April 21




GERMANY:

Adolf Eichmann and the hunt for monsters----The capture and trial of the
Nazi war criminal carries timely lessons in justice.


On May 23, 1960, then- Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood at
the podium in the Knesset and solemnly said: "A short time ago one of the
most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, was discovered by the
Israeli security services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in
Israel and will shortly be placed on trial."

The announcement shocked Israelis and the world alike. It should have. No
country was known to be actively pursuing war criminals. Such an operation
-- locating and seizing Eichmann in Argentina -- seemed beyond the ability
of an inexperienced, ragtag spy agency such as the Mossad. And such a
trial, on the part of a hardly disinterested young nation, would be
audacity itself.

The truth is, without luck, individual bravery and the willingness of
Israel to jeopardize its international standing, the operational manager
of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" would never have been
brought to justice.

More than any other event, the groundbreaking gamble of Eichmann's
capture, trial and execution made real the injunction to "never forget."
It also set the stage -- as a model and a cautionary tale -- for what
remains a controversial proposition: How shall we deal with history's
monsters?


In May 1945, with the Third Reich on the verge of surrender, SS Lt. Col.
Adolf Eichmann headed into the mountains of Austria. In the postwar chaos,
under an assumed identity, he would escape a pair of Allied POW camps, lie
low in the forests of northern Germany and then follow the Nazi "ratlines"
to Argentina where, with his wife and three sons, he started a new life
hidden in plain sight.

For most of this time, only Simon Wiesenthal and fellow concentration camp
survivor Tuviah Friedman were dedicated to searching for him. The West
Germans, the only government with the clear mandate to arrest and try
Eichmann, had shown little interest in stirring up the crimes of the past.
The Americans, focused on the rise of the Cold War, were also not
interested. "We are not in the business of apprehending war criminals,"
noted an internal CIA memorandum in 1953. Even the Israelis, burdened with
the day-to-day survival of their new nation, had invested few resources
into hunting down those responsible for the Holocaust.

In the end, it wasn't Wiesenthal and Friedman who found him. Pure
happenstance started a cascade of events that led to Eichmann's arrest.

In a Buenos Aires suburb, Sylvia Hermann brought home a young man she'd
met named Nick Eichmann. He bragged of his father's exploits in the
Wehrmacht and casually condemned the Jews. Lothar Hermann, her half-Jewish
German emigre father, wondered: Could he be the son of that Eichmann?

Lothar alerted Fritz Bauer, one of the few West German prosecutors seeking
former Nazis, about his suspicions, and then he and his daughter launched
an amateur investigation. Bauer -- worried that his own government would
not pursue the leads or, worse, that someone within it would alert
Eichmann that he'd been discovered -- passed the tip to the Israelis.

The Mossad first bungled the investigation, but Bauer persisted,
presenting it with yet another secret source placing Eichmann in
Argentina. The operation would require the Mossad, small and inexperienced
at the time, to operate halfway around the world in a country known for
its support for Nazi Germany. Its agents would have to succeed in three
operations: capturing Eichmann, detaining him for an indeterminate period,
then secreting him out of the country. All the while, they would be
violating Argentine sovereignty, risking prison.

Ben-Gurion approved the mission that is now part of spy legend. What is
less known is the outpouring of protest that followed Israeli officials'
announcement of the capture and their intention to try Eichmann
themselves. The Argentines protested to the United Nations, and the
Security Council condemned Israel for its activities. There was an
international uproar about the right of Israel to create a special
tribunal to prosecute Eichmann, a German national whose crimes were
committed before Israel was even a state.

Once again, Ben-Gurion forged ahead, seeing the capture and trial of the
Nazi war criminal as a way to remind a younger generation of Israelis, and
the world, that they must remain vigilant lest history repeat itself.

The gamble paid off. The testimony of survivors, and Eichmann's inadequate
defense that he was merely following orders, sealed his fate. The Nazis'
crimes against the Jewish people were exposed in horrifying, exhaustive
detail in newspapers and on radio and television. For the world, justice
was served, and Ben-Gurion's searing reminder still resonates today.

And yet, half a century later, the controversies provoked by Eichmann's
capture and trial are a long way from solution. Who will be investigated
for war crimes and crimes against humanity? By what law and in what
jurisdiction? And who will bring them to account?

Events mostly prove the imperfection of the systems we've devised. "Dr.
Death," the Nazi physician Aribert Heim, died a free man in Egypt, age 78.
In Cambodia, it has taken 30 years for aging Khmer Rouge cadres to face
judgment for their actions in the infamous killing fields. Sudan's
president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, indicted last month by the fledgling
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur, is
famously defiant. He is unlikely ever to stand trial.

