Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571 November/December 2010 ......Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571...

IN THIS ISSUEAmerican Society for Yad Vashem Annual Tribute Dinner.........................1, 2, 8-9, 16

A hatred that resists exorcism..........................................................................................4

The Holocaust and the lost Caribbean paradise.........................................................5

New online resource debuts for Nazi-era looted art....................................................6

Did Stalin condone the Holocaust?.................................................................................7

Even a tolerant country cannot tolerate intolerance...................................................7

Myths and truths..............................................................................................................10

Suspected Nazi war criminal eludes German justice system..........................................11

Von Ribbentrop’s watch..................................................................................................11

Polish archive, Israeli spar over father’s Holocaust diary..........................................13

A Film Unfinished: The Warsaw Ghetto as seen through Nazi eyes........................14

Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571 November/December 2010-Kislev/Tevet 5771

In keeping with this year’s theme Sharsheret — Chain —we gather to remember the chains of oppression which as-

saulted and pervaded our lives during the Holocaust and thechains that symbolically link successive generations of the Jew-ish people and have become a metaphor for our survival.

Our 2010 Tribute Dinner honors three generations who havemade Holocaust remembrance a centrifugal force in their lives.Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Holocaust survivor, partisan, resistancefighter, IDF brigadier general, historian, scholar, author, and for-mer Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, was a centralfigure in the founding of the American Society for Yad Vashem.For more than 20 years, we have worked together to build theSociety which has become a pillar of Yad Vashem. As an or-ganization, we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Mark Moskowitz, a son of survivors and a successful busi-nessman, has made time in his very busy life to become a devoted member of the YadVashem family. His recent commitment to the work of the American Society points to the im-portance of the continuing vitality of our organization. His participation with us is truly heart-warming. He is a bearer of the chain of remembrance, and The American Society for YadVashem is pleased to honor Mark Moskowitz this evening.

Of the many endeavors the American Society has undertaken in recent years, none bringsus more pride than the growth and development of our Young Leadership Associates. Eachyear, for the past decade, they have sponsored a Professional Educational Conference onvarious themes relating to the Holocaust that attracts several hundred teachers from the Tri-State area and beyond. By transmitting the lessons of the Holocaust to present and futuregenerations, YLA members are increasing awareness and fostering sensitivity in reducinghatred, intolerance, and prejudice.

We are pleased to honor the major leadership of this spectacular 800-member associ-ation. The Young Leadership Associates are the guardians of the future and constitute theessential link to ensuring our legacy.

It is now sixty-five years since the Liberation. In the commonly accepted narrative, theHolocaust began in 1939 and ended with the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. But whenwe look at the Holocaust from the perspective of what happened to the Jews, we see aSharsheret — a chain of events whose impact will extend for generations to come beyondthe liberation. It is imperative that efforts be put forth to research and study the post-Holo-caust period throughout the world.

The first in-depth exploration of this period took place last month at Yad Vashem at theinaugural conference of The Diana Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of theShoah. I would like to acknowledge the support for this endeavor of Avner Shalev, Chair-man of the Yad Vashem Directorate, and recognize the presence of Dr. Bella Gutterman,Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, who coordi-nated the conference, a truly historic event.

This conference created a model for future study on survivor communities worldwide.Yad Vashem has lit the lamp on the importance of the post-Holocaust period. For the

Holocaust to take its proper place in history, the influence of the chain of events that linkus to the past must be documented, understood and accepted.

The Yiddish phrase, “di goldene kayt” – the golden chain – is a symbol in Jewish loreof the continuity of traditional beliefs and values. By involving successive generations, ourwork in the American Society for Yad Vashem is emblematic of the unbroken chain of Jew-ish determination and resilience.

Thirty years have passed since we established theSociety for Yad Vashem. The pushing force to

establish the society was Eli Zborowski. The first mem-bers were mainly survivors of the Holocaust; many ofthem are no more with us. But I am happy to see heretheir children and grandchildren, who are continuingthe work their fathers started. This proves more thananything else the success of the Society.

We, the generation of grandfathers, remember the daysof liberation which we met with deep feelings of joy andsadness. Joy of survival and the defeat of Nazi Germany.The sadness emanated from the fact that only after liber-ation we began to understand the full extent of ourtragedy, that we remained few and alone, most of ourfamilies murdered, our communities devastated and de-stroyed, surrounded by an indifference to our suffering.

For the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people, liberation came too late. They didnot survive Auschwitz and Treblinka, neither the pits of Ponary and Babi Yar. But we thesurvivors have to be grateful, to the Red Army, to the British and American Armies, and tothe other Allied forces, for crushing Nazi Germany and liberating us. Many Jews wereamong the Liberators. Approximately one and a half million Jews served in the ranks ofthe Allied armies, and 250,000 of them fell in battle.

Each and every survivor will never forget the date and circumstances of his liberation. Iwas one of the lucky who not only experienced liberation but also fought as a liberator. Ifought against Nazi Germany for close to three years, until the last days of the war. I en-countered my liberation step by step. My first feeling of liberty was when I succeeded insmuggling a short-barreled rifle, which I stole from a German store, into the ghetto. It wasFebruary 1942. Keeping the weapon provided me with a feeling of strength, that I am nolonger at the mercy of the Nazis, I can fight back. I experienced the feeling of liberty forthe second time. It was when I escaped from the ghetto and joined the partisans in theforest. Now I was a fighter. It was March 1943.

On July 6th, 1944, I entered my hometown Sventiany, from which I had escaped a yearbefore. Ever since the rainy night when I escaped from the ghetto, I had been dreamingof this moment. And here I was. But I found no more Jews in my shtetl; only the stovesand chimneys of the burned wooden houses stood as monuments to a flourishing Jewishcommunity. Outside the township I stood by the pit where the town’s Jews were shot andburied, among them dozens of members of my own family. This is what I liberated.

The final stage of experiencing liberation was the night of December 24, 1945, when Iillegally reached the beaches of the Land of Israel on a small boat, and joined the ranksof the fighters of our independence.

Tonight’s dinner focuses on the chain of remembrance. A tree cannot grow without roots, sowe Jews, in order to exist as a people, have to preserve our roots. Among our roots is Holocaustremembrance and its implications and lessons. One of the universal lessons gained from theHolocaust is our duty to fight against racism, narrow-minded nationalism, and anti-Semitism.

We Jews should not forget that Hitler and Nazi Germany aimed to murder all the Jewishpeople, to erase and eradicate their very existence. The current Iranian president usesthe same language. Therefore an additional lesson which we must embrace is our obliga-tion to preserve and strengthen our Jewish identity, and our links to our ancient historicalhomeland, the land of Israel. These universal and our national lessons should be our chainof remembrance.

Eli Zborowski:

“OUR WORK IS EMBLEMATIC OF THE UNBROKEN

CHAIN OF JEWISH DETERMINATION AND RESILIENCE”

Yitzhak Arad:

“OUR NATIONAL LESSONS

SHOULD BE OUR CHAIN OF REMEMBRANCE”

The American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Annual Tribute Dinner

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE November/December 2010 - Kislev/Tevet 5771

Ifeel honored to represent a group of young men andwomen who have taken on the charge to continue

what our parents and grandparents have started. The thirdgeneration has an incredible responsibility. The third gen-eration must make a decision. Do we carry forward theheritage and traditions of the past? Or do we go out tomake our own mark on the world?

The originators, in this case the survivors, our grandpar-ents and great grandparents, saw the atrocities and feltthe pain themselves. They were forced to learn the incred-ibly hard lessons that came with living through the Holo-caust. They reacted and chose to move forward andreignite the light of the generations that came before

them. They kept Torah and Yiddishkeit alive. They fought to create the State of Israel.They built communities with synagogues and Jewish day schools. They chose to honorall of those that perished by forging ahead.

They formed Yad Vashem and taught us the importance of remembrance and educa-tion.

Our parents, the second generation, lived through much of the rebirth their parentsdreamed about. They saw the hard work and sacrifice firsthand and had a direct un-derstanding of the history and faith their parents represented and exemplified.

We, the third generation, have grown up in an easier world. We have seen the fruitsof our grandparents’ labor without the majority of the sacrifice.

Therein lies our challenge.Certainly we have studied the history and attended events that perpetuate our grand-

parents’ experiences. But are we just being kept warm by the flames of our parentsand grandparents? Do we have what it takes to build our own fire?

Even more importantly, will our children!?G-d willing they will never have to be a firsthand witness to anything like the Holo-

caust. However, that is all the more reason that we must step up and cement the her-itage being passed down through our lineage.

There are but only a few years to teach an entire generation. If we lose the next one,we lose it all.

Thank G-d as we stand here tonight, the task is well underway. Eli Zborowsky recog-nized this problem many years ago. Over 12 years ago Eli, Caroline Massel and manyothers set out to confront it. They created the Young Leadership Society of Yad Vashem,the YLA. Caroline has worked tirelessly to push the agenda and grow the organization.

So how have they done?Just look at some of the most active members being honored tonight. Attend one of

the annual YLA gala events to witness an amazing sight. Over 800 young Jewish menand women gather to eagerly support Yad Vashem!

We can proudly say that our heritage and faith are strong. That the fire is burningbright and the third and fourth generations have been taught how to make it grow.

Together, Caroline, the entire YLA and I are proud to stand in front of our parents andgrandparents and say Toda Rabah and “Hineni.” We are here. We are choosing to fol-low your path. We have learned the lessons, and have started to teach them ourselves.

On behalf of my fellow honorees, I would like to thank Eli Zborowski and the entiretyof Yad Vashem and the American Society for Yad Vashem. I would also like to thankCaroline Massel for her incredible work and achievements.

Most importantly, we thank our parents and grandparents for showing us how to en-sure that the memory and the lessons of the Shoah are never forgotten. We hope towork hand in hand with all of you for many years to come.

In 1948 in Berlin, a man who lost, among other family mem-bers, his wife and daughter, met and fell in love with a woman

who lost, among other family members, her parents and twin sis-ter. They married and had a family. My siblings and I are thatfamily. We are a link in an endless, unbreakable chain.

I would like to start by thanking you for this honor, for whichI am deeply moved. I also want to congratulate my fellow hon-orees, and join in their dedication and commitment to YadVashem and its mission.

Tonight’s theme, sharsheret (a chain), is reflected throughoutthis room. Collectively, we represent a chain of strength and ahistory of prevailing as a people. It has been my life’s mission –and that of my family — to keep that chain strong and growing,

Attending the official Yom Hashoah ceremony at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, has becomean integral part of my life. Every year, it is held a week before Yom Hazikaron, the MemorialDay for fallen soldiers in Israel, and I am there to observe this most solemn day of remem-brance. Together, these memorials provide a deep and historic connection between Israeland Jews worldwide.

In sharp contrast, like many other interesting juxtapositions in Israel, Yom Ha’atzmaut,Israel’s Independence Day, follows immediately after. This is the time when we rejoice atthe miracle that is the State of Israel, and we celebrate the unbreakable chain that linksour fate as a nation all the way back to Biblical times.

These three events represent sharsheret on many levels. They provide consecutive daysof reflection for us as individuals… as a country… and as a people. The understandingand insight — the spiritual connection — begins at Yad Vashem. This is where we beginto appreciate the history and ethos of the State of Israel and, in a greater sense, the heartof the Jewish nation.

I am the son of survivors. My brothers and sister and I were always strongly aware ofour parents’ tragic history and their remarkable survival. Even though our beloved parents,Henry ob”m and Rose, suffered unbearable losses, they imbued in us an unlimited senseof hope and determination, and a commitment to helping others achieve the life they foundwith one another...

Yad Vashem has been both an inspiration to me and an unparalleled resource. It hasprovided me with context for the stories I heard from my parents while growing up. As inthe case of so many Holocaust survivors, they were understandably reluctant to talk aboutall the terrible details with their children. But the bits and pieces of information I gleanedgrowing up truly came to light, in their horrific truth, at the Museum; like so many individuallinks coming together, connecting the past with the present.

This remarkable center [Yad Vashem] provides us all with a critical eye on history. It is ahistory the world must never forget and never deny! In order to move forward as a nation andas a people, it is essential for us to maintain an awareness of the past.

My father believed that a true understanding of what happened during the Holocaustcould be achieved only in the context of being in Israel. And I share that belief, whole-heartedly. The fact that Yad Vashem is centered in Jerusalem not only brings us a betterunderstanding of the roots of the State of Israel and its importance to the Jewish People,it gives us a destination to view our history…and to secure our future.

The profound effect that Yad Vashem has had on me defies description. Actively partic-ipating in supporting and maintaining this center of history and remembrance has becomea true “center” of my life. And being here tonight as part of a chain that is, inherently, de-fined by strength and spirit — standing amongst my mother, my siblings and some of my10 nieces and nephews, the newest links in our strong family chain – is one of the greatesthonors of my life.

Jeremy Halpern:

“WE ARE CHOOSING TO FOLLOW YOUR PATH.”

Mark Moskowitz:

“WE ARE A LINK IN AN ENDLESS,

UNBREAKABLE CHAIN.”


Dear Friends,It gives me great pleasure to send warm

greetings on the occasion of the Americanand International Societies for YadVashem's Annual Tribute Dinner.

Following their liberation, and in theshadow of their horrific experiences, thesurvivors of the Holocaust set out to re-claim and reconstruct not only their ownlives, but also to rebuild the Jewish peo-ple and help reestablish the Jewish state.

The survivors taught all humanity thateven the most appalling personal andcollective experiences can become asource of inspiration and resolve.

The support and dedication of the Ameri-can and International Societies for YadVashem ensures that these experienceswill forever be part of our history.

We appreciate your commitment to thisimportant cause. I wish you a meaningfuland memorable evening.

SincerelyBenjamin Netanyahu

Greetings from His Excellency the President of Israel,

Mr. Shimon Peres,

to the Friends of Yad Vashem

Dear Yad Vashem Friends,I want to express my warm appreciationfor your long-standing support of YadVashem and its meaningful mission.Given the present trend of Holocaust de-nial, Yad Vashem related activities serveto draw public attention to a dark era thatshould never be forgotten, and nurture itsmemory in perpetuity. Today, emphasison Jewish moral and ethical values andrespect for human life are of theessence.In the true Jewish tradition of mutual re-sponsibility, whether in Israel or the Dias-pora, it is our collective responsibility tocontinue bearing the torch of remem-brance and passing it on to the genera-tions to come, in tribute to those whohave perished and those who survived.I thank you for joining in this effort.Shimon Peres

GREETINGS FROM ISRAEL

November/December 2010 - Kislev/Tevet 5771 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

BY JEFFREY KLUGER, TIME

The Holocaust is a crime that neverseems to quit. Even as the ranks of

survivors grow smaller each year, the im-pact of that dark passage in history contin-ues to be felt. And it’s not just the victimswho feel the effects; it’s their children too.

Psychologists have long been intriguedby the emotional profile of so-called sec-ond-generation Holocaust survivors. Par-ents who lived through the camps wereforever changed by the horrors they wit-nessed. In the 21st century, many — prob-ably most — would be recognized assuffering from posttraumatic stress disor-der (PTSD). Back then, the absence ofsuch a diagnosis also meant the absenceof effective treatments. As a result, a gen-eration of children grew up in homes inwhich one, and sometimes both, parentswere battling untold emotional demons atthe same time they were going about thedifficult business of trying to raise happykids. No surprise, they weren’t always en-tirely successful.

Over the years, a large body of work hasbeen devoted to studying PTSD symptomsin second-generation survivors, and it hasfound signs of the condition in their behav-ior and even their blood — with higher lev-els of the stress hormone cortisol, forexample. The assumption — a perfectlyreasonable one — was always that thesesymptoms were essentially learned. Grow

up with parents afflicted with the moodswings, irritability, jumpiness and hypervig-ilance typical of PTSD and you’re likely towind up stressed and high-strung yourself.

