is consequently
expected to rise by NIS 250 million.

The decision will affect approximately 40,000 survivors living in Israel.
The basic welfare payment will be raised to reach 75 percent of the
subsidy paid by the German government.

In 2009, survivors are expected to receive NIS 2 billion from the state, a
sum reflecting the additions the government agreed to and the payments
survivors were previously entitled to.

A budget cut across the board for all government ministries that was
announced last week was meant to allow allocation of funds to implement
the Dorner Commission recommendations.

Earlier Monday, retired Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner, who headed the
commission, promised representatives of the Center for Holocaust
Survivors' Organizations that she would campaign for the implementation of
the recommendations made by the state commission of inquiry she headed.

Dorner told the representatives, headed by Noah Flug, chairman of the
Center for Holocaust Survivors' Organizations, that although it was
unusual for judges who have headed commissions of inquiry to remain
involved in the subject of their investigation after completing their
work, she would continue to do so because of the survivors' special
circumstances.

The report, published on June 22, called for increasing government
payments to the 43,000 survivors who are ineligible for direct
compensation from the German government, to 75 percent of the amount that
Berlin pays survivors living in other countries.

According to the reparations agreement Israel signed with Germany in 1952,
it took upon itself to represent Holocaust survivors who made aliyah from
1953. Consequently, these survivors do not apply directly to Germany for
payment but instead receive compensation from the reparations that Germany
paid the state. This makes them completely dependent on the Israeli
government for compensation.

Dorner and her committee estimated that the value of the German
reparations amounted to NIS 61.5 billion in today's terms and that the
government had only paid NIS 38 billion to the survivors in grants and
medical expenses. Thus, the government owed each of the 43,000 survivors
between NIS 1.3 million and NIS 2.2 million, depending on how much the
government had paid each individual survivor up until now.

The committee added that since it would be too great a burden on the
treasury to repay the survivors what they are actually owed, the
government should increase the payments to 75% of the compensation
payments paid by the German government.

The government has announced that it will address the Dorner Commission
recommendations in the 2009 budget. This has caused an outcry because of
the mortality rate of the survivors, who need the money immediately.
According to estimates, 30-40 Israeli survivors die each day According to
a spokesman for the Center for Holocaust Survivors' Organizations,
representatives met on Sunday with Ra'anan Dinur, director-general of the
Prime Minister's Bureau. Dinur proposed granting the survivors 70% of the
German figure and distributing the other five percent to the neediest of
the survivors. The payments would be retroactive from January 2008, the
spokesman said.

Sources at the Center said Finance Minister Roni Bar-On is in favor of
providing the grants in 2008.

(source: Jerusalem Post)





USA//NEW JERSEY:

Museum exhibit honors Swiss Holocaust hero
Hungarian institution remembers diplomat who saved 62,000

Jews lining up in front of the Glass House during World War II to obtain
protective exit visas from Carl Lutz.

Photo courtesy the Holocaust History Project
If you go
Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest will be on display
Sept. 7-14 at the museum of the American Hungarian Foundation at 30
Somerset St. in New Brunswick. It is open Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.- 4
p.m., and Sunday, 1-4 p.m. An opening reception and lecture, for which an
RSVP is requested, will be held Sunday, Sept. 7, from 2-5 p.m.

Admission is free, but a small donation is requested. Contact the museum
at 732-846-5777 or info@.... Additional information on the
exhibit and foundation is available at www.ahfoundation.org.
by Debra Rubin
NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex

August 12, 2008

As a Swiss diplomat in Budapest during World War II, Carl Lutz rescued
more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps by
sheltering them in safe houses throughout the city and issuing exit visas.

The most famous of the 76 safe houses, a former glass factory that become
known as the Glass House, sheltered 3,000 Jews. Today the house is under
the auspices of the Carl Lutz Foundation, established in 2004 to preserve
the memory of Lutz and the Zionist Halutz Youth, a Hungarian resistance
organization that assisted Lutz in his efforts to save Jews.

It was a mammoth undertaking to keep all these houses going, get food, and
take care of the people who were there, a good many of whom survived the
war, said August Molnar, president of the American Hungarian Foundation in
New Brunswick.

From Sept. 7 to 14, Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest:
The Swiss Vice Consul who Rescued Jews during the Holocaust will be on
display at the foundations museum. The exhibition will also feature three
accompanying lectures about the rescue of Hungarian Jewry.

Shown most recently in Washington, the exhibit was previously on display
at the United Nations and in Atlanta and will go on to Canada.

I saw it in Washington and I said to myself, We must get this, said
Molnar, who was a professor of Hungarian studies at Rutgers University
before becoming president of the foundation. I think this is a memorial
not only to Carl Lutz but, in some sense, preserves the memory of the
people he rescued.



Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who operated 76 safe houses and issued thousands
of exit visas for Hungarian Jews during World War II, will be the subject
of an exhibition and lecture series at the museum of the American
Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick.
In addition to the AHF, the exhibit and lectures are being sponsored by
the Budapest-based Carl Lutz Foundation, the Jewish Historical Society of
Central New Jersey, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County,
assisted by a grant from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.