But even this imperfect justice is more than the world had available in
the 15 years after the end of World War II.

Slow and flawed as they are, these tribunals increase the odds against the
monsters. They need our support. Because without them, those seeking
justice for future Eichmanns will face the same almost impossible odds
that those pursuing the architect of the Holocaust barely managed to
surmount.

(source: Opinion; Neal Bascomb is the author of the just published
"Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased
Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi."-- Los Angeles Times)

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


NAZI TOURS IN MUNICH----'Turn Left at Gestapo Headquarters'


Foreign tourists flock to the Third Reich walking tours in Munich. Even
now, 64 years after World War II ended, visitors from abroad still only
seem to associate Germany with two things -- beer and Hitler. The
country's image seems to be changing far more slowly than it would prefer.

Three tour guides are standing next to each other on Munich's central
Marienplatz square, and one could almost feel sorry for two of them: the
man with the spectacles and the Spanish woman. But Jeff Cox, the third, is
doing very well.

It's Easter, the sun is shining on the neo-Gothic faade of Munich's town
hall, and the city is full of tourists. Ideal conditions. Cox and the
other two have been waiting for customers. Each of them is offering a
different tour.

These days, city tours are tailor-made for certain target groups. The
Spanish guide has a sign that says "El centro en espanol!". The man with
the spectacles has a board offering a "Walk Around the Old Town." The
tourists walk past them. Not a single customer shows any interest in them.

Jeff Cox doesn't have a sign. Just a blue folder containing photos. He
doesn't even have to hold the folder up. You have to step up close to read
what Cox is offering. "Third Reich Tour. Munich Walk Tours in English."

The Third Reich in Munich. That means Hitler, Gring, the Gestapo, the SS.
Hitler in the city where everything started. The "Capital of the
Movement." Cox is pleased. He's got 18 tourists standing in front of him.
British, American, an Indian family. Each one of them has paid 12
($15.50). When it comes to city tours, Hitler is a surefire bet. Nazis
always sell.

Cox speaks beautifully clear English. He would have made a good history
teacher. He's an affable Londoner who tries to get his listeners
interested rather than boring them with dry lectures. He's been a city
guide for 10 years.

He's just been talking about Hitler's time in the Austrian town of Linz,
then his time in Vienna. Later on he'll take the group to the legendary
Hofbruhaus beer hall where Hitler held several speeches. Then to the
corner of Brienner and Trkenstrasse. That's where the Gestapo headquarters
was. The tour ends on Knigsplatz square, where the Nazi party staged its
early rallies.

"Who knows what Adolf Hitler was almost called?" says Cox. "Schicklgruber;
his father was called Alois Schicklgruber but changed his name."

Alan Stark has read seven biographies of Adolf Hitler. He listens
attentively to Cox, even though he knows most of it. Stark has blond hair
and lives in California, he likes to wear running shoes in his free time,
and he's interested in German history. When Stark says German history, he
really means Adolf Hitler.

Stark is in Germany for six days. It's really only four days if you
subtract the travel time. So he and his wife have to focus on what's
essential.

Day one: Nuremberg, the site of the Nazi party rallies. Day two:
Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg, the site of Hitler's mountain retreat. Day
three: Munich, Third Reich tour. Day four: the highlight point, Bayreuth.
"Parsifal," five hours of Wagner.

"I'm really no Nazi," says Stark. "I'm just interested in Germany."

Stark would make a lot of Germans sad. But tourists who come to Munich,
Berlin or Heidelberg have a pretty preconceived notion of this country:
Beer and Hitler.

If Germans think the world now sees them differently, they may well be
suffering from a misconception. Despite 60 years of the Federal Republic,
despite the Soccer World Cup in 2006,when Germans wore wigs in their
national colors of black, red and gold and played host to the whole world.

The Nazi story is over, and a colourful, easygoing patriotism has dawned.
Or so they thought.

Adolf Hitler Beer Tables

Cox has led the group into the Hofbruhaus. Some waiters are standing
between the large wooden tables of the vaulted hall. They know the score.
The Hitler tours are here every day. "There on the right, that's where
Adolf Hitler stood," says Cox. The group takes photos of a beer table.

"This is where Hitler presented the Nazi party's first party manifesto."
Stark walks along the rows of tables and takes pictures. He'll be taking a
lot of beer table images back to San Francisco.

The Starks will show their friends a Germany that is alien to most
Germans. The world is changing: An African American is the most powerful
man in the world, a white man is the best rapper, and Britain has the
world's most famous chef. But Germany remains the land of Adolf Hitler
beer tables.

