IN THIS ISSUEThe American Society for Yad Vashem Annual Spring Luncheon....................1, 8-9

Holocaust Remembrance day observed around the world.......................................2

Beyond justice: The Auschwitz trial............................................................................4

Britain’s Holocaust shame: The voyage of the Exodus............................................5Warsaw ghetto uprising leader speaks of struggle...................................................6

Hunt on for Nazi doctor.................................................................................................7

Personal writing from the Shoah...............................................................................10

Completing a mission.................................................................................................11

Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery.........................................13

Oscar Schindler, from Holocaust hero to obscurity................................................14

Salute Hollywood........................................................................................................16

Vol. 34-No.5 ISSN 0892-1571 May/June 2008-Iyyar/Sivan 5768

WOMEN OF VALORTHE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON

ILANA APELKER,AMERICAN SOCIETYFOR YAD VASHEM

This year’s Annual SpringLuncheon had the distinct honor

of welcoming Professor DeborahLipstadt as our guest speaker.Professor Lipstadt is Dorot Professorof Modern Jewish and HolocaustStudies at Emory University inAtlanta. Her book Denying theHolocaust: The Growing Assault onTruth and Memory (FreePress/Macmillan, 1993) was the firstfull-length study of those who attemptto deny the Holocaust. One of theindividuals in that study was DavidIrving, whom Lipstadt called “one ofthe most dangerous spokespersonsfor Holocaust denial.” Irving’sresponse to this claim was to file alibel suit against Professor Lipstadtwhich was the subject of her latestbook and the topic of her speech atthis year’s luncheon.

The book, History on Trial: My Dayin Court with David Irving(Ecco/Harper Collins, 2005) is thestory of the libel trial in London. In herremarks at Cipriani, ProfessorLipstadt recounts her reaction to firstlearning of the libel suit. Thinking thatit was nothing and would just go awayon its own, almost brushing it off asinsignificant by sticking it under a pileof other papers to be looked at later.Once the realization hit that this was areal case that meant she had to proveher findings (since British courts arevery different than ones in the US)she knew she had to fight Irving andnot just make the allegations go away,even though some told her to. Herearly life, growing up in an active

Jewish community in New York, pre-pared her for the fight she was aboutto endure. With help from the Jewishcommunity, her university, and the

general public (Jews and non-Jewsalike), the one-and-half million dollarsto mount her defense was raised andthe trial began. The outcome of thetrial, she knew, would be not only her

personal reputation, but the record ofhistory itself; the record of theHolocaust.

The trial, as Lipstadt says, was a

victory for history and historians. Andsurvivors heaped their praise onLipstadt as being their heroine. Shedescribed that it was only after thetrial that she understood their mean-ing. That she had done something,had stood up against these false alle-gations. Where sixty years ago, somany people did nothing. At the endof her remarks, Lipstadt read variouspassages from her book, letters thatpeople from all over the world hadwritten to her.

Dear Professor LipstadtYou do not know me and we will

probably never meet…My motherwas killed in Auchwitz.If David Irvinghad won my mother would have been

a victim a second time! So too wouldeverybody else who perished there. Iloved my mother very much and havenot seen her since April 14, 1939

when I was 14 years old. She waskilled on October 23, 1944. Gratefullyyours, Anne Bertolin (nee HanneloreJosias) {pg. 286}

Professor Deborah Lipstadt spokeout against Holocaust denial whenfew knew what the meaning of thosewords were. She is an example toyoung scholars and deemed a hero-ine by those she vowed to fight for.But perhaps the strongest words todescriber her are her own:

“I fought to defend myself, to pre-serve my belief in freedom of expres-sion, and to defeat a man who liedabout history and expressed deeplycontemptuous views of Jews andother minorities.” {pg. 289}

THE UNDENIABLE TRUTH OF THE HOLOCAUST

Jean Gluck, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree, Eli Zborowski, Chairman (American Society for Yad Vashem), and Dr. Rochelle Cherry, 2008

Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree.