Ruth Marcus Patt of Monroe, a trustee of the Laurie foundation and founder
of the historical society, said she was approached by Molnar.

He wanted to know if Id help support it and I told him wed be happy to do
it, said Patt.

This was not the first time she had teamed with the foundation on mounting
an exhibit, said Patt. Ten years ago she approached Molnar about staging
an exhibit of Hungarian Judaica.

He said hed be very happy to do an exhibit about the treasures of the
local Hungarian Jewish community, said Patt of that exhibit, which drew
more than 1,000 visitors.

Molnar said the Lutz exhibit includes photos taken around 1944 in and
around the Glass House, which was placed under diplomatic immunity after
being turned over to Lutz by a well-to-do Jewish family.

Lutz, who was in charge of foreign interests and visas from 1942 to 45,
issued tens of thousands of schutzbriefe, or protective letters, to
Hungarian Jews. These were reluctantly accepted by Nazi officials,
according to the website of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign
Affairs.

As the Nazi regime tried to liquidate the Jewish community during the wars
closing months, Lutz entered into tough negotiations with them and the
Hungarian government, obtaining permission to issue 8,000 protective
letters allowing Jews to immigrate to Palestine.



A memorial in Budapest to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who is credited with
saving the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the
Holocaust.

Photo courtesy Budapest Tourist Guide
By interpreting the 8,000 as families and not as individuals, Lutz and his
staff issued tens of thousands of additional letters. He and his wife,
Gertrud, liberated Jews from deportation centers and death marches.

Meeting with Wallenberg
Lutzs idea of issuing protective letters was subsequently adopted by
representatives of other neutral countries, particularly Swedish diplomat
Raoul Wallenberg.

On its website, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem said Lutz met
with Wallenberg after the Swedish diplomats arrival in Budapest and
instructed him in various rescue methods.

By the end of the war, close to 124,000 Hungarian Jews survived, according
to the Swiss website. Of those, half owed their lives to the courageous
actions of Carl Lutz, whose name, until recently, had largely been
forgotten by the Jewish people and the world at large.

Yad Vashem in 1965 awarded Lutz the title of Righteous Among the Nations;
after his death in 1975, his wife gave the Israeli Holocaust institution
his archives.

Lutz spent almost six years, from 1935 to 1940, as Swiss consul to
Palestine. When World War II broke out, he attempted to intervene on
behalf of German residents of Palestine who were incarcerated in prison
camps or were in danger of deportation. It was because of those efforts
that German authorities in Hungary allowed him a great deal of leeway,
according to Yad Vashem.

In 1963, a street in Haifa was named after Lutz, who has also been honored
in Switzerland. In 1991, a memorial at the entrance to the old Budapest
Ghetto was erected, and in 2006 the American embassy in Budapest built a
memorial to Lutz in its park.

(source: New Jersey Jewish News)




HUNGARY:

Budapest survivors eligible for compensation


Budapest Holocaust survivors are eligible for millions of dollars in
compensation payments from Germany.

Germany agreed to release about $19 million in one-time payments to about
6,500 Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation of the Hungarian capital,
the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced
Wednesday in Budapest.

To be eligible, the survivors must now live in Eastern Europe and may not
have received payment from other funds.

The Claims Conference reached the agreement after years of negotiations
with the German government. A one-time payment of $3,000 for each eligible
survivor will be made through the organization's Budapest Fund. The Claims
Conference announced it is sending waiver forms required by Germany to
nearly 6,000 survivors whom the organization believes may be eligible.

Others who believe they are eligible must apply by Aug. 6, 2009. To
contact the Budapest office of the Claims Conference, call 36-1-374-3078;
fax 36-1-374-3081; or e-mail Budapest@....

The Claims Conference is the primary Jewish organization negotiating for
compensation and restitution for Jewish victims of the Nazis.

(source: JTA)





AUSTRALIA:

Revisionist historian awaits verdict


A revisionist historian living in Australia could be jailed.

Dr. Fredrick Toben of the Adelaide Institute, which espouses Holocaust
denial viewpoints, allegedly defied a court order to purge Holocaust
denial material from his Web site.

Toben is awaiting the verdict of a contempt-of-court hearing in the
Federal Court in Adelaide brought by the Executive Council of Australian
Jewry. The hearing ended Aug. 7.

He pleaded not guilty this week to 28 charges alleging that he breached a
2002 Federal Court order to purge all Holocaust denial material from his
institute Web site. The judge said at the time that Tobens site vilified
Jewish people.

Among the claims Toben makes on the site are gas chambers did not exist at
Auschwitz and that the Holocaust was a lie."

Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian
Jewry, has been at legal loggerheads with Toben since he first accused him
of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act in 1996.

An attorney for the council, Robin Margo, told the court on Aug. 7 that
Toben should be fined or jailed for his continued defiance of the court
order over the last six years. Toben spent seven months in jail in Germany
in 1999 after being convicted of inciting racism.

(source: JTA)