"In Britain schools virtually only teach German history from 1933 to
1945," says Cox. He tries to change that image of Germany in his tours, he
says. Germany is changing, Cox tells his listeners. He also talks about
the resistance of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose and
how some people in Munich refused to say "Heil Hitler" instead of "Gr
Gott," the standard phrase used to greet someone.

But his group is clearly more interested in his descriptions of where the
SS was founded and where Hitler drank his beer. After all, the tourists
want to hear about the Nazis, and not about the new Germany.

The tour is over a little after noon. Three American women walk up to Cox
and ask him to recommend a good caf. Cox tells them to try the district of
Schwabing.

"Where is Schwabing?"

"That's easy," says Cox. "You walk straight on up to the traffic lights.
Then turn left at Gestapo headquarters."

(source: Spiegel)




USA:

New photo: Nazis dig up mass grave of U.S. soldiers


New photo surfaces of Nazi slave labor camp where U.S. soldiers held
during WWII

Photo donated to U.S. Holocaust museum by family of U.S. war crimes
photographer

"People have to see these. This is something that's history," Jim Martin
says

Today marks the anniversary of the liberation of the soldiers held at the
camp



The photograph is a jarring image that shows Nazi Party members, shovels
in hand, digging up graves of American soldiers held as slaves by Nazi
Germany during World War II.

Members of the Nazi Party are forced to dig up mass graves of U.S.
soldiers while American GIs look on.

While the men dig up the site, U.S. soldiers investigating war crimes
stand over them. Two crosses with helmets placed atop them -- the sign of
a fallen soldier -- are visible. Two Germans are knee deep in mud.
Another, with a handlebar mustache, has the look of a defeated man. The
bodies of 22 American soldiers were found in at least seven graves,
according to the photographer.

On the back of the photo is written, "Nazi Party members digging up
American bodies at Berga."

Berga an der Elster was a slave labor camp where 350 U.S. soldiers were
beaten, starved, and forced to work in tunnels for the German government.
The soldiers were singled out for "looking like Jews" or "sounding like
Jews," or dubbed as undesirables, according to survivors. More than 100
soldiers perished at the camp or on a forced death march.

It was on this day six decades ago, April 23, 1945, when most of the slave
labor camp soldiers were liberated by advancing U.S. troops. The emaciated
soldiers, many weighing just 80 pounds, had been forced by Nazi commanders
to march more than 150 miles before their rescue. Watch survivor break
down in tears over liberation

The new photograph was likely taken in May or June 1945 when U.S. war
crimes investigators combed Berga. It was donated earlier this month to
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by Jim Martin and his family, whose
father, Elmore "Bud" Martin, is believed to have snapped the picture as
part of the war crimes investigation team.

The photo and dozens of others sat for years in Jim Martin's closet. Some
of the photos, including graphic images of American corpses, were placed
on record at the National Archives years ago. See shocking photos of the
slave camp

But the image of Nazi Party members digging up graves doesn't appear to be
part of that collection. Martin said he was proud to hand over the photos.

"People have to see these. This is something that's history and it belongs
with something that's historical to tell that story. It doesn't belong in
my closet."

"To be honest, I'm kind of sorry I haven't done it sooner. We didn't
realize what it was."

Elmore Martin, who won a Silver Star for his valor in capturing images
during the war, was 28 when he shot the photographs. Before the war, he
worked as a photographer for the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press.
Martin's son said his dad, who died several years ago, struggled to keep a
job when he returned home. "I now see where it all started," he said.

What Elmore Martin and the war crimes soldiers seen in the photo couldn't
have known that day was how the case would evolve.

The two Berga commanders -- Erwin Metz and his superior, Hauptmann Ludwig
Merz -- were tried for war crimes and initially sentenced to die by
hanging. But the U.S. government commuted their death sentences in 1948,
and both men were eventually released in the 1950s. One other Berga
commander, Lt. Willy Hack, was executed, but not by the United States. He
died by hanging, justice carried out by the Soviets.

Jim Martin said his father would have been upset at the freeing of the
Berga commanders after the atrocities he documented. "He knew it happened
and to see that these people were released would be pretty devastating."

Efraim Zuroff, who has spent nearly 30 years hunting Nazis responsible for
the Holocaust, said the U.S. government commuted the sentences and freed
hundreds of war criminals like those at Berga after the war, as the Cold
War began to intensify.

"They were more concerned about keeping out Communists than admitting
victims of the Nazis," he said. "The realities out there were very
conducive of letting these people off the hook."