Page 2 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

ISRAEL – Holocaust RemembranceDay began at sundown with a solemn cer-emony attended by Israeli officials,Holocaust survivors and foreign digni-taries. They gathered at the Yad VashemHolocaust Memorial in Jerusalem toreflect on one of the darkest chapters inJewish history.

Flags were lowered to half-staff acrossthe country. Places of entertainment wereclosed and radio and TV broadcasts werededicated to the Holocaust.

A cantor chanted a mournful prayer asHolocaust survivors lit six torches in mem-ory of the six million Jews killed by theNazis during World War II.

Israel’s President Shimon Peres saidthe world could have faced destruction ifAdolf Hitler had acquired nuclearweapons.

Peres charged that the world woke uptoo late to eliminate the threat fromHitler’s Germany and he warned that mustnot happen again.

Aides said Peres was urging the worldto take action to prevent Iran from acquir-ing nuclear weapons before it is too late.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert alsoaddressed the gathering.

Mr. Olmert said today the Jews candefend themselves in their homeland, andtherefore, he said, the Holocaust willnever happen again.

***FRANCE – From April 30 evening and

during 24 hours the names of the Jewswho died after being deported by theNazis in France during WWII were read ina loud voice, to mark Yom HaShoah.

The 76,000 names are engraved in the“Wall of Names” at the Shoah Memoriallocated in the 4th district of Paris.

Such reading takes place every year onApril 30, the date chosen by the State ofIsrael to honor the memory of theHolocaust victims and of the heroes ofJewish resistance against the Nazis.

The memorial started with an officialceremony Wednesday evening in thepresence of Richard Prasquier, head ofCRIF, the umbrella group of FrenchJewish institutions, Israel’s ambassador toFrance, Daniel Shek, Serge Klarsfeld,president of the association of Sonsand Daughters of Jews deported fromFrance, and Anne-Marie Revcolevschi,director of the Foundation for the mem-ory of the Shoah.

Earlier that week, France’s DefenseSecretary of State, Jean-Marie Bockel,called for “the most extreme firmness”against the desecration of graveyards andrevisionist statements, during a ceremonyin Paris commemorating the Shoah. TheFrench capital’s Mayor, Bertrand Delanoë,attended the ceremony.

“As soon as there is desecration orrevisionist comment, it is necessary toreact with the extreme firmness,” Bockelsaid in a reference to Jean–Marie Le Pen,National Front leader, who, in an inter-view, called again the Nazi gas chambers“a detail of the history of World War II.”

The landmark nine-and-a-half hourdocumentary film, “Shoah”, directed byClaude Lanzmann in 1985, which is anoral history of the Holocaust, was broad-cast in four parts on French televisionfrom May 5 until May 8.

***CZECH REPUBLIC – Yom Ha-Shoah

was marked in many parts of the CzechRepublic – in synagogues, at public gath-erings and in private, by families whoselives were directly affected by theHolocaust. Anyone passing throughPrague’s Námìstí Míru on April 30 couldstop to take part in a public reading of thenames of Holocaust victims. The eventwas organized by the Terezín InitiativeInstitute, the Czech Union of Jewish Youthand the Foundation for Holocaust Victims.

“What we are doing here at NámìstíMíru in Prague is, and that’s how this

event differs from the other Yom Ha-Shoah events, is that we claim a part ofthe public place, a square that doesn’thave anything to do with the Holocaust,said one of the organizers of the eventMichal Frankl.

“And why we are doing it? We aredoing it in order to show that theHolocaust is not just something thatshould be commemorated in syna-gogues or concentration camps, but it issomething that relates to the public andit is part of Czech history. It is also part

of Prague’s history and of this neighbor-hood, Královské Vinohrady, which usedto have a large Jewish population.”