Now a new paper adds another dimen-sion to the science, suggesting that it’s notjust a second generation’s emotional pro-file that can be affected by a parent’strauma; it may be their genes too. Thestudy, published in the journal BiologicalPsychiatry, was conducted by a team ledby neurobiologist Isabelle Mansuy of theUniversity of Zurich. What she and her col-leagues set out to explore went deeperthan genetics in general, focusing insteadon epigenetics — how genes change as aresult of environmental factors in ways thatcan be passed on to the next generation.

The Holocaust is hardly the only life crisisthat can shape behavior and genes. Sur-vivors of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Darfur — oreven those who grew up in unstable orabusive homes — can exhibit similarchanges. But Holocaust survivors remainone of the best study groups available be-cause their trauma was so great, their pop-ulation is so well known, and so many ofthem have gone on to produce children,grandchildren, and even great-grandchil-dren. Humans, alas, may never run out ofways to behave savagely toward one an-other. But the better we can understandthe price paid by the victims — and the ba-bies of the victims — the better we may beable to treat their wounds.

GENETIC SCARS OF THE HOLOCAUST:

CHILDREN SUFFER TOO Russia has rejected a United Statescourt ruling to turn over a Jewish li-

brary to a Hasidic group in New York.A U.S. judge last week ruled against the

Russian government for its refusal to re-turn thousands of manuscripts that oncebelonged to a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi.

At issue are 12,000 religious books andmanuscripts seized during the Bolshevikrevolution and the Russian Civil War and25,000 pages of handwritten teachingsand other writings of religious leaders

seized by the Red Army in Nazi Germanyas war booty.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said lateWednesday that the ruling is a rude viola-tion of international law.

It said the library was nationalized be-cause its owner, Rabbi Joseph Isaac

Schneersohn, had no heirs. Schneersohnwas forced to leave Russia in 1927.

The ministry said the library is availablefor scientific study and worship.

Chabad-Lubavitch said it feared somemanuscripts were headed to the blackmarket.

Chabad sued Russia in 2004 after other ef-forts had failed in recovering its original texts.

The texts had been transported fromPoland to Moscow by the Red Army at theend of World War II as “trophy documents”

and “war booty” to the RussianState Military Archive.

In June, the Russian govern-ment said it would no longer par-ticipate in the lawsuit, telling aWashington district court that ithad “no authority to enter orderswith respect to the propertyowned by the Russian Federa-tion and in its possession.”

It added that the United Statescould deal with the disputethrough diplomatic channels andChabad should file suit in aRussian court.

“Russia is showing its con-tempt and disdain for interna-tional law, the American judicialsystem, and basic principles of

fairness and justice,” Nathan Lewin, alawyer for Chabad, said in a statement.

The head of Lubavitch in Russia, RabbiBerel Lazar, has said he favors a diplo-matic solution to securing the return of thecollections. “This is probably more efficientto convince the Russians,” he said.

RUSSIA REFUSES TO TURN OVER JEWISH LIBRARY TO U.S.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s chief rabbi

Berel Lazar, and president of Jewish communities of Russia

Alexander Boroda, from left, visit Jewish library in July 2010.

An ongoing project seeks to preserveand perform music written by victims

of the Holocaust and other World War IIprisoners.

A handful of the songs made theirworld premiere in Atlanta during “Testa-ments of the Heart,” a program to helpraise money to collect and preserve moremusic produced by captives of the Axispowers.

Some songs are slow, emotional, al-most weepy symphonies. Others are driv-ing and angry pub songs. A few aresarcastic jazz numbers.

Already thousands of the songs havebeen collected by Italian pianist and con-ductor Francesco Lotoro in a 20-year ef-fort to ensure the music is preserved.

He plans to house the collection in At-lanta’s Emory University once he raisesthe money to transfer it to the university’slibrary.

Francesco Lotoro collected thousands of songs.

HOLOCAUST MUSIC CAPTURES CULTURE OF CAMPS

The House of Representatives hasintroduced a resolution aimed at

helping Holocaust survivors in the UnitedStates in need of in-home care.

U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz(D-Fla.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) intro-duced a resolution Sept. 29 to raiseawareness of the social service needs ofHolocaust survivors — specifically theneed for them to be able to age in place.

The resolution, which was referred tothe House Education and Labor Commit-tee, expresses congressional support forefforts that help Holocaust survivors inAmerica continue to live at home and ap-plauds nonprofit organizations such asThe Jewish Federations of North Americafor their work honoring and assistingHolocaust survivors.

It also urges the Obama administrationand the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services to provide Holocaustsurvivors with needed social servicesthrough existing programs, and to de-velop and implement programs that en-sure Holocaust survivors are able to age

in place in their communities and avoidinstitutionalization during their remainingyears.

Of the approximately 127,000 Holo-caust survivors living in the UnitedStates, more than three-quarters areolder than 75 — a majority are in their80s and 90s. Some two-thirds of the sur-vivors in America are living alone, andmany lack the financial resources forbasic necessities such as proper housingand health care.

Most Holocaust survivors fall beneaththe federal poverty threshold that wouldplace them at risk of institutionalization.Institutionalized settings are especiallydifficult for Holocaust survivors, researchhas shown, because such environmentsreintroduce the sights, sounds, and rou-tines reminiscent of their Holocaust expe-riences.

Wasserman Schultz said the UnitedStates has “a moral obligation to ac-knowledge the plight and uphold the dig-nity of Holocaust survivors to ensure theirwell-being in their remaining years.”

HOUSE RESOLUTION AIMS

TO HELP HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

An Iranian web site that uses cartoonsto deny the Holocaust was launched

by a nongovernmental cultural organiza-tion in the country.

The HoloCartoon site offers a parallelversion of historical events in Jewish his-tory using cartoons. The material report-edly is based on a cartoon book on theHolocaust published in Iran in 2008.

The web site, according to the Anti-Defamation League news release, is rifewith anti-Semitic imagery, Jewish conspir-acy theories, Holocaust denial and factualinaccuracies.

“HoloCartoon is a pernicious Web site re-plete with vicious anti-Semitism and cari-catures of Jews fabricating the Holocauststory to advance their goals, and depic-tions of Jews as murderers and manipula-tive money worshippers,” said Abraham

Foxman, ADL’s national director and aHolocaust survivor. “Its pseudo-historymakes a mockery of the Holocaust, andthe site is little more than a virtual cesspoolof anti-Semitism.”

The book, which can be seen on the website by clicking on a swastika icon to turnits pages, tells readers that Jews createdthe idea of the Holocaust and fabricatedthe existence of the gas chambers in orderto receive reparations.

The site has English, Arabic and Farsiversions.

The ADL called on the United Statesto publicly denounce the Iranianregime’s blatant anti-Semitism. Iranianauthorities would have had to approvethe creation of the web site but not itscontent, according to the AssociatedPress.

IRANIAN HOLOCAUST-DENYING WEB SITE

Hungarian survivors of the Holocaustand families of the victims sued the

Republic of Hungary and its two rail com-panies in U.S. court, accusing them of col-laborating with the Nazis to exterminateJews during World War II.

The lawsuit accused the Hungarian gov-ernment and rail companies of confiscatingproperty of Jews and transporting them toghettos and concentration camps wherehundreds of thousands perished in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine.

“The Jewish victims of the HungarianHolocaust seek only what is due them —compensation and restitution for the atroc-ities they suffered at the hands of the de-fendants,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court forthe District of Columbia, seeks class-actionstatus and unspecified damages. It says atleast 300 survivors have been identified aspossible members of the class, but therecould be more than 5,000.

A lawyer for the individuals suing,Chuck Fax, said the claims likely totaltens of millions of dollars and possiblymore.

A Hungarian Embassy spokesman inWashington had no immediate commenton the lawsuit.

The case was brought under two fed-eral statutes, one that provides excep-tions to the Foreign Sovereign ImmunitiesAct which allow individuals to sue foreigngovernments that typically have immunityfrom lawsuits.

The other statute permits non-U.S. citi-zens to bring claims against private for-eign entities in American courts. Thelawsuit targets the government, the Hun-garian national railway and its cargo railcompany which was privatized in 2008.

Fax said that the lawsuit was still timelybecause Hungary has yet to compensatethe survivors or their families or return theassets to them.

HUNGARY, RAIL FIRMS SUED IN U.S.

OVER HOLOCAUST ROLE

B O O K R E V I E W SB O O K R E V I E W S MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE November/December 2010 - Kislev/Tevet 5771

The Emergence of Holocaust Educationin American Schools.

By Thomas D. Fallace. Palgrave Macmil-lan: NY, 2008. 231 pp. $80 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

It’s natural to think that the larger thebook, the more important information it

has to offer the reader. But, that’s not nec-essarily so . . . For example, The Emer-gence of Holocaust Education by ThomasD. Fallace is a slim volume — 231 pages— yet it is chock-full of valuable materialmeticulously gleaned by way of conscien-tious research, all of it absorbing and oftenquite thought-provoking.

Thus, in Fallace’s work — just as the titlepromises — we read the history of exactlyhow Holocaust education came on theAmerican scene. We see how, immedi-ately after the war, there was a silence asregards the topic, very like the silence ofthe victims themselves. Interestingly, wenote how the silence was broken in the1960s as a result of the media’s coverageof the Adolf Eichmann trial and Israel’ssubsequent Six-Day War, a war whichfrightened many into thinking that anotherHolocaust was “imminent.” Then, in the

1970s we learn of the substantive affectprize-winning writer and Professor ElieWiesel had on furthering interest in theHolocaust. Finally, we real-ize the tremendous and de-termined impact the April1978 NBC miniseries Holo-caust had. Indeed, thisminiseries stunningly cap-tured the attention of millionsof Americans . . . andsquarely focused this atten-tion on the Holocaust.

Not surprisingly, Fallace

goes on to tell us, concomi-

tant with the above, study of

the Holocaust grew and with

it curricula on how to teach it

. . . along with problems,

problems many could never

have imagined. Why?

“Genocide consciousness crossed [paths]

with another ideological current called the

‘affective revolution.’” In the 1960s and

1970s this, in pedagogical terms, meant

that teachers were exceptionally con-

cerned with making all they taught “rele-

vant” to the lives of the students in their

classrooms. This, more specific to our dis-

cussion, meant that simply transmitting the

facts of the Holocaust was not enough. It

meant that Holocaust curric-

ula would frequently include

comparisons to other geno-

cides. It meant that Holo-

caust curricula would often

use the subject to engage

students in a greater study

of morality and ethics.

In short, complaints about

the curricula came fast and

furiously. For example,

some felt strongly that the

Holocaust was “unique” and

not to be compared to any

other genocide in any way.

To these individuals com-

parison was sacrilegious.

In the meanwhile, others were upset that

more genocides weren’t included. And,

along the same lines, still others felt that

the Nazis were being unfairly presented as

“the only ones who committed crimes

against humanity and that the Jews were

the only ones who suffered to any great ex-

tent.” Then, too, there was the whole ques-

tion of whether history should be used to

teach morality. Could it? Should it? Furthermore, there was the question of

just who was doing the teaching. Did theyknow the subject matter well enough? Didthey have their own agenda? Did thisagenda affect the teaching? Just whatwere students learning?

At first glance, the teaching of the Holo-caust seems a simple matter. But, there ismuch, much more to it. And this, in fact,makes The Emergence of Holocaust Edu-cation in American Schools a book thatshould most especially be read by stu-dents of the Holocaust, teachers of theHolocaust, and teachers generally. Formany issues Fallace focuses on have to dowith the teaching of history generally.

By the way, particularly interesting in allthis is the fact that Holocaust education inAmerican public schools was not initiatedby any Jewish organization. It was a“grassroots movement” initiated by teach-ers themselves. Moreover, those dedi-cated to the teaching of the subject haveincluded both Jews and non-Jews.

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor of Media,Communication, and Visual Arts at PaceUniversity.

THE EMERGENCE OF HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS

REVIEWED BY EDWARD ROTHSTEIN,THE NEW YORK TIMES

Is there anything left to be said aboutanti-Semitism? By now surely the out-

line is clear: how hatred of Jews grew outof early Christianity’s attempts to supplantJudaism; how the demonization of Jews inthe Middle Ages turned violent; how thehatred was given its name by a 19th-cen-tury German journalist; and how it reachedcataclysmic fulfillment inthe Holocaust.

There are other land-marks: the expulsion ofthe Jews from England,Spain and Portugal; inter-mittent massacres in Mus-lim lands; the constructionof European ghettos; thepogroms of Russia andEastern Europe; the Drey-fus Affair; the Nazificationof Europe; Stalin’s purgesand show trials.

And then, of course,there are the triumphs thatact as a kind of remon-strance: the Enlighten-ment success of Jews insecular European societies, the myriad op-portunities in the United States, the birth ofmodern Hebrew, and, after a half-centuryof settlement, land purchases, and institu-tion building, the creation of Israel, whosefounding principles incorporated both dem-ocratic and Judaic ideals.

Why then lately have new tomes beenpublished devoted to the hatred of Jews?A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism fromAntiquity to the Global Jihad (RandomHouse) weighs in at about 1,200 pages, acompendium of a career’s research byRobert S. Wistrich, professor of modernJewish history at Hebrew University in Is-rael. And more than 800 pages are de-voted just to British anti-Semitic history inTrials of the Diaspora (Oxford) by AnthonyJulius, a learned British lawyer whose

clients included Diana, Princess of Wales,and whose book on T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semi-tism was widely praised for its supple un-derstanding.

Surely this attention is a bit over-wrought? Aren’t we in an age that

must be “post” all such sentiments — post-modern, post-Auschwitz, and post-anti-Se-mitic? Haven’t many anti-Semitic doctrines(or their consequences) been largely over-turned? How many people today would ad-

vocate ghettos or extermi-nation? Who still believesthat Jews bake Christianchildren’s blood intomatzo? Many countrieshave forbidden hatespeech; hasn’t that en-forced a decorous socialtact? And while it is difficultto ignore the vulgar ha-treds expressed by Mus-lim protestors or in thenewspapers of the Arabworld or even amongWesterners, aren’t thosejust frustrated expressionsof justifiable political griev-ances?

Besides, anti-Semitism,

we now understand, is a form of racism.

Like all forms of group hatred, it is subject

to reform and to the modern cure of sen-

sitivity training. We learn about such ha-

treds in order to exorcise them. It seems

every museum exhibition, textbook and

children’s story about racism provides a

similar moral prescription: tolerance.

So isn’t there something a little tasteless

about bringing up anti-Semitism all the

time, let alone drumming its theme page

after page? Sure, racism may still flourish,

but given the modern success of Jews,

hasn’t this particular form of it become an

anomaly? Or worse, hasn’t the term be-

come a manipulative attempt to deflect

judgment? As is often pointed out, criticism

(Continued on page 15)

Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust. By Dr. Mordecai Paldiel. Introduction by

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Prefaceby Rabbi Arthur Schneier. KTAV, 2006.250 pp. $29.50 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY PETER STEINFELS

The book is called Diplomat Heroes ofthe Holocaust, and perhaps the most

telling thing about it is that it is very slim. Richard C. Holbrooke, former ambassa-

dor to the United Nations, made that pointduring a ceremony, held at Park East Syn-agogue on Manhattan’sEast Side, to mark thebook’s publication.