How should Americans feel six decades later that the government freed the
Nazi commanders responsible for atrocities against U.S. soldiers?

"We're supposed to feel very pissed off about that, to be perfectly
honest, and that feeling is very justified," Zuroff said.

The German government has since made reparations to the soldiers held at
Berga. Zuroff said now it's time for the U.S. government to do "the right
thing."

"To apologize," he said.

The Army said it is trying to figure out the best way to honor the Berga
soldiers. There are about 20 known survivors still living.

"The U.S. Army honors the service and sacrifice of all veterans who have
fought our nation's wars. The Army is working to identify the most
dignified and personal way to honor the soldiers held at the Nazi slave
camp, known as Berga," Army spokesman Lt. Col. Willie Harris said in a
written statement.

The Army refused to answer further questions about the Berga case. Listen
in as an elderly man learns about his brother's death at the camp

Survivors have long wanted to know why the sentences of the commanders
were commuted. In a letter dated June 11, 1948, to an attorney whose
nephew died at Berga, the U.S. War Department said the sentences of Metz
and Merz were commuted because they were "underlings."

The letter goes on to say that Metz "though guilty of a generally cruel
course of conduct toward prisoners was not directly responsible for the
death of any prisoners, except one who was killed during the course of an
attempt to escape." That soldier was Morton Goldstein.

Survivors say Goldstein tried to escape but was captured. They say Metz
stood him against a wall, walked up to him and shot him, execution-style,
through the head. As his body lay on the ground, guards riddled him with
bullets, according to survivors.

The soldiers who survived were not called to testify at the war crimes
trial against Metz and Merz, instead prosecutors relied on about a dozen
soldiers' statements gathered through the course of the investigation. At
the trial, Metz blamed any deaths at the camp on U.S. medics.

"They bore the sole responsibility for the medical care," Metz told the
court, according to the book "Given Up for Dead," by Flint Whitlock,
citing trial transcripts. "I ask you: Who must bear the responsibility?
The answer is obvious: The U.S. medics."

Those comments don't sit well with Berga survivors. "He was terrible,
absolutely terrible. He lied," said Tony Acevedo, a U.S. medic who
catalogued the deaths in a diary at the camp. "Everybody hated his guts."

"Even the German guards were scared of him." Flip through Acevedo's diary
from the slave camp

Berga survivors say they await any recognition from the Army that may
come, especially after all these years.

Morton Brooks, 83, said he constantly thinks about the day he was
liberated. He was rail thin and had walked by political prisoners shot in
the head during the forced death march. In the final hours before his
rescue, his attitude was, "Let them kill us," he said.

"I think all the time that I'm a survivor of this and I'm still around,"
said Brooks. "To me, it just amazes me. I don't know how I got through."


Jim Martin said he's still trying to process his father's role as a
forgotten American war hero, armed not with a gun, but a camera.

"The worst part is I'm just finding it out," he said.

(source: CNN)



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


Painting, sold under Nazis, returned to owner's estate--
Art dealer Max Stern was forced to liquidate his gallery in 1937

Stern died in 1987 with no heirs

His art restoration project benefits three universities

"Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe" was returned Tuesday



An oil painting was returned Tuesday to the estate of a Jewish art dealer
who was forced to consign the painting and other artwork under Nazi
Germany before fleeing the country.

The painting, "Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe," was done in
1632 by an unknown painter from the Northern Netherlandish school,
according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in southern New
York.

It was owned by Max Stern, an art dealer who had a gallery in Dusseldorf,
Germany, until 1937, when the Nazis' Reich Chamber for Fine Arts ordered
him to liquidate the gallery and its inventory, the statement said.

Stern, who died in 1987, left no heirs. He and his wife had founded the
Max Stern Art Restitution Project, which directly benefits Concordia
University and McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, according to a statement from U.S Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

The painting was returned Tuesday -- Holocaust Remembrance Day -- to
Clarence Epstein of Concordia University on behalf of the executors of the
estate, said Lou Martinez of the immigration agency.

It was returned in a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New
York, he said.

The painting had been owned by Philip Mould Ltd., a London, England,
gallery, when Lawrence Steigrad, a New York art dealer, bought it in 2008,
the New York attorney's office said.

Neither had any idea of the painting's past. Philip Mould Ltd. had
purchased the painting the year before from Lempertz Auction House. The
same auction house sold the painting in 1937 after Stern was forced to
liquidate, without receiving any proceeds from the sale, the New York
attorney's office said.

Immigration agents used information from a Holocaust claims office in the
New York state Banking Department to look into Steigrad's gallery.