“The other reason is that we want toshow that the case of racial persecutionand the attempt to segregate Jews fromnon-Jews during WWII is still relevant,that it may be related to some othercases of racism that we can witnessthese days. In the booklets that we dis-tribute, we try to show the number ofanti-Jewish measures that try to sepa-rate Jews from non-Jews.

“That’s why the symbol of this years’Yom Ha-Shoah is a calendar, in order toillustrate the quick pace in which thesemeasures and laws were issued. Besidesthis, we want to show that many Jewsresisted this attempt of segregation. ManyJews tried to defend themselves, to keeptheir own space and dignity.”

***USA, BOSTON – Some held back

tears, others let them fall, as Stephan B.Ross, founder of Boston’s Holocaustmemorial, recounted the torture andhumiliation he suffered in Nazi deathcamps over five years.

As difficult as the story was to hear formany of the 400 participants in theHolocaust remembrance at Faneuil Hallon that May 4 afternoon, organizers saidhis journey, along with those of other sur-vivors, needs to be remembered.

“The generation of survivors is dwin-dling,” said Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, chair-

man of the Jewish Community RelationsCouncil’s commemoration organizingcommittee. “The memory should not betaken away because the witnesses are nolonger here.”

The annual ceremony carried a sense ofurgency, with speakers noting there arefewer eye-witnesses to the Holocaust –today’s survivors experienced it as chil-dren or as teenagers. They recognizedone prominent Holocaust survivor, the lateCalifornia Congressman Tom Lantos, whodied in February, as the only survivor ofthe Nazi campaign to have served in theUS Congress. His widow and daughterspoke and lit a candle in his honor.

At the same time, speakers voiced con-cerns over recent remarks by PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran callinggenocide against Jews “a myth,” andoffered pleas for support of Israel.

The ceremony this year also fell in thesame month in which the state of Israelmarks its 60th anniversary.

“Each year we move closer to themoment when the Holocaust will cease tobe a living memory and become history,”said Nadav Tamir, consul general of Israelto New England. “We should be the torch-bearers of ‘never again.’ “

Emphasizing the importance of passing onaccounts of the Holocaust to a younger gen-eration, organizers had two Bostonteenagers read from diaries of children whowere believed to have been their ages whenthey died in concentration camps.

But it was the forceful, personal storyof Ross that elicited the most seat-shift-ing among listeners.

His son, City Councilor Michael P.Ross, stood with him as he talked aboutbeing sustained by the hope of seeinghis family, only to learn upon hisrelease that his parents and six of hissiblings had been killed.

Stephan Ross and his family wererounded up from their homeland inPoland and separated in 1940, when hewas 8 years old. Ross would be trans-ferred to about 10 prison camps, includ-ing Auschwitz, where he was subjectedto slavery, abused by pedophile guards,and witnessed cannibalism.

“It was hard for me to go on living,and I prayed for God to stop punishingme,” he said.

He finally pointed to a small Americanflag hanging from the lectern at FaneuilHall, which he said an American soldierhanded him to dry his tears during hiscamp’s liberation in April 1945.

“I cherished this flag for 63 years. It ismy greatest treasure,” he said. “May thetragedy of the Holocaust be a lesson tomankind to speak out against racism.”

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY OBSERVED AROUND THE WORLD

A flame is lit by a Holocaust survivor at Yad

Vashem, marking the beginning of official cer-

emonies on Yom Ha-Shoah.

The Wall of Names at the Shoah Memorial in

Paris.

Observing Yom Ha-Shoah in Prague.

Israeli President Shimon Peres andhis Polish counterpart, Lech

Kaczyñski, were among those who tookpart in Holocaust memorial ceremony atthe Treblinka concentration camp onApril 14. President Shimon Peres deliv-ered an address at a ceremony marking65 years since the Warsaw ghetto upris-ing, stating that peace is the way inwhich Israel must avenge the horrors ofthe Holocaust.