During the years ofNazi persecution andthen mass murder ofJews, Mr. Holbrookenoted, Europe’s em-bassies and consulateswere filled with thou-sands of officials, butvery few of them provedwilling to toss aside pro-tocol and instructions tosave the lives of peoplethreatened with death inthe camps.

Diplomat Heroes of theHolocaust is a documen-tary record of 29 excep-tions. It was written by Mordecai Paldiel,director of the department at Yad Vashemthat designates non-Jewish rescuers ofJews with the honorific title RighteousAmong the Nations.

Stationed in cities either already or aboutto be under the control of the Third Reich,this small minority of determined and in-genious officials issued passports givingJewish refugees new citizenship status,sometimes to unlikely places, like El Sal-vador.

They issued exit and entry visas and let-ters of protection so that Jews could pass

to safer territories. They accepted fakedocuments or even helped people procurethem. They made up phony stamps andcreated new documents to impress localofficials and border guards. They bluffedand they threatened and, in many cases,personally sheltered or hid Jews or accom-panied them to border crossings.

Defying their own governments’ policiesagainst assisting refugees, and especiallyJewish refugees, was often as necessaryas defying German power. Feng Shan Ho,for example, China’s consul general in Vi-

enna after Austria be-came part of the NaziReich, earned a repri-mand and then loss of hispost for freely issuingvisas to Shanghai. Ap-proximately 18,000 Aus-trian Jews actuallyescaped to China, whileothers used their visas toreach safety elsewhere.

Even stranger was thesuccess of two diplomatsin Lithuania, JanZwartendijk, a business-man serving as honoraryDutch consul general inKaunas, and ChiuneSugihara, a consul gen-eral (and spy) for Japan

there. The two men issued thousands ofdocuments providing for the entry of Jewsinto the Dutch-controlled Caribbean islandof Curaçao and for passage through theSoviet Union and Japan to get there.Needless to say, the beneficiaries of thisscheme neither had heard of Curaçao norended up there. They did, however, es-cape death in Eastern Europe.

The story of Raoul Wallenberg is nowlegendary. The charismatic young envoywas sent from Sweden (with the backingof President Franklin D. Roosevelt) to pro-


A HATRED THAT RESISTS EXORCISM IN THE ERA OF THE HOLOCAUST,

29 WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE


BY JAY ALABASTER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The young man’s monochrome por-trait is at least 70 years old, the

whites all faded to yellow, but it is still clearhe had style. His hair is slicked down, eyearched, suit perfect with matching tie andhandkerchief.

He also had the good fortune to escapeEurope in the early days of World War II.The photo, a gift to the man who helpedhim escape, is one of seven recently dis-covered snapshots that cast light on a lit-tle-known subplot of the war – even asGermany sought to seal Jewish Euro-peans in, a small army of tourism officialsfrom its main ally, Japan, helped shepherdthousands away to safety.

“My best regards to my friend TatsuoOsako,” is scrawled in French on the backof the picture, which is signed “I. Segaloff”and dated March 4, 1941. His fate is un-known.

An effort is under way to find the peoplein these portraits or their descendants, allof whom are assumed to be Jewish. Per-sonal photos of such refugees, who oftenfled with few possessions, are rare.

The photos were found in an old diaryowned by Osako, who was a young em-ployee of the Japan Tourist Bureau at thetime, and died in 2003. Akira Kitade, whoworked under Osako and is researching abook about him, has contacted Israeli offi-cials for help and visited the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum in Washing-ton, D.C.

The museum said he gave it about 30photographs that he is trying to identify,and received a list of over 2,000 Jews whoreceived travel papers that enabled themto reach Japan.

Nissim Ben Shitrit, the Israeli ambassa-dor to Japan, says he has passed on theinformation to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,which tracks and honors victims of theHolocaust, and is optimistic some of the in-dividuals can be tracked down.

“I thought that we discovered almosteverything about the horror of the Holo-caust,” Shitrit said. “And yet there is moreto discover.”

The photos shed further light on thestory of Chiune Sugihara, a Japan-

ese diplomat stationed in Lithuania whogranted transit visas to several thousandJews in the early days of the war. In doingso, he defied strict stipulations from Tokyothat such recipients have proper funds anda clear final destination after Japan.

He was one of a handful of diplomatssuch as Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg andHiram Bingham IV of the U.S. who usedtheir bureaucratic machinery, often withouttheir government’s knowledge, to issue thepaperwork that would get Jews to safety.

Dubbed the “Japanese Schindler,” Sugi-hara was honored in 1985 by Yad Vashemas one of the Righteous Among the Na-tions, a high honor reserved for non-Jewswho saved Jews at their own personal riskfrom the Holocaust, Hitler’s destruction of6 million Jews.

A short movie about him, “Visas andVirtue,” won an Academy Award in 1997.

Museums in his home town and in Lithua-nia are dedicated to his memory.

In league with Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutchconsul in Lithuania, Sugihara worked non-stop on visas for Jews in the months untilRussia annexed Lithuania in August 1940

and he was forced to leave the country. Heissued thousands of documents and con-tinued to slip blank visas out of the windowof his train as it pulled away, according toaccounts of his departure.

Visas issued by Sugihara, who died in1986 at the age of 86, are estimated tohave given around 6,000 Jewish refugeesa lifeline out of Europe, though records areincomplete. These transit visas enabledthem to travel through Russia on the

Trans-Siberian railroad, a harrowing jour-ney over thousands of miles that couldtake weeks, into Japanese-controlled ter-ritory in Manchuria.

While the diplomat pumped out hisvisas independently, a much more

organized and lesser-known effort wasunder way for Jewish refugees once theyreached Japanese territory – which iswhere Osako enters the saga.

In 1940, the Japan Tourist Bureau, thecountry’s main tourist agency, agreed tohelp Jews in the U.S. distribute aid moneyto refugees fleeing Europe. This wouldallow them to fulfill immigration require-ments and help them function once insideJapan.

The decision was made despite Tokyo’sclose ties to Germany; according to JTBrecords the company had the permissionof officials in the Foreign Ministry and otheragencies.

The bureau assigned workers to helprefugees at various stages of their journey,and Osako, in his second year of employ-ment, worked as an escort and clerk onships that took them across the Sea ofJapan to the island nation.

Most would then go on to the port citiesof Kobe and Yokohama and try to arrangepassage onward.

“Sugihara has been praised around theworld and is held in very high esteem, butMr. Sugihara’s great actions were sup-ported by various individuals working un-seen, in his shadow, and I’d like Mr.Osako’s experiences to be known,” said


BY WILLIAM R. PERL, IMMIGRATION DAILY

It is widely believed that the Nazi “FinalSolution” would have claimed fewer vic-

tims if the free world had shaken off its apa-thy and helped the Jews to escape. Thistheory, that the world stood passively by asthe genocide was being committed, is nowbeing challenged. Evidence has been pro-duced that arrives at the shattering conclu-sion that the Western powers were morethan passive, apathetic bystanders.

Contrary to popular belief, the problemfor Jews during the Holocaust was not howto get out, but where to go. The key figuresin most governments throughout the world,instead of liberalizing their immigrationlaws, closed their borders to the huntedJews, or at most admitted token numbersonly. The Nazis set the house aflame, andthe free world barred the doors.

Some of the measures taken by the freeworld that contributed to the deaths of tensof thousands remain little known. Foremostamong these was the thwarting by theUnited States Department of State of rescueplans that would have brought otherwisedoomed refugees to the Caribbean, specifi-cally to the sparsely inhabited U.S. Virgin Is-lands as well as the Republic of Haiti.

The U.S. Virgin Islands had been ac-quired by the United States from Denmarkin 1917 for $25 million. Most people areaware of only three islands: St. Thomas,St. Croix, and St. John. The group, how-ever, consists of 68 islands of diversesizes. Although most are tiny, they com-prise 86,000 acres. At the time when theirinhabitants invited refugees from Nazi bar-barism, the islands had a population of ap-proximately 25,000, most of whom werevery poor and uneducated.

Many of the islands are quite mountain-ous, dotted with picturesque little ports and

cozy bays. The climate is ideal in thespring, fall, and winter, and quite comfort-able in the summer as the trade winds pro-vide a cooling breeze. Temperatures varyonly slightly from the warmest to thecoolest months. There is a rich diversity ofnative plant and animal life.

RESOLVED: A HAVEN FOR REFUGEES

As early as November 18, 1938, thelegislature of the Virgin Islands

adopted the following resolution: WHEREAS, world conditions have cre-

ated large refugee groups, and WHEREAS, such groups eventually will

migrate to places of safety, andWHEREAS, the Virgin Islands of the

United States being a place of safety canoffer surcease from misfortune.

NOW THEREFORE, be it resolved bythe Legislative Assembly of the Virgin Is-lands of the United States in session as-sembled that it be made known to Refugeepeoples of the world that when and if ex-isting barriers are removed that they shallfind surcease from misfortune in the VirginIslands of the United States.

AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED thatcopies of this Resolution be forwarded tothe President of the United States, theSecretary of State, the Secretary of Labor,the Secretary of the interior, and membersof the Press.

The State Department immediatelystarted action to obstruct the islanders’ hu-manitarian efforts and to close this possi-ble avenue of escape. On December 15,1939, the Secretary of State sent a letterto all authorities possibly concerned, call-ing this resolution “incompatible with exist-ing law.”

The Department of the Interior and theLabor Department began a probe of thelegal issues. The Labor Department an-nounced on February 3, 1940, that the in-

vitation was “consistent with existing lawand unobjectionable from the standpoint ofpolicy.”

It was November 6, 1940, almost twoyears after the announcement of the invi-tation, when the Solicitor of the Interior De-partment published his 22-page report.The report concluded that “the proclama-tion in question is, in all respects, legallyunassailable.” The Attorney General, how-ever, who on October 16, 1939, was askedby the Secretary of the Interior for his eval-uation of the legalities, refused on March29, 1940, to study the issue “for the reasonthat the Secretary of State had not invitedsuch an opinion.”

“DELAY AND DELAY”

During all that time, people who couldhave been rescued and living in a

Caribbean paradise remained in the hell ofNazi Europe until they fell victim to thedeath camps. The effectiveness of this“delay and delay” policy was praised by theAssistant Secretary of State, BreckinridgeLong. In a memo dated June 26, 1940, hewrote: “We can delay and effectively stopfor a temporary period of indefinite lengththe number of immigrants into the UnitedStates. We could do this by simply advis-ing our consuls to put every obstacle in theway and to resort to various administrativeadvices which would postpone and post-pone the granting of the visas.”

This policy was criticized by the GeneralCounsel of the U.S. Treasury, RandolphPaul, as “murder by delay.” He chargedhigh officials in the State Department withforming “an American underground move-ment . . . to let the Jews be killed.”

This strategy was in sharp contrast withthe public statements of concern made byState Department officials. On October 17,1939, at a meeting in the White House,speaking before the Intergovernmental

Committee on Political Refugees, Secre-tary of State Cordell Hull declared: “We doknow that at this period there are an in-creasing number of people who are drain-ing the cup of bitterness and ofdisappointment to its very dregs. We doknow that they are on a level below that ofthe common animal, which is able to findsomething to subsist, to find some placewhere it can relax and sleep.”

Lawrence H. Cramer, Governor of theVirgin Islands, surprised and frustrated bythe turmoil created in Washington by hislegislature’s rescue attempt, finally signedon November 2, 1940, two years after theresolution had been adopted, a decree ac-cording to which 2,000 families were to beadmitted initially. To appease State Depart-ment critics, certain requirements were im-posed, but tens of thousands qualified.

The invitation’s main purpose was to pro-vide a haven for those who had applied forimmigration to the United States and hadobtained a quota number for their registra-tion and eventual processing when theirnumber came up. Waiting times were usu-ally long, sometimes three years or more.The Nazis, of course, didn’t abstain fromarrests and deportations just because thevictims had quota numbers, and thou-sands with such numbers perished. The is-lands were thus to have provided a refugeduring the dangerous waiting period. As aprerequisite to entry, the refugees were notto become public charges—but that wouldhave been no obstacle since many had rel-atives in the U.S. who were willing to pro-vide such an affidavit, as were many majorJewish welfare organizations.

A NEW WEAPON

Notwithstanding the thousand miles ofocean separating the U.S. mainland

from the Virgin Islands, the State Depart-(Continued on page 12)

OLD PHOTOS REVEAL TALE OF JAPAN AND JEWS OF WWII

Tatsuo Osako of the Japan Tourist Bureau.

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE LOST CARIBBEAN PARADISE

S U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RS U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E R MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE November/December 2010 - Kislev/Tevet 5771

BY STANLEY ABRAMOVITCH, CNN

In October 1945, I spent Yom Kippur inthe displaced persons camp in Lands-

berg in Bavaria, Germany, as the repre-sentative of the American Jewish JointDistribution Committee (JDC), workingwith displaced persons.

The liberated Jews who had been impris-oned in the nearby Dachau concentrationcamp, as well as those who had beenforced to work in ammunition and otherfactories in Bavaria, were gathered intoLandsberg and nearby Feldafing camps.Many Jews from other concentrationcamps had been force-marched to this partof Germany, where the U.S. Army liberatedthem.

In Landsberg there was a spacious Ger-man Army barracks confiscated by theU.S. Army, in which some of the liberatedJews were housed. Basic food and med-ical care were provided by the Army, sup-plemented by assistance from JDC.

The Jews elected a committee which as-sumed responsibility for the internal admin-istration of the camp. Synagogues wereorganized for the high holidays by differentgroups, often on the basis of the origin ofthe participants.

I attended morning services in the syna-gogue for Polish Jews. The older genera-tion was almost not there. They were the

first victims, since they lacked the physicalstrength to withstand the horrors of thecamps. Few children survived. They, too,succumbed quickly. The survivors prayed,remembered, wept and found a little com-fort in those tears.

After morning prayers, I decided tovisit other synagogues and spend

some time with other groups. I left the syn-agogue and walked across the half-emptystreets. There were many people who re-mained in the street and refused to attendservices. They were angry at G-d.

Among them were formerly religiousJews who could not accept the apparentindifference of G-d to the suffering, the tor-ture, and the tragedy they had both wit-

nessed and experienced in their homesand in the camps.

They could not reconcile their former be-liefs and convictions of an All-Merciful,Almighty Divine Being, with the catastro-phe that had struck their communities.They would not pray. When they heard therecitation of the Kaddish, the special

prayer of mourners ex-pressing praise of theLord, they reacted angrilythat G-d did not deservethe Kaddish.

They were broken inspirit. They could not rec-oncile recent events towhich they were wit-nesses with the contentsof the Hebrew prayers.

These Jews roamed thestreets. They wanted toexpress their anger, toshow G-d that they defiedHim, as he seemed tohave abandoned them.

Some ate their food on the fast day publiclyin the streets, as a gesture of defiance – ofrevolt.

In one of the streets, I saw a large groupof people standing in a circle. I ap-

proached nearer to find out what wasgoing on.

In the middle of the circle stood a seven-year-old girl, embarrassed, perplexed. She

could not understand why all these peoplestood around her.

She, of course, could not know that theywere surprised to find a Jewish child. Sothey stood, silently, and just looked at thismiracle of a Jewish child in their midst.They could not tear themselves away fromthis one child who said nothing and towhom nothing was said. They just stoodand gaped.

A special prayer is normally recited onYom Kippur for the departed members ofone’s family. It’s called Yizkor, the memo-rial prayer.

As those people looked at the little girl,they remembered their own children, ortheir younger brothers and sisters, thenephews and nieces who at one time weretheir pride and joy, and who were no more.Each one of them looked and remem-bered, recalled the beloved children whowere cruelly exterminated.