The art dealer "confirmed the painting was in his possession." and he
eventually allowed agents to seize the painting, the attorney's office
said.

(source: CNN)



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

Nazi victim: Can people without a soul be punished?


For 65 years, Elisabeth Mann has carried with her the pain only a
Holocaust survivor can know.

The only one in her Hungarian Jewish family to make it out of the Nazi
death camps, life for a long time felt like punishment.

Branded in her mind are the images of, for example, a pile of babies set
ablaze, snarling dogs and the laughter of an SS officer pointing to the
black smoke of incinerated bodies that filled the sky. And on her heavy
heart is the anguish, including the blame she feels for her brother Laci's
death.

He was 13 and not feeling well when the family arrived by cattle car at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"I told him to go with my mother because mothers are the people who take
care of sick children," she cried, while sitting in her Los Angeles,
California, home.

"I didn't know that with my advice I killed my brother because all the
mothers and all the children were taken to the gas chamber right away."

Given the horrors she's lived and witnessed, one might think Mann, now in
her 80s, would be among those demanding that Nazi war criminals be
brought to justice. And yet she's uncomfortable with the ongoing attempts
to deport to Germany for trial John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old Cleveland,
Ohio, man allegedly linked to mass killings at Sobibor, a death camp in
Poland.

Demjanjuk insists it wasn't him. The pursuit of him -- and of suspects
like him -- isn't one Mann supports.

She said she never wanted revenge, because "I did not want to be like
them."

Mann doesn't think going after war criminals now is worth the cost and
energy, nor does she think the legal process will make a difference to
such men who've already lived a full life.

"What is punishment for a person who is capable to do such horror, such
horrible things to living people?" Mann, an artist, wondered aloud. "I
cannot imagine that that person has a soul or conscience or heart. ... He
simply wouldn't feel it. ... What kind of punishment could you give to a
person like that?"

Her argument doesn't work for Efraim Zuroff, who has spent nearly 30 years
hunting Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, a systematic effort that
wiped out 6 million Jews, or two-thirds of European Jewry.

"It has to be clear to everybody that the Holocaust was not a natural
disaster. ... It was created by man, against man," he said from Jerusalem,
Israel, where he coordinates Nazi war crimes research for the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "When
responsibility can be determined, people have to be held accountable."

On Monday, the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the center released
its latest status report on Nazi war criminal investigations and
prosecutions. Demjanjuk tops the list of the 10 most wanted.

Others on the list include Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian officer who
allegedly helped kill 1,200 people in Novi Sad, Serbia, as well as Milivoj
Asner, a onetime Croatian police chief, now believed to be living in
Austria, who allegedly persecuted and deported to the Nazi camps hundreds
of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.

In a written statement about the report, Zuroff said that since the start
of 2001, there have been 76 convictions, at least 48 indictments, and
hundreds of investigations have been launched.

Central to these actions has been a project Zuroff has helped oversee
called Operation: Last Chance, a push -- started in 2002 -- to support
worldwide government efforts to pursue aging Nazi war crime suspects.

While some countries have stepped up, including the U.S., Germany, Serbia
and Spain, others, such as Australia, Austria and Ukraine, have shown a
"lack of political will" and have failed to act, the statement says.

"The easiest thing in the world is to just forget," Zuroff, 60, said by
phone. "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the
murderers. ... We don't think people deserve a prize for reaching an old
age."

Mann's own children couldn't agree more. Like Zuroff, they think pursuing
Nazi war criminals is the least that can be done to honor victims.

"I'm definitely in favor of going after these folks, regardless of their
age," said Mann's daughter, Nancy. "A lot of people suffered, and are
still suffering, because of the crimes that were done in the past."

Thomas, Mann's son, said that going after Nazi war criminals "sends a
message to our society and the world that it's not OK to do these things,"
and that it helps bring awareness "to people who don't know about the
Holocaust, and there are lots of them."

He told the story of a college freshman in Southern California who stood
up during a presentation his mother was giving and said she'd never heard
of the Holocaust.

"That really brings it home," Thomas said. By pursuing suspected Nazi
criminals, the process "reminds people that this did happen" and shows
that "people do care that this happened."

(source: CNN)


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


Holocaust Museum Lets Local Voices Memorialize


Barbara Steiner survived life as a child in the Warsaw ghetto and three
Nazi death camps, emerging against dreadful odds without family or
belongings but with a powerful story to tell. Yet for decades
she was quiet about her trauma, concentrating on a new life raising her
children in this placid suburb northwest of Chicago.