In his speech Peres, who lit a torch inhonor of the Holocaust victims, said“Millions of Jews lived here for a thou-sand years. And though their lives werenot always secure, they sustained us asa people. It is very hard for me to standhere, but that is not the fault of thePolish people, rather it is the incompara-ble extermination (of the Jews) carried

out by the Nazis. “When I come to

places such as this italmost irritates me tosee the shining sun andthe green trees, but theNazis are to blame,”the Israeli presidentsaid.

Referring to theIsraeli soldiers and stu-dents who were also inattendance, Peres said“I am very moved bytheir presence here. Ithink to myself – if theyhad lived back then –this would not have happened to us.

“We will never again allow people withmurderous compulsions, uncontrollable

animals – to do this again,” he said.Polish President Kaczyñski also

addressed the audience: “We are stand-ing in a place where 800-900,000

Jewish citizens of Poland were extermi-nated; and why? Only because theywere Jews. This was the only reasonbehind their deaths and it was a sen-tence delivered regardless of age, sex oranything else.

“The 3,000 Jews of the ghetto inWarsaw, one of the largest Jewish citiesin the world, were murdered here. Whatmore can we say in the face of such acrime except ‘never again.’ Never againwill there be persecutions over national-ity, religion or race.

“We remember the dreadful crime thattook place here, and those who savedJews, but let us also think of the future –we wish to make every effort so that ourrelations with Israel will continuallyimprove; this is our duty,” saidKaczyñski.

POLISH PEOPLE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HOLOCAUST

Shimon Peres (right) with Polish PM Donald Tusk.

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 3

Air force jets streaked across thecountry’s coastline as sailboats

bobbed in the sea below. Spectatorspacked the shores, climbing on rooftopsfor a better view of the air show asIsraelis came out to celebrate 60 yearsof statehood.

The nation’s moodshifted from mourn-ing to celebration thenight before asMemorial Day gaveway to IndependenceDay. City squareswere filled with revel-ers who came to hearconcerts and watchfireworks and soundand light shows.K i c k i n g o f fIndependence Dayevents, KnessetSpeaker Dalia Itzik tried to strike anupbeat note, despite the rather grim polit-ical mood in the country.

“The State of Israel is an unusual suc-cess story, a wonder by any historicalstandard,” Itzik said.

“We had no miracles. We built this splen-did achievement with our own hands.”

The defense establishment played a keyrole in official events for the day. In Haifa,the navy exhibited its ships and sub-marines, and its underwater commandosheld a demonstration. Along the northernborder, an air force base was open to the

public, as was the coun-try’s intelligence trainingschool near Tel Aviv.

The school exhibitedespionage equipmentand offered guidedtours of tunnels mod-eled after those in theGaza Strip that are usedfor smuggling weaponsacross the border fromEgypt. Also on displaywas a model of aHezbollah base used inLebanon.

Walking among thecrowds in Tel Aviv, Yaniv Bashan took inthe meaning of the day.

“It’s a nostalgic time, people are lookingback at what was,” said Bashan, a 29-year-old engineer. “There are lots of ques-tions about the future but it’s clear the sit-uation is much better now than it was 60years ago.”

ISRAELIS CELEBRATE NATION’S 60TH BIRTHDAY

Israel’s capital has been festooned with

flags for the nation’s 60th birthday.

MEGAN JACOBS , THE JERUSALEM POST

Anew exhibit in Gaza portrays theJewish state burning Palestinian

children in ovens. A group called the National Committee

for Defense of Children from theHolocaust unveiled its premier exhibit lastweek, entitled “Gaza: An exhibit describ-ing the suffering of the children of theHolocaust.”

Rather than teach about the Nazi geno-cide of EuropeanJewry, the exhibitportrays Israel as theperpetrators of theH o l o c a u s t ;Palestinian childrenare “burned” in amodel crematoriumby “Israelis.”