As they remembered, they recited with-out any words the Yizkor for all those whoonce were part of their lives and now weregone forever. This was a silent, most mov-ing Yizkor, without words, without prayerbooks, recited in that street in Landsberg,by a group of Jewish survivors, watching abewildered little Jewish girl.

It was the most moving, most eloquent,most heartfelt, most silent Yizkor I haveever heard.

MY FAITH: YOM KIPPUR 1945, IN A CAMP FOR HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Stanley Abramovitch (seated, second from right) with American Jew-

ish Joint Distribution Committee staff at a German displaced persons

camp circa 1945.

The Nazis stripped hundreds of thou-sands of artworks from Jews during

World War II in one of the biggest culturalraids in history, often photographing theirspoils and meticulously cataloguing themon typewritten index cards.

Holocaust survivors and their relatives,as well as art collectors and museums, cango online at www.errproject.org/jeude-paume to search a free historical databaseof more than 20,000 art objects stolen inGerman-occupied France and Belgiumfrom 1940 to 1944, including paintings byClaude Monet and Marc Chagall.

The database is a joint project of theNew York-based Conference of JewishMaterial Claims Against Germany and theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Mu-seum in Washington, D.C.

The database is unusual because it hasbeen built around Nazi-era records thatwere digitized and rendered searchable,showing what was seized and from whom,along with data on restitution or repatria-

tion and photographs taken of the seizedobjects, the groups told The AssociatedPress.

The Claims Conference, which helpsHolocaust survivors and their rela-

tives to reclaim property, said it had usedthe database to estimate that nearly half ofthe objects may never have been returnedto their rightful owners or their descen-dants or their country of origin.

“Most people think or thought that mostof these items were repatriated or resti-tuted,” said Wesley A. Fisher, director of re-search at the Claims Conference. “It isn’t

true. Over half of them werenever repatriated. That in itselfis rather interesting histori-cally.”

Marc Masurovsky, the pro-ject’s director at the museum,said the database was de-signed to evolve as new infor-mation is gathered. “I hopethat the families do consult itand tell us what is right andwhat is wrong with it,” headded.

The database combinesrecords from the U.S. NationalArchives in College Park, Md.;the German Bundesarchiv, thefederal archive in Koblenz;and repatriation and restitution

records held by the French government.By giving a new view of looted art, the

database could raise questions about thepossibly tainted history of works of art insome of the world’s most important mu-seum collections, experts said.

“I always tell people we have no ideahow much is out there because nobodyhas ever bothered to take a complete in-ventory,” said Willi Korte, one of the most

prominent independent provenance re-searchers of looted Nazi art. “I think all ofthose that say there’s not much left to docertainly should think twice.”

Korte has been at the forefront ofthe worldwide search for art lootedby the Nazis, an undertaking thathas accelerated over the past twodecades, spurring court battlesand pitting the descendants ofJewish families who were forced togive up their possession againstmuseums and private collectors.

Among the works listed in thedatabase is a painting by the

Danish artist Philips Wouwerman,which had belonged to the Roth-schild family and was discovered inthe secret Zurich vault of Reich artdealer Bruno Lohse in 2007.

Korte, who was asked to developan inventory of the works in theLohse vault, said the Wouwermanpainting “was clearly plundered.”

No one knows exactly how manyobjects the Nazis looted and howmany may still be missing.

The Claims Conference says about650,000 art objects were taken, and thou-sands of items are still lost.

But the true number may never beknown because of lack of documentation,the passage of time and the absence of acentral arbitration body.

Some museum organizations have ar-gued in recent years that most looted arthas been identified as researchers focuson the provenance of art objects.

The database includes only a slice of therecords generated by the Einsatzstab Re-ichsleiter Rosenberg, an undertaking ofThird Reich ideologue Alfred Rosenberg toseize archives, books, art, Judaica, home

furnishings, and other objects from Jewishfamilies, bookstores, and collections.Records of the looting were disbursed tonearly a dozen countries after the war.

The database is focused on ERR spoilsshipped to a prewar museum near theLouvre, where they were often cataloguedand sold back to the market, destroyed orintegrated into the lavish private collectionsof top Nazi officials — including the militarychief Hermann Goering.

Julius Berman, the chairman of theClaims Conference, said organizing Naziart-looting records was a key step to right-ing an injustice.

“It is now the responsibility of museums,art dealers, and auction houses to checktheir holdings against these records to de-termine whether they might be in posses-sion of art stolen from Holocaust victims,”he said.

NEW ONLINE RESOURCE DEBUTS FOR NAZI-ERA LOOTED ART

In this April 24, 1945, photo released by the U.S. National

Archives, an American soldier stands among German loot stored

in a church at Elligen, Germany.

In this May 13, 1945, photo released by the U.S. National

Archives, U.S. Army Sgt. Harold Maus of Scranton, Pa.,

looks over an engraving by German artist Albrecht Durer,

which was found among other art treasures at a salt mine

in Merkers, Germany


BY MICHAEL BURLEIGH, MAIL ONLINE

When a platoon of conquering Ger-man SS soldiers entered a remote

village in Russia in 1941, their leader, AloisKnäbel, was told by an informer that thelocal cobbler was Jewish.

Knäbel had the man, his wife and three-year-old daughter brought to him and setthe adults to work scrubbing his quarters.When they had finished, he led them out-side and, while holding the child’s hand, heshot them dead.

The toddler started screaming, and Knä-bel picked her up, stroked her hair andmuttered soothing words to her. Then, ashe cradled her to his chest with one hand,he used the other to shoot her in the neck.

His fellow SS troopers were most im-pressed.

“Look how finely Knäbel did that,” saidone admiringly, “how he first calmed downthe child and then killed her.”

This single, small, sad incident demon-strates why — while I do not think any warhas ever been good — I believe ferventlythat World War II was a necessary one.

The Nazis and their partners in crimetried fundamentally to alter the moral un-derstanding of humanity — and with thelikes of Alois Knäbel they succeeded. Theydid this by locating their murderous depre-dations within a warped moral frameworkthat defined their violence as purifying,necessary, and righteous.

They thought they were a superior breedon a historic mission to eliminate the Jew-ish race, whose very existence they be-lieved posed a threat. They were doing so,they claimed, on behalf of future genera-tions of Germans.

In reality, they were participants in whatChurchill called “the greatest and most hor-rible single crime ever committed in thewhole history of the world.” The war againstthe Nazis was, as the title of my new booksays, very much a “moral combat.”

What still chills me to the marrow is therealization that barbarism soon became anindustrial process — in which the killerstook a perverted craftsman’s pride.

An SS officer named Friedrich Jeckelnproudly developed a new technique ofpacking down layers of victims to make thebest use of trench space.

The killing squads started by lining uptheir victims in front of the graves in themanner of firing squads, but too often thisrequired officers to deliver the coup degrace with their pistols.

They tried shootingstanding victims frombehind at close range,but gore flew back intotheir faces.

After technical dis-cussions — carried onin earshot of the nextvictims in line — it wasdeemed easier toshoot people kneelingor lying down withinthe graves, whichmade for an easierclean-up.

In major operations— such as the slaugh-ter of 33,771 Jews atBabi Yar in the Ukraine, which took days toaccomplish — mobile field kitchens arrivedwith warm food and special rations ofschnapps. Some of the units were sodrunk they were sick while performing ex-ecutions.

German Army spectators were wel-come — since this further con-

tributed to the perpetrators’ sense ofnormality — but one SS officer whobrought his pregnant bride along was con-sidered to have crossed the line. That’show warped their sense of morality was. Atleast 2.9 million Jews were killed by menstanding a few feet away from them. Thegenocidal regime tapped into, and empow-ered, the brutal streak of these cowards.

One such creature was the very drunkmember of the Gestapo seen in a bar witha beer mat attached to his tunic, on whichhe had scrawled “1,000” in red ink. “I’m cel-ebrating the thousandth shot in the neck,”he slurred. He added that he’d shoot hisown father if he was ordered to.

But it became increasingly clear to thosein charge that new methods would have tobe found before the larger project of killingall European Jews could be realized.

The scene was set for the next stage ofindustrialized mass murder — extermina-tion camps.

In the autumn of 1941, trials began withcarbon monoxide gas.

A vehicle resembling afurniture-removal truck wasdeveloped, into whose air-tight interior exhaust gasescould be fed.

But the technical break-through came when thecommandant at Auschwitzexperimented on RussianPoWs with the pesticide gasZyklon B.

The Holocaust was un-derway. From now on,

the fate of millions of men,women and childrenbelched and burned fromtall chimneys.

But to what extent did theoutside world realize what was happening —and could more have been done to stop it?

This has been fiercely debated eversince the full horrors of the Holocaust wereuncovered in the last months of war.

Britain and the U.S. are too often por-trayed as having failed in their moral duty— guilty of not bombing exterminationcamps and guilty of not airdropping armsso the imprisoned Jews could fight back.

But the reality of what was happening onthe far side of Europe was not obvious atthe time. The Third Reich’s exterminationpolicy was camouflaged with euphemismsand shrouded in secrecy.

Any murderous orders not conveyed byword of mouth were read and then burned.

Nonetheless, units operating in the fieldmade regular radio reports of their activi-ties in a code that was broken by Britishcryptanalysts at Bletchley Park.

But since only a percentage of messagescould ever be intercepted and decoded, thepicture that emerged was patchy.

Besides, for those brought up with a post-Enlightenment belief in human progress, itwas a giant emotional and intellectual step toget from these discrete facts to grasping thata civilized European country had reverted —with the aid of modern technologies — to wip-ing out an entire race.

There were other problems, too, in ana-lyzing the material picked up by the code-breakers. While there was plenty ofevidence of massacres, the victims werevaguely referred to as Bolsheviks, plunder-ers, partisans and so forth, rather thanJews. On the face of it, they did not add upto genocide.

Based on intelligence from Bletchley,Churchill broadcast to the British people inAugust 1941 stating what was known —that, as Hitler’s armies advanced throughthe Soviet Union, “whole districts are beingexterminated. Scores of thousands of ex-ecutions in cold blood are being perpe-trated by German police-troops uponRussian patriots. . ..”

Many Jewish historians are exercisedthat he did not specifically mention

that most of the victims were Jews. Theyalso complain that the attention he gave tothe dire circumstances of Jews throughoutthe war was intermittent to the point of in-difference.

Some even believe that the Allies werecolluding with Hitler because of an al-legedly pervasive anti-Semitism, an insin-uation first made by David Ben-Gurion,Israel’s first prime minister.

But the harsh truth is that Allied policyhad one priority — to defeat Nazi Ger-many. Nothing could be allowed to divertresources from that absolute aim.

Even when the first concrete reportsemerged of a coordinated Nazi extermina-tion policy, the U.S. State Departmentmade it clear that there would be no devi-ation from this central purpose. “Whetherthe number of dead amounts to tens ofthousands, or, as these reports state, tomillions is not material to the main prob-lem, which is the winning of the war,” it saidemphatically. “Other considerations must


RONALD LAUDER , PRESIDENT OF THEWORLD JEWISH CONGRESS

In July, firecrackers were thrown at theonly synagogue in the Swedish city of

Malmo, breaking three windows. The daybefore, a bomb threat had been left at thebuilding, warning what would happen. Twoweeks before, there was another attackagainst the same synagogue.

For months, Malmo’s Jews have testifiedto an increasingly hostile atmosphere, withmany saying they are frightened to go outon the streets wearing anything that mightidentify them as Jews. Earlier this year,Daniel Schwammenthal, writing in TheWall Street Journal, explained why in thestarkest possible terms: “Screaming ‘SiegHeil’ and ‘Hitler, Hitler,’ a mostly Muslimmob threw bottles and stones at a smallgroup of Jews peacefully demonstrating forIsrael at this town’s central square lastyear. Worshippers on their way to syna-gogue and Jewish kids in schools are rou-tinely accosted as ‘dirty Jews.’ ”

Malmo police say that, of the 115 hate

crimes recorded in the city in 2009, 52

were aimed at Jews or Jewish institutions.

Anti-Semitism is back, and what is taking

place in Malmo is merely an extreme man-

ifestation of what is happening elsewhere

in Sweden.

Let us recall that it was Sweden’s top-

selling newspaper, Aftonbladet, that

published an anti-Semitic blood libel last

year alleging that Israeli soldiers routinely

murdered Palestinian children and har-

vested their bodily organs for sale on the

international black market. The Swedish

government responded with indifference,

and worse: when the country’s ambassa-

dor to Israel put up a note on the em-

bassy’s website distancing Sweden from

such appalling calumnies, her superiors in

Stockholm ordered her to take it down.

It is not just the media and the govern-

ment fanning the flames of this hatred. In

January, 2009, church officials in the town

of Lulea cancelled a planned torchlight

procession for Holocaust Memorial Day,

with a spokesman saying that they were

“preoccupied” and “grief-stricken” by Is-

rael’s operation in Gaza.

Cancelling Holocaust Memorial Day?

Spreading blood libels, and acquiescing in

them? Allowing a state of affairs in which

Jews are frightened to leave their homes?

This does not sound like the tolerant, fair

and just society for which Sweden would

like to be known. How has such a state of

affairs arisen, and what can be done to ad-

dress it?

The first problem is that Swedishmainstream hostility to the state of

Israel has clearly begun to cross the lineinto outright anti-Semitism. Of course, at-tempts to draw a distinction between ha-tred of Jews and hatred of Israel werenever particularly convincing.

Israel is a specifically Jewish project, andto join the campaign of delegitimizationagainst the Jewish state is to join a cam-paign of delegitimization against much ofworld Jewry, the vast majority of which ei-ther lives in Israel or regards it as a centralcomponent of Jewish identity. But one par-ticular section of Sweden’s population hasnever engaged in the pretense that thereis a distinction between hatred of Israeland hatred of Jews.

Which brings us to the second majorissue at play here: Sweden’s Muslim pop-ulation. While all manifestations of intoler-ance against Muslims must be firmlyresisted, it is also vital to recognize thedanger some Muslim immigrants havebrought with them from their home cul-tures: extreme forms of bigotry againstJews and Israel.

When mainstream politicians, newspa-pers, and churches rail against Israel,

many Swedish Muslims inevitably see thisis a green light to unleash their own hostil-ity toward ordinary Jews. They feel theiranti-Semitism is acceptable.

Athird layer of this problem is the in-creasingly symbiotic alliance be-

tween radical Islamist groups in Swedenand a left that has departed from the hon-orable social-democratic traditions forwhich the country is famous around theworld. When the Israeli Davis Cup tennisteam came to Malmo in 2009, it was forcedto play against its hosts behind closeddoors while a crowd of 6,000 rioted out-side. With hate for Israel serving as the pri-mary unifying factor, this alliance hasgrown into a new and dangerous force forintolerance within Swedish society.

Ultimately, change will not come unlessand until Sweden’s leaders address theseproblems. Officials and opinion shapersmust understand that this perilous state ofaffairs will worsen if they fail to take theirresponsibilities more seriously, tone downtheir rhetoric and adopt a balanced ap-proach toward Israel.

Above all, politicians must speak outwhen minorities become the target of hatecrimes. Even a tolerant country such asSweden must not tolerate those whopreach intolerance.

EVEN A TOLERANT COUNTRY CANNOT TOLERATE INTOLERANCE

DID STALIN CONDONE THE HOLOCAUST?

Tyrant: Soviet leader Josef Stalin.


LIBERATION CH שךשךתThe American & International Societies

Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate; Yitzhak Arad, recipient of the 2010 Yad Vashem

Remembrance Award; and Eli Zborowski, American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Chairman.