In 1977, Skokie, home to many Holocaust survivors, drew national attention
when a group of neo-Nazis tried to march there.

Thirty-two years ago this summer, however, that peace was shattered when a
group of American neo-Nazis threatened to march through the village, a
destination carefully picked for its psychological punch: at the time,
Skokie was home to many thousands of Jews like Ms. Steiner who were
Holocaust survivors or their relatives.

The threatened march put Skokie at the bulls-eye of a national debate
about free speech and democratic ideals. And although the march never
materialized here, it prompted a movement among the death camp survivors
that manifested itself in an urge to speak up and teach the lessons of
their lives.

And so they organized a group and got to work.

All those decades of effort came to fruition this weekend in the form of
the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, in the
very village the neo-Nazis had hoped to horrify. The museum was shaped by
what may be the last generation of Holocaust survivors to have such
influence over their own stories.

"It's a dream come true and more," Ms. Steiner said, preparing for the
public opening on Sunday morning, at which former President Bill Clinton
was scheduled to give a keynote address.

"Magnificent is the only word for something so beautiful," she said.

The 66,000 square feet of exhibit space asks universal questions about
human rights, as many Holocaust memorials do. But unlike similar
institutions, the Skokie museum is almost totally anchored in the local,
brought to life with the personal pictures, documents, clothing,
testimonies and other artifacts of the buildings own neighbors.

And several of the Holocaust survivors are working as docents and other
staff members, weaving their first-person stories into the history,
exploring issues of genocide around the world. They are candid about how
their sense of tranquillity was shattered by the threat of having to
encounter the swastika on Skokies streets, decades after their desperate
escapes from the Nazis.

"The rightful place for this is here, because of the march," said Samuel
R. Harris, the president of the museum and learning center, whose parents
and siblings were killed at the Treblinka death camp. "You must know what
fear the swastika brings to a survivor. The fear is immense, more than
you can write. I felt, what can I do? Very simple solution: education.

The museum's co-curator, Yitzchak Mais, former director of the Yad Vashem
museum in Jerusalem, explained its significance as filling a largely
unexplored niche.

"These are your neighbors from the Midwest," Mr. Mais said. "You'll
realize that you walked on the street with them, shopped with them at the
grocery, sat with them at the movie theater."

"You've lived with the witnesses," he went on. "It removes the distance.
This didn't happen a thousand miles away. It's about right here, and
that's very clear."

Long before the group of survivors, officially called the Holocaust
Memorial Foundation of Illinois, had a sparkling new building complete
with art galleries and a childrens wing, it did its work out of a modest
storefront on Main Street in a residential neighborhood next to a pub.

Without large donors or the attention of designers and architects, they
cobbled together a modest but poignant exhibit that welcomed busloads of
schoolchildren and anyone else who wanted to hear their stories. There
were about 20 or 30 members, Ms. Steiner recalls. (Of that original group,
she said, only three are alive today.)

They worked with little fanfare until an epiphany of sorts. It was time to
do some repairs to the storefront. What if they skipped the repair work
and instead put their energy into fund-raising for a whole new center?

"They began to dream," said Richard S. Hirschhaut, the museum's executive
director. "And this is an organization that had an annual budget at its
high point of $200,000."

But, as Mr. Hirschhaut said, it was a group known for its luck and pluck.
"They started asking, 'What if we could do more, reach more people? And
how do we do it?" he said. "It was an easy sell for newcomers who have
fallen in love with the survivors, who adore and respect them, to go
forward."

One such relative newcomer to the group was J. B. Pritzker of Chicago, the
philanthropist scion of the Hyatt hotel chain and other investments, who
said he had become enchanted by the survivors, adopting their dream as his
own.

Approached to be the capital campaign chairman about 10 years ago, Mr.
Pritzker, the managing partner of a private investment firm, accepted. He
brought the group from having essentially nothing in the bank to where it
is today, several tens of millions of dollars later.

Ms. Steiner, a former bookkeeper at Sears and other department stores,
remembers the planning stages.

"When they were talking about millions, I said, 'Wait! You're talking
about millions! You're kidding, right? How are we able to do that?'" she
recalled telling Mr. Pritzker in a meeting. "He said, 'Don't worry, we'll
have the money. Thank God I was wrong. He was right.'"

Mr. Pritzker, leading a pre-opening tour, said, "The lesson were trying to
teach is that in small ways in everyday life we can rise and be
up-standers. This is the universal message that the museum is all about."

Among the people who will be telling their stories at the museum is Aaron
Elster, who moved to Skokie in 1955 by way of New York City. This is where
his nightmares of hiding in a Polish family's attic for two years during
the Holocaust began to subside.

"Like many people, I didn't want to speak about my background," said Mr.
Elster, 76, a retired insurance executive. "I didn't want to be known as a
victim. But while we can, I feel that its incumbent on every survivor to
speak up."

So many are already gone.

"I personally believe that their souls are here," Mr. Elster said. "And it
becomes a holy place for people like myself."

(source: New York Times)



POLAND:

Young Jews march in memory of Holocaust victims


Thousands of young Jews and elderly Holocaust survivors marched Tuesday
at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz to honor those who perished in
the Holocaust, while an Israeli official condemned the Iranian
president's recent anti-Israel comments.

A shofar, or ram's horn, sounded the march's start. Around 7,000 people
from more than 40 countries, many carrying the blue-and-white flag of
Israel, then streamed through the infamous wrought-iron gate crowned with
the words "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Sets You Free" at the former
Auschwitz camp.

Under a clear blue sky, the participants trekked 2 miles (3 kilometers) to
the sprawling Nazi sister camp of Birkenau, home to wooden barracks and
the gas chambers.

The annual March of the Living, which honors the memory of some six
million Jews who died in the Holocaust, appeared this year as a
counterpoint to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech Monday at a
U.N. racism conference in Geneva.

Ahmadinejad, who has denied that the Holocaust happened and has called for
Israel's destruction, accused the Jewish state in his speech of being a
"most cruel and repressive racist regime." His official text had referred
to the Holocaust as "ambiguous and dubious" but Ahmadinejad dropped that
reference from his speech.

Speaking before Tuesday's march, Israel's deputy prime minister Silvan
Shalom dismissed the Iranian leader's address as "a speech of hatred."

"What Iran is doing today is not too far off from what Hitler did to the
Jewish people 65 years ago," Shalom said. "He (Ahmadinejad) would like of
course to develop these beliefs that Israel has no right to exist."

But Shalom called Tuesday's march the world's answer to the Iranian
president's remarks.

"We are saying very clearly to the Iranian president and to the entire
world that Israel will continue to exist, that the Jewish people will
continue to exist, and that the world is much more united than he believes
to stop such kind of phenomena, such kind of prejudice and hatred," Shalom
said.

At least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles,
Gypsies and others, died in Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers or from
starvation, disease and forced labor before Soviet troops liberated the
Nazi-run camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

After arriving at Birkenau, some marchers placed small wooden slabs with
messages of mourning on them between the train tracks that brought Jews to
their death. One read "I love and miss you Papa Adam," while another read
"In loving memories of families Gromb and Markovity, who were brutally
killed by the Nazis."

For camp survivors, the march presented an opportunity to remember those
who perished and to pass on their knowledge to a younger generation.

"I'm back because for me this is a pilgrimage. I come back to pay tribute,
first to the ones I did know, and then to the hundreds of thousands who
died here and were murdered here," said Noah Klieger, an 83-year-old
journalist from Tel Aviv who survived the camp along with his mother and
father.

"I feel it's my duty to come because I was saved and many others were
not," he said.

The march ended in a ceremony with the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the
dead, at the monument to the camp's victims between the red-brick ruins of
Birkenau's crematoria.

Younger marchers said it was important to understand the horror the
survivors went through.

"I'm here right now in memory of the people who perished, in honor of the
people (survivors) who are coming back," said Nathan Koreie, 18, who came
from Los Angeles. "They had not only the strength to endure what they went
through at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that they've come back now and they are
coming to teach us is a testament to their strength and will to survive."

(source: Associated Press)





UKRAINE:

New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews

In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to
swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania,
children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents.
In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze
to death.

Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi
slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot
dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about
the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smaller killing fields across the
former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.

That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust
museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites,
comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, crosschecking numbers
and methods. The work, gathered under the title The Untold Stories, is far
from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday
evening, the research is being made public on the institutions Web site.

"These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved
smaller towns and villages," said David Bankier, head of the International
Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. "In many cases, locals
played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to
every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer
with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This
provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa."

"For the purposes of this project, a killing field entails at least 50
people," said the project director, Lea Prais. The killing began in June
1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic
republics in the north to the Caucasus in the south, Nazi death squads
combed the areas.

The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by
Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet
collaborators.

The new research checks that evidence against German records, diaries and
letters of soldiers, as well as accounts by witnesses and the few
surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes,
the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is
noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to learn more exactly
the numbers killed.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in
Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad
Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981
interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a
bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, "After the civilian guards with the
yellow armbands shouted once again, 'I was able to identify them as
Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now,
were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among
them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.'"