Eli Zborowski, American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Chairman; Jean and

Eugen Gluck, and their grandsons Matthew Gluck and Michael Gluck.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman, and Robert Bernstein, YLA Honoree. Eli Zborowski, Chairman, and Na

Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Avi & Nicole Lieberman, YLA Honorees. Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Abbi and Jeremy Halpern, YLA Honorees.Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Rebecca Hanus, YLA Honoree; and

Melvin Bukiet, Dinner Chair.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Adam & Iris Lindenbaum, YLA Hon-

orees.

Eli

ore

Marilyn Rubenstein, 2010 Annual Tribute Din-

ner Chair.


HAIN 65 YEARS LATERs for Yad Vashem Annual Tribute Dinner

Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate; Mark Moskowitz, recipient of the 2010 Yad Vashem

Leadership Award; and Eli Zborowski, American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Chairman.adav Besner, YLA Honoree.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Adina and Lawrence Burian, YLA

Honorees.

Mitchell Kahn, YLA Honoree; Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Ilana

Kahn, YLA Honoree.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Barry Levine, YLA Honoree; and Melvin

Bukiet, Dinner Chair.Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Ilana Lifshitz, YLA Honoree; and Melvin

Bukiet, Dinner Chair.

Zborowski, Chairman; Caroline and Morris Massel, YLA Hon-

ees.

Eli Zborowski, American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Chairman; Sam Halpern,

Cheryl Lifshitz, and Gladys Halpern.Leonard Wilf, 2010 Annual Tribute Dinner

Honorary Chairman.

REPORT FROM REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMYAD VASHEM MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE November/December 2010 - Kislev/Tevet 5771

BY EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON, THE JERUSALEM POST

Historian Jan T. Gross is building anew history of the Holocaust, based

on relations between Poles and Jews be-fore, during, and after World War II.

Jan T. Gross begins his keynote lectureby projecting an old photograph onto thescreen behind him. He promises to talkabout it at the end of the presentation,knowing that the picture, ostensibly asomewhat commonplace snapshot of Pol-ish peasants resting on their tools behindtheir harvested crops, is disturbing. Thepicture is fuzzy, and the lunar-like land-scape is too desolate, the harvest too mea-ger, the colors too gray.

The overflow audience at Yad Vashemlistens intently to Gross’s lecture, entitled“Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of JewsBy Their Neighbors – A Norm or an Excep-tion in German-Occupied Europe?” whiledistracted by the image.

At the end, as promised, he relates to thepicture. “Is this not,” he challenges, “a fa-miliar scene, a snapshot of summer vaca-tions with distant relatives in thecountryside?” But then he points to what isonly vaguely visible in the enlarged imageseen from a distance – “the crops scat-tered in front of the group are skulls andbones. In this photograph we see a bunchof peasants standing atop a mount ofashes. These are the human ashes of800,000 Jews gassed and cremated in theTreblinka extermination camp betweenJuly 1942 and October 1943. The Euro-

peans captured in the photograph havebeen digging through the remains of Holo-caust victims, hoping to find gold and pre-cious stones that Nazi executioners mayhave overlooked, despite carefully check-ing the body cavities of the murderedJews… And while the scale of the Tre-blinka excavations was unique, the prac-tice of digging up Jewish remains from thesites of mass murder to strip them of valu-ables was common.”

He continues, “Not only the Poles: manypeoples across the continent have benefitedfrom the Nazi policies of stripping Jews ofcivic and property rights and eliminatingthem from public life, and, ultimately, fromlife. [I present you with] a question and ananswer to frame the photograph: What do aSwiss banker and a Polish peasant have incommon? And the answer to this questionwould be, a golden tooth extracted from thejaws of a Jewish corpse.”

The exercise, like much of Gross’s work,is powerful and complex, the dramatic ma-nipulation underlining the historical pointshe makes.

Gross, 63, a professor of history atPrinceton University, was in

Jerusalem, in early October, for an interna-tional conference entitled “The Aftermathof the Holocaust: Poland 1944-2010,”which was sponsored by the DianaZborowski Center for the Study of the Af-termath of the Shoah, a part of YadVashem’s International Institute for Holo-caust Research.

In his lecture Gross discusses his re-search, which focuses on the killings andplunder of Polish Jews by their fellow citi-

zens. His research goals, he makes clear,are broad and ambitious: to create a newhistoriography and, through this, to rewritethe history of the Holocaust.

Gross was born in Poland to an ethnicPolish mother, who had been a member ofthe Polish resistance, and a Polish-Jewishfather. He came to the US with his familyin 1968, at the age of 22, as an émigré es-caping the rising anti-Semitic wave of re-pression in Poland. As a student of physicsin Warsaw, he had been involved in theprotest movement, expelled from the uni-versity and jailed for several months. Re-settling in the US, he earned a PhD insociology from Yale University, beginninghis distinguished academic career.

He came to international prominence withthe publication of two books that forced Pol-ish citizens to face painfully precise mirrorsof Polish history. In Neighbors, first pub-lished in English in 2001 and in Polish in2002, Gross describes in passionate, almostvulgarly brutal prose, the massacre of PolishJews in the town of Jedwabne, in July 1941.Contrary to Polish common wisdom, themassacre, he shows, was committed by theJews’ Polish neighbors and not by the Ger-man occupiers.

In 2006, he published Fear: Anti-Semitismin Poland after Auschwitz, in which he ar-gues that Poles attacked Jews who returnedto Poland after the Holocaust and details thestory of the Kielce pogrom in July 1946,when ethnic Poles murdered 37 Jews; Fearwas published in Polish in 2008.

Gross’s basic thesis contends that theseanti-Semitic acts stemmed from the fear ofthe Polish people that they would have to

give back properties to the Holocaust sur-vivors, but were also a reaction to theirown sense of guilt and to the barbarizationof Polish society inflicted by the Nazis.

The facts of the pogroms in Jedwabneand Kielce were known in Poland, but theyhad been obscured, both by the Sovietregime that created a “permissible” versionof history and by Polish collective identity,which is based on a self-image as victims,not perpetrators. Poles’ reactions to thepublications of Neighbors and “Fear” wereintense and varied; some saw the revela-tions as Poland’s opportunity to come toterms with its murky past, but others wereincensed. Polish officials even investigatedthe facts of the case in order to considerprosecution of Gross for defamation of thePolish population, although no chargeswere ever brought.

Gross says that he knows that the dis-cussion is painful for Poles, but in-

sists that it is necessary. “My identity as aPole includes a profound sense of sidingwith the persecuted. And few have a betterright than Poles to feel persecuted. Butbeing Polish, whether we want to or not,carries a responsibility, a need to sort outwhat we have done. We cannot base ourself-identity on lies or half-truths. We didthese things. They happened in the streets and villages, where everybody could see.The anti-Semitism is incomprehensible, itis beyond the pale. It is a blemish on ourhumanity, a scandal to our minds.”

The events that he describes, Gross says,cannot be dismissed as deviant or marginalbehavior. “‘Regular’ members of the com-


MYTHS AND TRUTHS

For decades the destruction of PolishJewry has dominated the study of

the Shoah, but it was only recently that theunprecedented challenges of the return tolife of the surviving Jews have begun to at-tract sustained scholarly attention. Thus itwas particularly fitting that the first interna-tional conference of the Diana ZborowskiCenter for the Study of the Aftermath of theShoah, held at the beginning of October,concentrated on the many and different as-pects of the repercussions of the Holo-caust in Poland.

The conference, the initiative of theAmerican Society for Yad Vashem Chair-man Eli Zborowski and Prof. Feliks Tych ofthe Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,was attended by 22 researchers fromPoland, each of whom has already con-tributed a chapter to the broad collection ofstudies that will make up The Aftermath ofthe Holocaust: The Polish Case 1944-2010, due to be published in English andPolish by the end of the year. Discussionswere significantly enriched by the pres-ence of two distinguished guests fromNorth America — Prof. Antony Polanskiand Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross — togetherwith a group of Israeli scholars in the field.

“The postwar effects of the Holocaust,especially in the years 1945 through 1947,require the attention of historians becauseit was precisely this period that was themost difficult for survivors who were tryingto create for themselves something wemight call a new normality, an attempt atself-determination after the tribulations of

war,” said professor Tysh in his speech atthe conference.

“The topic of the returning survivors andthe how they were received by residents oftheir hometowns is important because it of-fers the key to reconstructing the real so-cial and moral circumstances in which theHolocaust took place,” – continued FelksTych. “The series of postwar pogroms inPoland, Slovakia and Hungary show howfar the Holocaust’s shadow reached, andhow deeply ran the conviction, birthed fromthe years 1941-1945, that a Jew may bekilled without impunity.”

“I was impressed by the seriousness ofthese researchers”, Dr. Zeev Mankowitz,head of Yad Vashem’s Zborowski Center,said in an interview.

“This is highly significant as it demon-strates a wiliness to confront the past, faceit honestly and deal with it. The only wayyou can neutralize some of the deep poi-son that has harmed Polish-Jewish rela-tions is by relating to the collective memoryof Polish people. The only way for a cultureto probe the depth of its collective memoryis for it to be done by the people who be-long to that culture and not by outsiders.”

The major themes tackled at the con-ference began with the survivors’

first encounters with Polish society, and thememory of this period embedded in earlypersonal letters and in the docudramaUndzere Kinder (Our Children). The focuswas then broadened to embrace Polish at-titudes towards the surviving Jews, the firststeps in rebuilding Jewish life and the initial

attempts to shape adequate forms of com-memoration. The conference ended with adiscussion on Polish-Jewish relations andattempts to access what remains of thePolish Jewish community. “The conferencelooked at how Polish society deals with the

fact that their country was the main arenafor the murders,” explained Dr. Bella Gut-terman, Director of the International Insti-tute. “We examined the immediate postwarevents — extreme anti-Semitic expres-sions and pogroms — through the Com-munist era and then from the fall ofCommunism until today. Much of what waspresented was new research and findings

undertaken in the past two years, and welook forward to broadening our scholarly in-vestigations as a result of the conference.”

“Our research project would not havebeen possible without the financial andemotional support of people and institu-

tions,” – said professor Tychin his acknowledgement re-marks.

“The first acknowledge-ment belongs to Mr. EliZborowski, who has beenour project’s good geniusfrom the beginning. His pa-tronage gave us certaintythat we will be able to com-plete the project, since hesupported us both emotion-ally and financially. He al-ways emphasizes that suchcomprehensive researchprojects should be under-taken in every countrywhere the Nazi genocidehas occurred and in everycountry where the survivorssettled.”

“We also express our grat-itude to Mrs. Nancy Brumm, who hasfounded and chired the American Societyof Jewish Heritage in Poland. Another or-ganization that recognized the importanceof our project and contributed to its finan-cial support is the inter-governmental TaskForce for International Cooperation onHolocaust Education, Remembrance andResearch.”

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE AFTERMATH OF THE SHOAH

Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross, Princeton University, NJ; Eli Zborowski,

Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem; Prof. Antony

Polonsky, Brindeis University, MA; Prof. Feliks Tych, Jewish His-

torical Institute (ZIH), Warsaw.


BY JÖRG DIEHL, SPIEGEL ONLINE

The suspected Nazi war criminalKlaas Faber, who is number five on

the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted list, is enjoying a quiet retirementin Bavaria. While some alleged formerNazis are facing trial in their old age, the87-year-old has managed to slip throughthe cracks in the German justice system.

Klaas Faber and his wife were nice peo-ple, the affable neighbor said on thephone; apparently they “kept themselvesto themselves” but were “very decent.”They went walking a lot, had three sons,and drove around in a red Audi. “He usedto work in an office,” the woman says. “Hecan tell you the rest himself.”

Klaas Faber ranks number five on theSimon Wiesenthal Center’s list of the 10most wanted Nazi war criminals. In 1947,Faber was sentenced by a Dutch court tolife in prison for multiple murders duringWorld War II. But the former Nazi collabo-rator escaped from prison with a gang offellow inmates and fled across the borderinto Germany.

The former menswear salesman, whowas born in Haarlem in the Netherlands,has lived in an apartment building in Ingol-stadt in the German state of Bavaria sincethe 1960s. While other suspected Nazicriminals such as Heinrich Boere, 88, andIvan Demjanjuk, 89, have to face chargesrelating to their roles in World War II atroc-ities despite their old age, Faber no longerhas anything to fear from the German jus-tice system.

“I no longer consider this an injustice, buta scandal,” Arnold Karskens, who is chair-man of a Dutch foundation that investi-gates war crimes, told Spiegel Online. “Hehas kept a low profile for decades and thatseems to actually have worked. It must beunbearable for the relatives of his victims.”

Dutch court documents showed thatFaber volunteered for the Waffen-SS inJuly 1940 of his own accord.

During questioning after the war, Fabersaid it was “quickly made clear ... that one

would be incorporated into the SS whenthe training came to an end. I did not wantthat.” He would later tell prosecutors thathe had refused to take the oath “to theFührer” and had, after a few months, goneback to the Netherlands.

There, Faber, whose father and brotherwere both also ardent Nazis, joined theWeerbaarheidsafdeling, which was similarto the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung (SA) stormtroopers in Germany. For 18 guilders aweek, Faber served the Dutch Nazi leaderAnton Adrian Mussert as a bodyguard andcame across as someone who was suit-able for higher-level duties. Faber “hasproved himself to be a conscientious andreliable employee,” noted one superior, ac-cording to the documents. He did not havea problem with “alcohol abuse and/ordebts,” the document noted, “as far as isknown.”

Faber went on to become a constable inthe state police. In September 1944, hewas assigned to the SS’s Security Servicein Groningen in a support function. Accord-ing to statements by several former com-rades, Faber is said to have executedseveral Dutch resistance fighters duringthis period. In March 1946 he confessed tohis interrogators that he had “shot one ofthe detainees” during an execution in theWesterbork transit camp.

After 1945, a Dutch court initially sen-tenced Klaas Faber to death, but

that sentence was later commuted to lifeimprisonment. But he did not stay in prisonfor very long. On Dec. 26, 1952, Faber andsix other convicted Nazi war criminals es-caped from prison in Breda while a filmwas being shown.

They crossed the Dutch-German borderat Ubbergen. The following day, the districtcourt in Kleve fined the men 10 marks eachfor illegal entry — but a court employee gavethem the money and even added a littleextra for their onward journey. “They wereall comrades in the court,” recalled one ofthe escaped prisoners in a 1997 interviewwith the German magazine Stern.

Two days later, the Dutch authorities inGermany again sought the extradition ofthe fugitives – without success. Bonn re-fused, citing a 1943 decree by Adolf Hitler,according to which all members of theWaffen-SS were automatically German cit-izens. But didn’t Faber claim he had re-fused to swear the oath of allegiance to theFührer? Was he therefore definitely amember of the SS or not? The questionsremained unanswered.

Then in 1957, the Düsseldorf DistrictCourt also refused to initiate proceedingsagainst the escapees, claiming that therewas insufficient evidence against them.For Faber it was exactly the kind of freepass that he needed. He moved to Ingol-stadt and lived a suitably respectable,

bourgeois life in the prosperous West Ger-many of the “economic miracle” era.

In 2003, the Dutch government, underpressure from the victims’ families, re-quested that Faber serve in Germany thelife sentence that he had been given in1947. But the Ingolstadt District Court,which now had jurisdiction over the formerSS member, said the request was inadmis-sible. After all, a German court — in theform of the Düsseldorf District Court in1957 — had already let Faber off the hook.

Then the Central Office for the Investiga-tion of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund got in-volved, as its director Ulrich Maassconfirmed. The office’s investigators hadmanaged to gather “heaps of material”against Faber in Germany and the Nether-lands. A fresh indictment on the basis ofthis evidence might have been possible,says Maass.

However, the public prosecutor in Mu-nich that was responsible for the case, whohad received the files on Klaas Faber fromMaass in 2006, had a different view of thematter. In his opinion, Faber had shot hisvictims in the conviction that he was carry-ing out valid death sentences against re-sistance fighters. In Faber’s case, there isno evidence of the base motives which,under German law, are a defining charac-teristic of murder, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, a spokesman for the Munich publicprosecutor. In which case, one had to givethe defendant the benefit of the doubt andassume it was manslaughter, Steinkraus-Koch explained. But in the case of Faber,the crime of manslaughter would have be-come time-barred in 1990, he added.

Unless new evidence that supports thesuspicion of murder turns up, the case isnow closed for German investigators,Steinkraus-Koch said. The Chief PublicProsecutor’s Office has repeatedly con-firmed the termination of the proceedings,the last time in May 2008.

SUSPECTED NAZI WAR CRIMINAL ELUDES GERMAN JUSTICE SYSTEM

Klaas Faber.

BY SEAN O'HARE, TELEGRAPH

What would you do if you were Jew-ish and had bought a second-hand

watch for £150, only to find out that it oncebelonged to Hitler’s right-hand man and asa result was worth £50,000?

In 1985 British screenwriter LaurenceMarks was given a Hollywood mansion,wrote comedy for Paramount Studios,drove a red convertible, and was deeplyunhappy.

He hoped an afternoon’s shopping tripand the purchase of a $200 second-handwatch on Los Angeles’s Melrose Placewould lift his mood.

“I felt isolated. I had everything but Ipined for London, its culture, and myfriends. It was the loneliest time of my lifeand I thought spending some money wouldcheer me up,” he tells me.

In the second-hand watch shop’s windowdisplay, Laurence spied a simple Longines

Art Deco watch and left the shop twentyminutes later wearing it on his wrist.

“I couldn’t stop staring at it, though neveronce did I wonder who it belonged to orwhy it was in the shop window,” he says.

Returning to London after less than ayear as an expat in LA, Laurence opted fora change of watch and bought one at auc-tion, placing the Longines in a safety de-posit box in a London bank where it stayedfor five years.

Deciding to revive the Longines watch,Marks realized that it had started to losetime and took it to a City of London repairshop. Three weeks later he received a callasking him to come into the shop.

“The watch repairer asked me if thewatch was a family heirloom,” Marks re-calls. “I told him it wasn’t, but asked himwhy he asked.”

“He removed the back of the watch,handed me an eyeglass, and said ‘Well?’What I saw were the initials ‘JVR.’”

Nothing strange in that. But in addition tothe initials there was a small elegantly en-graved swastika, under which was en-graved a date: 1930.

“I asked the watch repairer who JVRwas,” says Marks, “but he had no idea. Hesaid that if I was really interested I shouldtake the watch to Sotheby’s. They wouldbe able to tell me.”

After 16 weeks, Sotheby’s Watch andClock department confirmed that the watchwas genuine, was bought in Berlin in 1930,belonged to Joachim von Ribbentrop andwas exceedingly valuable.

“I knew Joachim von Ribbentrop wasHitler’s friend and fixer, as well as his for-eign minister. And wasn’t he the man whosigned the Von Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact,

which effectively allowed the start of theSecond World War?

“So I asked how much it was worth andwas told anywhere between £40-50,000,maybe more, depending how badly a col-lector wanted it.

“It didn’t occur to me at that time that thiswatch would attract dormant Nazis, whowould pay a fortune just to get a little closerto a regime that they wished had survivedand flourished.

“Apparently, von Ribbentrop, whilst not afirst-division Nazi, was very collectable.And the fact that he was the first Nazihanged at Nuremberg could well increasethe watch’s value,” Marks says.

How the watch ended up in a second-hand watch shop in California is anyone’sguess, although Sotheby’s suggested aUS guard may have stolen it from vonRibbentrop as he awaited execution in hisNuremberg cell.

When Marks told the news to hisfriend and writing partner Maurice

Gran, Gran said he couldn’t possibly sellthe watch because he would effectively bepocketing Nazi money.

“As a Jew,” Marks says, “I could seeMaurice had a point.”

“What if I sold it and gave the money toa Jewish charity? A synagogue that needsa new roof, perhaps? A Jewish youth clubcommunity hall?

“I did enquire to one or two Jewish charitiesabout making a substantial donation, butonce they heard where the money was goingto come from, they either said a polite ‘No,thank you,’ or slammed down the phone.

“And of course I could understand thatthe Von Ribbentrop Community Hall at-tached to a north London synagogue couldbe seen in bad taste.

“So I was left with this dilemma for manymonths.”

Maurice Gran finally suggested writing aplay about the dilemma: what does a Jewdo with a Nazi watch, particularly if heneeds the money?

“I immediately could envisage what agood play this would make and after threeor more years of discussion we wrote VonRibbentrop’s Watch,” says Marks. “Whatelse could we call it?

“I then did as Maurice suggested and putthe watch away in a safe and there it willremain. No fascist or Nazi sympathizer willever get their hands on it.

“But the bigger question remains: Whatwould you have done in my position?”

VON RIBBENTROP’S WATCH

Laurence Marks, right, and his writing partner,

Maurice Gran.

Von Ribbentrop’s watch, found by Laurence

Marks.


(Continued from page 7)be subordinate thereto.”

The evidence continued to mount of theevil the Nazis were perpetrating. In addi-tion to intelligence intercepts, anothertrickle of information came from organiza-tions such as the Jewish Agency and theWorld Jewish Congress.

Based in neutral Switzerland, they col-lated reports from across Nazi-occupiedEurope and relayed them to Jerusalem,London, and New York.

In mid-1942, a Polish undergroundgroup got a message to their govern-

ment-in-exile in London that 700,000 Jewshad been killed there between June 1941and April 1942. This led to the first articleon German mass murders of Jews to ap-pear in any British newspaper. On June 25,a Daily Telegraph headline declared: “Ger-mans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland.” Afew days later, the Daily Mail reported,“Greatest pogrom — one million Jews die.”

By the following month, there was testi-mony that these killings were being cen-trally orchestrated by the Germanauthorities when a dissident German in-dustrialist reported to a contact in Genevathat the Nazis intended to kill all the Jewsin Europe.

In November, a hundred or so Jewishprisoners were exchanged for Germans in-terned by the Allies. Their stories shatteredany illusions that a continent-wide atrocitywas not underway.

That month, too, one of the most coura-geous men of the war, Polish undergroundcourier Jan Karski, travelled across Occu-pied Europe with a precious key in hispocket. Welded inside it was the micro-filmed testimony of two Jewish leaders,smuggled out from the Warsaw ghetto,about the horrors happening there.

Karski also had his own eyewitness in-formation, obtained when he took the enor-mous risk of donning a guard’s uniformand slipping in disguise into a holdingcamp for Jews. They were being mar-shaled there before being sent by train tocamps with gas chambers, such as Sobi-bor and Treblinka.

One of the Warsaw ghetto leaderswhose testimony he brought back told him:“I know the English. When you describe tothem what is happening to the Jews, theywill probably not believe you.” It was an ac-curate prediction.

When Karski’s report was given to lead-ing British civil servants and politicians, in-cluding the Foreign Secretary, AnthonyEden, they seemed more interested in theheroic details of his es-cape than in what he hadto tell them.

Nonetheless, on De-cember 17, 1942, an in-ternational declarationcondemned Nazi atroci-ties that had claimed thelives of “hundreds of thou-sands” of Jews. By thattime, in reality, two millionJews were dead.

But there was no refer-ence to Auschwitz, whichwas regarded erro-neously as a concentra-tion camp exclusively forChristian Poles.

Besides, what could be done about it?The two Jewish underground leaders

who spoke to Karski wanted the Allies toadd stopping the killing of the Jews to theirstated war aims.

They also suggested issuing a publicwarning to the German people that theywould be held collectively responsible forwhat was being done in their name.

If the extermination still did not stop, thereshould be retaliatory bombing of Germantargets in Poland and the execution of anyself-proclaimed Nazis held by the Allies.

But the RAF pointed out that the extremedistances meant bombers would have tocarry so much fuel they would be able todeliver only a token payload. As forreprisals against German POWs, thiswould not only violate international law butlead to retaliation against British POWs.

With direct action ruled out, all that was leftwere increasingly threatening warnings. InMarch 1944, the Foreign Secretary rose in

the Commons to express the British peo-ple’s “detestation of Germany’s crimes.”

Churchill instructed that anyone associ-ated with such murders should be trackeddown, tried, and executed.

Meanwhile, two remarkable es-capees from Auschwitz were on

their way to the West with the first insideaccount. Their report reached London inJuly 1944.

Armchair moralists continue to condemnthe Allies for inaction after this. But they ig-nore the practical difficulties and the ex-tremely remote prospect of success —largely because a raid might only havekilled those it was intended to save.

And by 1944, the Allies’ priority was theirbiggest military gamble of the entire war —establishing a foothold in France. Ahead ofD-Day, Bomber Command was fully occu-pied trying to wreck the rail network of north-ern France to stop German reinforcementsarriving. After D-Day, it had a crucial job giv-ing air support to the troops on the ground.

The RAF had developed expertise inlow-level attacks using the new, fast andastonishingly versatile Mosquito aircraft. InFebruary 1944, a sortie mounted at the re-quest of the French resistance smashedthe walls of the Gestapo prison at Amiens.

The outcome was not good. One hun-dred prisoners were killed during the raid,

and most of those who escaped were re-captured and shot.

Could a Mosquito force have under-taken such an operation against

Auschwitz, 750 miles further away? Someargue this would have been morally impor-tant even if it had not succeeded. The aircrew who would have died might havebegged to differ.

In July 1944, with evidence emerging thatJews were being deported in vast numbersfrom Hungary, the Western Allies have beenaccused of culpable negligence for not per-forming an operation that would almost cer-tainly have ended in disaster, yet the Sovietshave received a pass for their failure tomake the slightest effort to destroy gaschambers that were in easy reach.

One thing the Soviets couldn’t claim wasan inability to get their heads round whatwas happening. The Holocaust would nothave caused Stalin and his associates anydifficulties of comprehension. They tor-tured and murdered people all the time.

They knew all about concentration camps,since, in their own gulags, they operated thelargest camp system in the world at the timeand had the equivalent of major urban pop-ulations behind barbed wire.

They were also familiar with deportingentire ethnic groups, as the Chechens,Crimean Tatars, Poles, and Volga Ger-mans discovered. They also persecutedpeople for their religious beliefs, as well asfor their class or nationality.

An inordinate amount of criticism hasbeen focused on the Western Allies for notdoing anything about the exterminationcamps, yet there has been a remarkabledearth of books about the Soviets’ inaction.

Every study of the Allies’ response to theHolocaust either omits the Soviet Union en-tirely or appends the Soviets as an after-thought, even though a third of the USSR’sfive million Jews perished at Nazi hands.

No one seems to ask why Stalin did notuse his huge air force to bomb the campsor drop paratroops who would have madeshort work of the SS men running thedeath camps. If there are sins of omissionto be accounted for, then here may well bewhere the blame truly lies.

DID STALIN CONDONE THE HOLOCAUST?

Survivors of Auschwitz after their liberation on January 27, 1945.

(Continued from page 5)ment went into even higher gear when itlearned that Cramer had signed the procla-mation. Breckinridge Long contacted hisfriend Representative Martin Dies, Chair-man of the House Committee on Un-Amer-ican Activities. The weapon they used wasthe old canard that spies would arriveamong the refugees. That not a single suchcase had been proven mattered little to Longand Dies. President Roosevelt, “informed”by Long of the undoubted arrival of spiesamong the refugees, was won over.

Finally, to clinch the matter, Long had abrilliant idea. He went to see Admiral AlanG. Kirk, Chief of Naval Intelligence. “If theNavy could declare it [the Virgin Islands] arestricted area for strictly naval reasons,”Long explained, “[that would] prevent theraising of the political questions involved inthis refugee and undesirable citizens trafficwhich is going on [Then] we would have nomore trouble.”

This settled the case. Nobody in wartimecould defend an issue that threatened thesecurity of the United States. The attemptto tear a few thousand of the doomed fromMoloch’s jaws had been sabotaged. Thisvictory by the State Department wasachieved 20 months after the Kristallnachtpogrom and nine months after the Nazimassacres began in Poland.

Heavy pressure was mobilized againstHaiti when it planned to admit 100 refugeefamilies. The Haitian President was accusedof undermining the American war effort andthus the safety of the United States. Theusual contrivance — the claim that therewould be spies among the refugees — inthe case of Haiti was extended to the misin-formation that (although they might not bestraight Hitlerites) all refugees were “at theleast” pro-German. The American Ministerto Haiti, on September 30, 1940, receivedthe following telegram from Secretary ofState Cordell Hull:

The Department desires you to discour-age at every opportunity and in a mannerwhich can leave no doubt in President Vin-cent’s mind all projects for bringing addi-tional European refugees to Haiti under thecircumstances that have prevailed in thepast . . . . The Department therefore woulddeplore further interest by the Haitian Gov-ernment in the admission of refugeesamong whose numbers will doubtless befound elements prejudicial to the safety ofthe Republic of Haiti and this country . . . .

The Chargé in Haiti, fully understandingwhat his superiors expected of him, lost notime. On October 2 he wrote to the Secre-tary of State:

I made the following points: One, allrefugees from Germany are at most only

anti-Hitler . . . . Therefore, we regard theserefugees as suspects and cannot view withapproval their migration from place toplace. I added that since my Governmentis spending in excess of twelve billion dol-lars for the defense of the United States,and the Western Hemisphere, it would beunreasonable to expect that we would viewwithout concern the uncontrolled move-ment of alien suspects.

During all the time that the State Depart-

ment was thwarting the refugees, letters

arrived from those who had heard of the

possibility of escape. On May 20, 1941,

Robert M. Lovett, Acting Governor of the

Islands (Lawrence Cramer had resigned)

wrote to James McDonald, Chairman of

the President’s Committee for Refugees: “I

have been overwhelmed by correspon-

dence of a most poignant nature.”

“OUR LAST CHANCE”

Of the dozens of pleading letters in

the National Archives, one by Ger-

hard Neumann, who writes for himself and

six others, is particularly tragic. The letter,

dated February 14, 1941, was written from

Camp Gurs, a collecting place in France

for shipment either via the infamous

Drancy camp, or directly to the annihilation

places in the east.

Neumann wrote: “We should be very

much obliged to you, if you could improve

our actual situation by giving us the per-

mission to stay in your territory till we can

immigrate to U.S.A. We are aware, that we

do an extraordinary step in applying to you.

But that is our last chance.”

On March 25, 1941, Robert Lovett an-

swered: “I regret to inform you that a proce-

dure for giving effect to the plan of affording

temporary refuge in the Islands has not

been worked out by the State Department

and the Department of the Interior.”

Another applicant awaiting deportation

was Walter Bruehl. He wrote: “We are still

a small number of passengers on the

steamboat St. Louis, departing from Ham-

burg May 13, 1939 [on the infamous Voy-

age of the Damned], to Havana, Cuba who

after an adventurous crossing were forced

to return to Europe . . . . Please, Honorable

Sir, let me know what we can do. I shall act

immediately in the required direction.”

On May 20, 1941, Lovett answered: “I re-

gret to inform you that the State Depart-

ment has refused permission to put into

effect the plan proposed for the reception

of the refugees . . . .”

Each of the applicants’ letters, preserved

in the National Archives, is a mute witness

to the inhumanity of man against man.