"At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward
the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews
were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the
end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time,
the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to
them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a
layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand."

Ms. Prais said one of the discoveries that had most surprised her was the
way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to
commemorate those who had perished. In distant fields and village squares
they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial, despite fears of
overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.

"The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent," she said.

The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One
case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what
happened in the town of Krupki, Belarus, where the entire Jewish community
of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.

A German soldier who took part in the mass killing kept a diary that was
found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having
volunteered as one of 15 men with strong nerves asked to eliminate the
Jews of Krupki. "All these had to be shot today," he wrote. "The weather
was gray and rainy," he observed.

The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany, but as
they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident.
Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time
controlling the crowd.

"Ten shots rang out, 10 Jews popped off," he wrote. "This continued until
all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The
children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won't forget
this spectacle in a hurry...."

(source: New York Times)






ENGLAND:

Hitler's art attracts big sale prices


A painting by Adolf Hitler sold for almost $15,000 Thursday -- more than
six times as much as expected.

The watercolor was one of 15 items of Hitler art being sold at auction.
Together, the artworks by the Nazi leader fetched almost $120,000.

They had expected to raise just under $50,000, auction house Mullock's of
Shropshire estimated.

Many of the pictures were on the market because one of the sellers wanted
money to install a new central heating system in his house, a spokesman
for the auction house said.

"The watercolors came from a collector who is a regular vendor of ours,"
said Richard Westwood-Brookes, a historical documents expert at Mullock's.
"He'd forgotten about them for years. He found them in his garage."

He refused to disclose the identity of the seller, as a matter of policy.

Thirteen watercolors were expected to fetch $580 to $2,200 apiece, while
the lone small oil painting was estimated at up to $30,000, the auctioneer
estimates.

All of the watercolors shattered expectations -- 12 of them selling for
between $4,400 and $9,000.

The remaining watercolor -- a 1910 painting showing a figure sitting on a
stone bridge -- fetched almost $15,000. There has been speculation that
the figure was a depiction of Hitler himself.

The oil painting sold at only almost $20,000. A pencil sketch signed "A
Hitler 1914" went for almost $4,700, beating the auctioneer's estimate of
up to $3,700.

An easel thought to have belonged to Hitler sold for nearly $15,000,
having been expected to bring $2,900 to $5,800. An anonymous bidder
purchased it by phone.

Hitler dreamed of being an artist as a young man, and although he failed
to get into the Vienna Academy of Arts, he supported himself by painting
watercolors for several years before World War I, according the Holocaust
Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The auction also includes dozens of items related to Hitler's time as
leader of Nazi Germany -- including documents from concentration camps
where those deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis were imprisoned, sterilized
and murdered. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi death
camps, alongside millions of political prisoners, homosexuals, Gypsies and
others.

"Who would want to have in their house a painting by the most horrible
murderer in the history of mankind?" asked Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center which aims to fight anti-Semitism. "Any individual
that would buy it to hang in their homes should be ashamed of themselves."

Hier said he did not object to Holocaust-related documents being auctioned
"if their purpose is to wind up in research institutions," noting his own
organization had obtained "important documents" that way.

Westwood-Brookes defended the sale of Nazi memorabilia.

"It's just as much as part of the Second World War as photographs of
(Winston) Churchill," the British prime minister during the war. "It's
something that happened and you can't ignore it."

He said he hoped buyers would preserve items such as a teenage girl's
registration document for the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp,
where approximately 1 million people were murdered.

"The intention is that people will acquire this material and make sure it
is preserved for future generations to study," Westwood-Brookes said.

The buyers could be "anybody and everybody," he said.

"There are many, many collectors of Second World War memorabilia all
around the world," he added.

"Some people wouldn't want it," he admitted, but some would, "mainly
because they want something to do with a famous person in history. In this
case it happens to be Hitler, but in another sale it might be Churchill or
Gandhi."

"I don't take any moral position" on the sale of Hitler-related artifacts,
he said. "You can't say this guy was a bad guy, so I won't sell his
memorabilia, this guy was a good guy so I will sell his. If you do that,
where do you stop?"

The Hitler paintings came from three sources, Westwood-Brookes said,
describing them as "people who had collected them over the years."

"The rest of the stuff has come in from all sorts of sources -- dealers
who acquire stuff and sell stuff from other auction houses or private
sources, members of the public who find something in the attic, and
collectors, who are constantly changing their collections and selling off
that bit that they don't want in order to buy stuff that they do."

(source: CNN)