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE LOST CARIBBEAN PARADISE


(Continued from page 5)researcher Kitade.

The messages on the photos given toOsako are in languages that reflect theNazi advance through Eu-rope: German, Polish,Norwegian, French.

Kitade said the imagesleft a strong impression onhim. “It was 70 years ago,so the people in the pic-tures may no longer bealive, but if possible,somehow I’d like to findeven their families andshow them,” he said.

Historians have varioustheories as to why Japanallowed Jews to passthrough, and others to set-tle in its Manchuria territo-ries. Some say it wasdone on purely humanitar-ian grounds, while otherssay the country wanted togain educated citizenry for its newly con-quered lands and curry favor with the U.S.in the years before the two countries wentto war.

In 1938, as Germany’s persecution in-creased, government ministers in Tokyo is-sued a statement that Japan would treatthe refugees humanely. At the same time,

Japan was slaughtering and enslaving oth-ers in its territories throughout Asia – ac-tions for which postwar Japanese leadershave repeatedly apologized.

Osako’s daughter, Mie Kunimoto, now

62, was surprised to learn about the

photos.

“I never heard about this, and neither

had my sister. He wasn’t the type of person

to talk about the past.”

Like many of his generation, Osako didn’t

talk much about his wartime experiences, al-

though he wrote briefly about them in 1995

for a college alumni publication.

“The Jews that I saw at that time had no

passports and were stateless, they were

refugees that had fled Europe and were

generally downcast, some with vacant

eyes that projected the loneliness of peo-

ple in exile,” Osako wrote.

But he also had time to make friends along

the way – he notes that some were very

helpful in his duties, and he recalls seeing

Jewish women “of a rarely seen beauty.”

“A souvenir to a very nice Japanese

man,” reads the Polish message on an-

other of the photos from his diary, this one

of a dark-haired young lady with a slightly

furrowed brow. The signature looks like

“Rozla.” Her fate is also unknown.

First published in The Washington Post

This photo given to Japanese tourism official Tatsuo Osako shows a

woman and a brief message written on the back of the picture.

OLD PHOTOS REVEAL TALE OF JAPAN AND JEWS OF WWII

The Israeli daughter of a Holocaust

survivor who kept a diary in hiding

during World War II wants it back from a

Polish-Jewish archive, but officials refuse.

It belongs to the nation, they say.

Composer Ella Milch-Sheriff told AFP

she was appealing to Warsaw’s Jewish

Historical Institute to give her the crucial

chronicle of the Nazi German occupation

of Poland made by her late father Baruch

Milch.

Milch-Sheriff said she does not want it for

herself, and aims to donate it to Israel’s

Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

“I would like the diary to be in the best

hands and in exhibitions, so that people,

including family members, will be able to

see it,” she said.

The document is a snapshot of Nazi

Germany’s World War II occupation of

Poland, which became the epicenter of

its drive to wipe out Europe’s Jews. It

also bears witness to Milch’s personal

suffering. In one entry, he recounts the

shooting death of his three-year-old son

— who would have been Milch-Sheriff’s

half brother.

But Polish officials say they are bound by

strict rules covering historical records — in-

cluding those made by private individuals.

“The diary of Baruch Milch is important

evidence of the past, a document present-

ing the life and tragic fate of Polish nation-

als of Jewish origin,” national archive chief

Slawomir Radon said in a statement.

“It is an archive document and, as such,

cannot be taken from Poland perma-

nently,” he said.

A long history of war and occupation —

and consequent destruction — means

Poland guards its remaining national

archives hawkishly.

Milch, a doctor, wrote the diary while

being hidden by Poles who faced death if

found out.

Between July 1943 and March 1944, he

recounted his pre-war life and also detailed

atrocities which claimed his entire family,

including the tiny son.

Pre-war Poland was Europe’s Jewish

heartland, with a thriving community of

some 3.2 million, or 10 percent of the pop-

ulation.

Around half of the six million Holocaust

victims were Polish Jews. Most perished in

death camps the Nazis set up in Poland,

such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After the war, many of the few hun-

dred thousand survivors headed to

what is now Israel. Milch and his second

wife emigrated in 1946, and Milch-Sheriff

was born there.

Before leaving, he gave his diary to a

Polish Jewish group recording Holocaust

history.

“He realized his records

constituted an important doc-

ument and that is why he en-

trusted them,” Eleonora

Bergman, head of the Jewish

Historical Insitute, told AFP.

But Milch-Sheriff said her

father had wanted the diary

kept safe temporarily.

“The only testimony to what

happened to his family and

friends was there in his diary,

and he was afraid that if he

took it with him, it would get

lost, damaged or destroyed,”

she said.

Milch died in 1989.

Towards the end of his life, he wrote his

memoirs in Hebrew and asked Milch-Sher-

iff and her late sister Shosh Avigal to have

them published.

Shortly after his death, a Polish re-

searcher contacted them for permission to

publish extracts of the Polish-language

manuscript from the archives.

“This was the first time my sister and I

heard about the original diary. My mother

knew about it but never spoke with us

about it until that moment,” said Milch-

Sheriff.

In 1990, her sister went to Poland seek-

ing the diary, but only got a copy.

Bergman explained why.

“We are always ready to give a family a

copy of documents. But the mission of our

institute is to record history, often based on

the private notes of individuals,” she said.

Milch’s family spent the next few years

reconciling the Polish and Hebrew texts.

Their edited version was issued in Hebrew

in 1999 and English in 2003, while the orig-

inal was published in Poland in 2002.

Milch-Sheriff said she is determined to

pursue her claim and could turn to the Eu-

ropean Court of Human Rights.

Polish academic and lawyer Ireneusz

Kaminski is considering representing

her, saying it is a test case.

“While the authorities do regard her as

the heir to her father’s diary, the law pre-

vents her from enjoying its ownership,”

Kaminski said.

“To date, there has been no balance be-

tween the public good and ownership

rights which are disproportionately limited,”

he explained.

Two years ago, another Holocaust diary

sparked controversy.

Written by Ruth Laskier, 14 — who later

died in Auschwitz — it chronicled three

months of 1943 in the southern town of

Bedzin.

A childhood friend, Stanislawa Sapinska,

kept the diary secretly for decades before

revealing it to a local newspaper, which

published it in 2006.

It was immediately compared to the diary

of Dutch-Jewish teenager Anne Frank.

In 2007, Sapinska donated it to Yad

Vashem on a trip organized by officials

from Bedzin, who claimed they were un-

aware it was against the law.

POLISH ARCHIVE, ISRAELI SPAR

OVER FATHER’S HOLOCAUST DIARY

A worker of the Jewish Historical Institute holds part of a diary

by Holocaust survivor Baruch Milch.

The head of the French governmentwhich collaborated with the Nazis

during World War II personally made harshanti-Jewish legislation even tougher, aleading Nazi hunter said, citing a newly un-veiled document.

Serge Klarsfeld, decorated for his workto bring Nazis to trial, said Philippe Petainpenciled harsher measures into a Statuteon Jews issued by his Vichy regime ex-actly 70 years ago.

First World War hero Pétain signed anarmistice with the Nazis in 1940 which di-vided the country, leaving the north in Ger-man hands. Pétain created a governmentto the south in unoccupied France with itscapital in Vichy.

According to the Statute, which Klarsfeldsaid had been handed over anonymouslyto the Holocaust Memorial in Paris and au-thenticated by its experts, Pétain penciledin his own notes drastically worsening con-ditions for Jews in France.

“We didn’t know until now that Pétainhad made changes to the text of Oct. 3,1940, and that he had made it more strict,”Nazi hunter and founder of the Associationof the Sons and Daughters of Jews De-ported from France Serge Klarsfeld told re-porters.

The Vichy government helped in deport-ing about 80,000 Jews to concentrationcamps from France between 1942 and1944.

The amendments “completely redrafted”the nature of an already extremely anti-Se-mitic text, Klarsfeld added.

“It shows this was the desire of Pétainhimself,” he said of the document, whichwent on display a few days earlier. Theoriginal text had excluded the descendantsof French Jews born or naturalized before1860, but the notes showed Pétain hadcrossed this out, making all Jews targetsfor discrimination.

Pétain also widened the exclusion forJews in society, barring them completelyfrom jobs in education and the justice sys-tem and preventing them from standing forelected posts.

Until now, there has been little documen-tation on Pétain’s Vichy government andhis stance towards the Jews.

His defenders have always said his poli-cies aimed to protect French Jews by as-similating them into the local culture andconverting them into Catholics.

“That argument collapses with this doc-ument,” said Klarsfeld, awarded the Legionof Honor by then-President Mitterrand forhis work seeking prosecutions for Nazi warcrimes.

Pétain was tried after the war and sen-tenced to death for treason, but his sen-tence was commuted to life imprisonmenton an island off the Atlantic coast. He diedin 1951.

VICHY GOVERNMENT

TOUGHENED ANTI-JEWISH

LAWS

The French historian Serge Klarsfeld with a

draft law dated Oct. 3, 1940 and annotated by

hand by Marshal Philippe Pétain.


(Continued from page 4)tect the Jews in Budapest who had sur-vived the annihilation, overseen by AdolfEichmann, of half a million HungarianJews in the course of 1944. With a staff ofhundreds, most of them Jewish, Wallen-berg worked night and day distributingpassports and providing safe housing, foodand medical care while the pro-Nazi ArrowCross movement committed anti-Semiticoutrages and the Red Army closed in onthe city. Wallenberg was to disappear for-ever in the hands of the Soviet forces, hisexact fate debated for decades.

But the diplomat hero that Mr. Holbrookehighlighted in his remarks was Aristides deSousa Mendes, an aristocratic Portugueseconsul general in Bordeaux, France, from1938 to July 1940. In May 1940, he facedpitiable crowds of refugees from the Ger-man invasion of France, many of themJews camped in the streets and parks anddesperate for visas allowing escape intoSpain and Portugal.

He also faced an absolute prohibition byPortugal’s dictator, António de OliveiraSalazar, against issuing transit visas torefugees and especially to Jews.

In mid-June, the consul general ago-nized for several days, cutting himself offfrom the world, at one moment agitated, atthe next despondent. Suddenly he pro-ceeded to his office and announced: “I’mgiving everyone visas. There will be nomore nationalities, races, or religions.”

The next days were frenzied. All day andinto the night, visas were issued. Feeswere waived. No one filled in names.Sousa Mendes traveled to the Spanishborder to make certain that refugees wereable to cross. He confronted Spanish bor-der guards when needed — and continuedto sign visas.

Lisbon was upset and on June 23stripped him of his authority. Returning tohis property in Portugal the next month,he only disturbed the authorities more byacknowledging his deeds and defendingthem straightforwardly on humanitarianand religious grounds. Dismissed fromthe diplomatic service and with 12 chil-dren to support, he had to sell his familyestate and eventually died in poverty,supported by an allowance from Lisbon’sJewish community, where he ate at asoup kitchen.

The book relates its dramatic stories inrelatively undramatic fashion. Rather likea legal record, it quotes testimony givento Yad Vashem; the names and words ofpeople who were rescued come and gowith only a quick glimpse at who they areand what became of them later. And yetthose names are reminders of the pre-ciousness of each woman, man and childin the ranks of those caught up by the mil-lions in this nightmare.

The book can refer only in passing towhat motivated its diplomat heroes.Some spoke of humanitarian duties, oth-ers of Christian beliefs; both groups citedsimple human feelings. “Our father toldus that he had heard a voice, that of hisconscience or of God,” recalled a son ofAristides de Sousa Mendes.

The book also recognizes that the inher-ent tension between a diplomatic profes-sion resting on following instructions andthe moral demands arising from unfore-seen and overwhelming human sufferinghas not gone away. In his introduction tothe book, Mr. Holbrooke mentionsrefugees from Vietnam and Darfur.

First published in The New York Times.

IN THE ERA OF THE HOLOCAUST,

29 WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE

BY RICHARD Z. CHESNOFF, THE HUFFINGTON POST

Aside from Auschwitz and other Nazideath camps, nothing epitomizes

the horrors of the Holocaust more than theinfamous Warsaw Ghetto.

Surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped 10-foot-high brick wall, it was into this tiny cor-ner of the Polish capital that the Nazis

herded up to 400,000 Jewish prisoners ata time, systematically starving them withbarely 181 calories of rations per day, leav-ing them to die of hunger or disease, orsimply leaving them to languish while theyunknowingly awaited shipment to Hitler’sgas chambers.

It was here too that in the spring of 1943,a small band of heroic Jewish fighters

launched a desperate uprising againsttheir Nazi captors, a battle that ended onlywhen the overwhelmingly powerful Ger-man forces leveled the ghetto and reducedit to rubble.

Yet barely a year before, in May 1942 —two and half years after the WarsawGhetto was established and shortly beforethe Nazis sent the ghetto’s first 300,000Jews to the extermination camp of Tre-blinka — the Reich dispatched a crew of

German soldiers to film Jewish lifein the Warsaw Ghetto.

Their perverse propaganda goal:to record for posterity examples ofthe religious practices and “sub-human culture” of the soon-to-be-eliminated judische Rasse, every-thing from a circumcision cere-mony to a burial service, from theextreme poverty of the many tothe supposed lack of concern ofthose few Jews who still had someassets.

Parts of this nefarious Nazi prop-aganda film were heart-wrench-ingly real; the Nazis had nocompunction about showing Jewssuffering. But other parts of it werecarefully staged, a German

Potemkin Village movie honed for propa-ganda and construed to discredit the Jews.

Horrifying snippets of it have appearedover the years: a starving child dying onthe streets of the ghetto while other Jewswalk by or still others dine on meals at well-stocked restaurants that never existed;Nazi-appointed Jewish ghetto police bru-talizing fellow Jews.

Yet mysteriously the Nazis’ propagandafilm was never finished. For more than 50years, the silent, unedited reels lay hiddenin a secret East German film archive inboxes marked simply, “The Ghetto.”

Then along came Yael Hersonski, ayoung Israeli documentary maker

whose own grandmother had survived the

Warsaw Ghetto. After gaining access tothe long-abandoned footage via the cur-rent German government, Hersonski wroteand directed A Film Unfinished, a stagger-ing 90-minute documentary of the atroci-ties of life in the Warsaw Ghetto as filmedby the Nazis themselves.

Two-thirds of the 31 year old Hersonski’sfilm consists of the original Nazi propa-ganda footage – including outtakes. Therest is composed in part of the wrinkledfaces of a handful of Warsaw Ghetto sur-vivors grimly watching an actual screeningof the film and offering commentary (someclearly remember the Whermacht camera-

men at work). Using an actor, Hersonskihas also re-enacted the actual postwartestimony of one of the film’s original Ger-man cameramen (now deceased).

But in this viewer’s mind, the most fasci-nating parts of the unfinished film are itsouttakes, which at times clearly show thecameramen themselves caught in the shot(see photo at beginning of piece) ordemonstrate how scenes were staged,then re-shot to produce a “better” anti-Se-mitic result.

AFilm Unfinished has already wonwell-deserved international plaudits,

It was the 2010 Sundance Film FestivalWinner for World Cinema DocumentaryEditing, the 2010 Hot Docs Winner for BestInternational Feature, and a prime selec-tion at Germany’s 2010 Berlinale.

For some obscure reason, the MotionPicture Association of America – whichlets our youth be bombarded by meaning-less entertainment and violence – has de-cided to give A Film Unfinished an R ratingbecause of “disturbing images of Holo-caust atrocities, including graphic nudity,”the latter in a Nazi-coerced scene of youngwomen in a ritual bath.

The rating, which prevents anyoneunder 17 from watching the film unlessaccompanied by a parent or adultguardian, will not block the commercialscreening of the film. But it will preventthe film from being shown in high schoolclasses as an educational tool, to the par-ticular disappointment of its creator YaelHersonski, who looks barely 17 herselfand says she made it “not only for nowbut for future generations.”

A FILM UNFINISHED: THE WARSAW GHETTO AS SEEN THROUGH NAZI EYES

Jewish ghetto police round up Jews for the Nazi camera-

man.

Film maker Yael Hersonski.

German investigators trying to trackdown Nazi criminals before they die

may have had their best break in years afterdiscovering a trove of Brazilian immigrationfiles more than half a century old.

Kurt Schrimm, the top German justice of-ficial hunting Nazi fugitives, said his teamstumbled on archives identifying severalhundred Germans who moved to Brazil inthe decade after World War II and whomay be linked to Nazi crimes. Though onlya fraction are still likely to be alive,Schrimm plans to follow up on the leadwith Brazilian officials.

Previous leads have included siftingthrough 1945 war trial documents from So-viet archives involving German prisonersof war and Soviet collaborators. A military-history archive in Prague was found tocontain complete files on the Nazi Waffen-SS up to 1943. In 1990, Italian court docu-ments on SS atrocities were discoveredafter having disappeared in the 1950s.

The Brazilian files focus on suspectedNazi criminals entering on provisionalpassports. Schrimm and his team followedup leads from a Brazilian source who cameacross letters warning the authorities ofNazis trying to slip into the country withtravel documents issued by the RedCross. Little was done to bar their entry,Schrimm said.

South America became the refuge ofseveral high-ranking Nazi officers after theThird Reich’s collapse, including Holocaustarchitect Adolf Eichmann, death-campdoctor Josef Mengele and Gestapo mem-ber Klaus Barbie.

“As hopeful as we are about the Brazilfindings, just 5 percent of the suspectsmay still be alive and able to stand trial,”Schrimm said. “The Nazi commanders areall dead, but that doesn’t make the crimesof their younger subordinates any lessprosecutable.”

Schrimm’s unit currently has about 20investigations open. Schrimm’s Cen-

tral Office works alongside such organiza-tions as the Los Angeles-based SimonWiesenthal Center. The Wiesenthal Centergraded Germany with a B in its 2009 rank-ing of efforts to bring Nazi criminals to jus-tice. The U.S. received an A.

Schrimm dismissed the rating, saying hisCentral Office doesn’t like being gradedlike a school kid.

“As long as there’s a possibility that thesepeople are alive, we’ll continue our work,”Schrimm said in an earlier interview.

Schrimm, whose team taps on computersin two work rooms, gave a tour ofone of the dusty file spaces piled to the ceilingwith dog-eared documents detailing Nazicrimes that took place more than six decadesago. The quiet setting was a far cry from the1960s and 1970s, when the unit was at itsbusiest tracking down Nazis. Since its foun-dation in 1958, the Central Office has con-ducted more than 7,400 investigations.

The case against Demjanjuk came aboutafter an investigator accidentally stumbledon a report on the Internet that the U.S.was seeking to revoke his passport. Dem-janjuk’s name was known because he hadbeen convicted in 1988, charged withbeing the Treblinka death-camp guardknown as Ivan the Terrible – only to be ac-quitted in 1993 by Israel’s Supreme Courtafter doubt about his identity emerged.

The Central Office, suspicious about histrue identity, followed up on clues gainedfrom already scheduled visits to Israel andthe U.S. Once Schrimm’s team assembledwhat it thought was enough information toconvict, they turned it over to state prose-cutors.

“A few years ago nobody talked aboutDemjanjuk any more –- he fell into thememory hole,” Schrimm said.

GERMANY’S TOP NAZI-HUNTER FINDS

NEW LEAD IN BRAZILIAN ARCHIVE


(Continued from page 4)of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semiticany more than criticism of any particularJew is.

But spend some time submerged inthese books — by no means a pleasant oran easy task — and these notions recedeinto irrelevance. Mr. Wistrich’s volumepresents itself as an encyclopedic history,and is so full of details and citations, itoverwhelms. We hear from a 17th-centuryViennese preacher (“After Satan Chris-tians have no greater enemies than theJews”), Karl Marx (“What is the worldly cultof the Jew? Huckstering. What is hisworldly god? Money”), and the Hezbollahsecretary general, Hassan Nasrallah (“Ifwe searched the entire world for a personmore cowardly, despicable, weak, and fee-ble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion,we would not find anyone like the Jew”).

Mr. Wistrich offers less a history, though,than a contemporary indictment with his-torical background. This makes his bookdifficult to read. Its approach is one of cu-mulative examples culminating in jihadistsand their apologists. Its rosterlike style canbecome tedious but the examples arepowerfully dispiriting.

Trials of the Diaspora has a similar ef-fect, though Mr. Julius is more fo-

cused and analytical, dissecting types ofenmity, the nature of anti-Semitic myth,and its influence on the greatest examplesof English literature. From his analysis, webegin to see too just how different anti-Semitism is from other forms of racism.

Racism attaches negative attributes ontopeople bearing a particular biological her-itage. Such characteristics are passed on;they are inherited. The hatred is focused;the perceived threat can be excised. In away, racism is a materialist or physical pas-sion: the problem and the solution are con-crete.

While anti-Semitism has tapped intoracial hatreds in modern times, Mr. Juliusand Mr. Wistrich highlight its traditional re-liance on conspiracy: the hidden plot. Anti-Semitism isn’t just a matter of assertingunpleasant or reprehensible attributes. Itsees the Jew as an antinomian threat,overturning all ethical laws. The Jew worksin secret, creating invisible alliances,pulling elaborate strings, undermining so-ciety’s foundations. This is why the Proto-cols of the Elders of Zion has found sucha fertile internationalground. That 19th-cen-tury document purportsto be the secret minutesof such a plotting en-semble of Jews. It is thecounterfeit confirmationof a long-held belief.

Anti-Semitism is ametaphysical passion,not a materialist one. Itdoesn’t even require aJewish presence.

One reason anti-Semi-tes have been so ob-sessed with the issue offinance in the modernworld is that money isthe circulatory system ofcapitalist society. It is mysterious, manipu-lable: the Jew’s perfect instrument. TheJew, first seen as a theological spoiler, be-comes a metaphysical and monetaryspoiler. The medieval image of the Jewwas related to the vampire, Mr. Juliusshows; the modern anti-Semitic visionsees the Jew as a guzzler of a society’slifeblood.

This amplifies virulence as well: the Jew,for the anti-Semite, is not just a danger, butthe greatest danger exerting the greatestpowers. In current paradoxical parlance,the Jew is, in essence, a Nazi. The Jew

does not just devour a Christian child’sblood, but the blood of all innocent chil-dren, and more completely, the blood of allinnocents.

Is any evidence needed? Appearancesare irrelevant; argument is illusion.

What use is visible fact when the power ofthe Jew is in the web woven below the sur-face? Jewish autonomy is itself evidenceof Jewish threat. Moreover, confrontationrequires courage. Anti-Semitism neversees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a

revelation. An attack onthe Jew is never offen-sive; it is always defen-sive. This is precisely howthe Nazis portrayed it. It isprecisely how Islamistideology does as well, ev-ident, for example, in theprinciples and foundingdocuments of Hamas andHezbollah.

In a recent book, “NaziPropaganda for the ArabWorld” (Yale), the histo-rian Jeffrey Herf showshow Nazi propagandistsliterally taught Arab audi-ences the language ofanti-Semitism through

popular radio programs in Arabic. Nazi ide-ology bears many resemblances to that ofcontemporary Islamic extremism, somethe consequence of careful teaching. Thatteaching is still present in the Arab world,amplified by political leaders and imams,often annexed to denigrations of Jewstaken from Islamic sources

The result, Mr. Julius and Mr. Wistrichrecognize, has been one of the most his-torically noxious forms of anti-Semiticmythology, which has also fed into politicaldebates in the West and cannot be over-looked or easily dismissed. It is easy

enough to discern when responsible crit-icisms of Israel veer into something rep-rehensible: the structure of anti-Semiticbelief is not subtle. There is a wildly ex-aggerated scale of condemnation, inwhich extremes of contempt confront acountry caricatured as the world’s worstenemy of peace; such attacks (and theuse of Nazi analogies) are beyond evi-dence and beyond pragmatic political de-bate or protest. Israel’s autonomy — itsvery presence — is the problem. Mr.Julius writes, “Israel is the only state inthe world whose legitimacy is widely de-nied and whose destruction is publiclyadvocated and threatened; Israelis arethe only citizens of a state whose indis-criminate murder is widely consideredjustifiable.”

But even if we leave aside such mani-festations, it is clear enough that anti-Semitism requires much deeperunderstanding than it usually gets. Lastweek, for example, Hannah Rosenthal,the United States’ special envoy to mon-itor and combat anti-Semitism, spoke inKazakhstan, asserting the similarity ofanti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

This is not an uncommon assertion(and cases of unwarranted discriminationare always similar), but Islamophobia isa concept developed within the last twodecades by those who wish to elevateIslam’s reputation in the West; anti-Semi-tism was a concept eagerly embracedand expanded by haters of Jews. Onewas constructed by a group’s supporters,the other by a group’s enemies.

Moreover, much of what is character-ized as Islamophobia today arises out oftaking seriously the impassioned claimsof doctrinal allegiance made by Islamicterrorist groups and their supporters.Anti-Semitism, though, has nothing to dowith any claims at all.

A HATRED THAT RESISTS EXORCISM

(Continued from page 10)munity took part in them, not miscreants or‘marginal people.’ In fact, the participation bythe local elites and by upstanding membersof the community, who remained in goodstanding after the events, bestowed uponthese crimes a kind of official imprimatur.These were quasi-normal events, and evenremained a subject of conversation for yearsto come at local gatherings. The plunderwas a widespread social practice, sanc-tioned by norms.”

After the war, he notes, Western nationswere able to reflect on what had hap-pened, but Stalinism crushed any publicdiscussion in Poland about the war, theHolocaust, anti-Semitism or Polish culpa-bility, enabling Poles to entrench their viewof themselves as noble, heroic victims.

Throughout his writings, Gross em-phasizes greed as a motivating fac-

tor for the anti-Semitism. But can greedalone provide the explanation? “The directmotive to commit the majority of murdersand denunciations of Jews hiding in thecountryside was the desire to plunderthem, to take over their belongings, whichwere imagined to be considerable,” Grossanswers. “This was a pernicious conse-quence of a stereotype of Jewish riches.People imagined that by killing these peo-ple, they would get hold of their riches.

“But the barbarism was released by theNazis,” he says. “The war in the East wasvery different from the war in the West. Inthe East, it was a more brutalizing experi-ence. The Nazis regarded the Poles withovert contempt, as if they were subhuman.

Everyone was a witness to horrible vio-lence. It was dehumanizing.”

Yet, he notes, there were some whohelped and rescued Jews. “There weresome who, even though they were anti-Se-mitic, helped Jews. One woman called on

her fellow Poles, saying, ‘The Jews are ourenemy, but in this situation, we, as Chris-tians, cannot be passive observers of mur-der.’ A woman in Kielce hid Jews from thepogrom; she later told a journalist that sheis a devout Catholic and that when she is notworking, she is praying.

“But there were not enough people likethis.”

Gross rejects the idea, however, of collec-tive responsibility. “There is no such thing ascollective responsibility. I do not bear re-sponsibility for the actions of the Holocaust.But we do have a collective sense of identity,and, as a Pole, that identity must include notonly Polish victimhood, but also Poles asperpetrators. It is possible to be both a noblehero and a villain, and we have been both.We must accept this.”

The Holocaust, says Gross, if studied atall, was not integrated into Polish nationalhistory. “For Poles, the history of WorldWar II has not included the Holocaust, asif it were a separate part of history. Jewishhistorians also kept it separate, as if it were

only their responsibility, and as if therewere no interface between Poles andJews.”

This foundation, he says, is simplywrong. In rewriting the history of WorldWar II in Poland, Gross is also introduc-ing a new historiography, based on nar-ratives and testimonies. He is learning,he says, from his own experience.

“I came across the testimony ofSzmul Wassersztajn, who describedthe crime in Jedwabne, by chance. Andyet, somehow, I was unable to accept

that it wasn’t an exaggeration, but a prettyfaithful description of what had happened.The events he was describing didn’t regis-ter in my mind. It took me years to compre-hend and accept.”

Historians of the Holocaust havetended to rely on institutional docu-

ments, following the lead of one of thefounders of the field of Holocaust studies,Raul Hilberg, who dismissed the impor-tance of personal testimonies. Further-more, says Gross, “Information providedby Jews about the fate they suffered duringthe war has been viewed with incredulity –this is a consequence of the unbelievablescope of the crimes the Nazis committedagainst the Jews. The survivors them-selves often repeated that they could notbelieve what they had seen.”

The disbelief was also augmented by thememory of the Allies’ propaganda hoaxesin the First World War and the pervasivedemeaning stereotype of the Jews inChristian cultural tradition.

Yet gradually, historians have come to re-alize that these testimonies often providethe only information available. They weredeliberately written, Gross contends, “inorder to provide an exact account of thecatastrophe. Since it appeared impossibleto save the mass of Jewish people me-thodically annihilated in the Nazi-organizedkilling process, a sense of obligation grewamong the Jewish record-keepers to atleast preserve the evidence of the veryprocess of destruction, to produce an ac-count of what had happened, without em-bellishing the story, even having toovercome their own incredulity at what washappening around them.”

To this day, many Jews often repeat that“the Poles were worse than the Germans”in their treatment of the Jews. Gross sighsas he answers, “Everyone knows that itwas the Germans who invented the Holo-caust and built the camps. But I think thatthe sense of betrayal is much stronger withregard to the Poles. For Jews, relation-ships with the Poles are much more com-plicated than with the Germans. They wereneighbors. There is a terrible sense of be-trayal because these were murderous at-tacks, including torture and unspeakablebarbarity, perpetrated by people theyknew. And many Jews also felt a nostalgiclove for Poland, which had been theirhomeland for so many generations.”

MYTHS AND TRUTHS

Inte

rna

tion

al S

oc

iety

for Y

ad

Va

sh

em

MA

RT

YR

DO

M A

ND

RE

SIS

TA

NC

E

50

0 F

IFT

H A

VE

NU

E, 4

2n

d F

LO

OR

NE

W Y

OR

K, N

.Y. 1

011

0-4

29

9

NO

N-P

RO

FIT

OR

G.

U.S

. PO

ST

PA

ID

NE

W Y

OR

K, N

.Y.

PE

RM

IT N

O. 9

313

We

b s

ite:

ww

w.y

ad

va

sh

em

usa

.org

Martyrdom & Resistance

Eli Zborowski,

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the International Society

for Yad Vashem, Inc.500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd Floor

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli Zborowski

Marvin Zborowski

Mark Palmer

Sam Skura**

Israel Krakowski

William Mandell

Sam Halpern

Isidore Karten**Norman Belfer

Joseph Bukiet**

*1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, Camp In-mates, and Nazi Victims**deceased



Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Joseph & Nicole Meyer, YLA Honorees.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Gonen and Jaci Paradis, YLA Honorees; and


Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Alan and Mindy Schall, YLA Honorees; and


Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Keren Toledano, YLA Honoree; and Melvin


Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Ariel Zborowski, YLA Honoree; and Melvin


Eli Zborowski, Chairman; Boaz Zborowski, YLA Honoree; and Melvin


Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571 November/December 2010 ......Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571...

Documents

Transcript of Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571 November/December 2010 ......Vol. 37-No.2 ISSN 0892-1571...