According to theRamallah-based Al-Ayyam daily, “Theexhibit includes alarge oven and insideit small children arebeing burned. Thepicture speaks foritself.”

The Zionist Organization of Americacondemned the exhibit, saying in a state-ment that “there seems to be no limit tothe depravity of Palestinian hate educa-tion and incitement.”

“We have seen over the years every sortof perversity, including educating childrento become suicide bombers and honoringmass murderers. Here, the Palestinians,both Hamas and Fatah, depict Israelis asexterminating-Nazis, while teaching noth-ing about the actual Holocaust in whichthe wartime Palestinian leadership of HajAmin el-Husseini was in fact very active.Husseini not only orchestrated campaignsof murder against Jews in the BritishMandate, but also became an ally of theNazis, and worked hard to speed up thework of deportation and murder,” saidZOA President Morton Klein.

“The depiction of Israelis as exterminat-ing Nazis essentially sends the message

that Jews are evil people who should, likethe Nazi regime, be destroyed. It is a trav-esty that many nations, including the US,continue to fund the PA, and thereby workto keep this conflict alive, while speakingendlessly of working hard to end it. Untiland unless the Palestinians are held totheir commitments to end terrorism andthe incitement to hatred and murder thatfeeds it, no peace can be expected tobecome even feasible,” he said.

“This is different than anything else,”said Palestinian Media Watch directorItamar Marcus. “In the past, Palestinians

would compare whatIsrael is doing to themto the Holocaust.”

Over the last fewyears, PalestinianMedia Watch has docu-mented a “tremendousincrease” in the usageof the word “holocaust”in the Palestinianmedia. Marcus said itwas now being used“regularly, a few timesper week or per article,”versus once a month,as it had been prior,

causing concern on multiple levels. “The use of the term ‘Shoah’ has no

doubt permeated society,” Marcus said. “Ithas been adopted as their term.”

Once adopted, it serves to de-legitimizeIsraelis, making them out to be liars andaggressors, he said.

Furthermore, the perversion of Shoahlanguage is incitement to hatred that,though not a direct incitement to violence,is equally as dangerous, he said. Marcuscompares the current dialogue and hatredpromotion to that of 1996-2000, where“incessant hatred was pumped into[Palestinian] society.” Once “hatred, fearand a feeling that revenge is legitimate”are instilled in the population, an eruptioninto violence is the next step in a terroristcycle, he said.

“Our greatest danger for peace in thelong-term is promotion of hatred,” saidMarcus. “This is the worst kind. It willimprint hatred on those kids forever.”

Railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-

Birkenau is seen but with Israeli flags

replacing the Nazi ones. Sign in Arabic

reads: “Gaza Strip or the Israeli

Annihilation Camp.”

HATRED THROUGH THE HOLOCAUST

Amovable exhibition on the deporta-tion of Jewish children during the

Holocaust has been refused permission tostop in Berlin`s central station.

“At this site of mass deportations, tech-nical concerns were deemed more impor-tant than the exhibition,” the organizers ofthe “Zug der Erinnerung” (Memory Train)said in a statement.

State rail operator Deutsche Bahn hassaid rail traffic would be disrupted if thesteam train carrying the exhibitionstopped at the capital’s gleaming newHauptbahnhof main station.

The row is the latest of several betweenthe organizers and state rail providerDeutsche Bahn, which initially refused tolet the exhibition be shown at any Germanstations at all.

Deutsche Bahn argued that the memori-al exhibition did not belong in stationsbecause it deserved more than the dividedattention of hurried commuters, but relent-ed after its stance drew strong criticism.

Since then, it has come under fire forcharging the organizers transport fees.

Michael Szentei-Heise, the leader of theJewish community in the western city ofDuesseldorf, has called Deutsche Bahn

chief Hartmut Mehdorn “a Nazi at heart ...(who) would have arranged the deporta-tion of Jews with great conviction.”

Deutsche Bahn has threatened to sue him. The exhibition traces the plight of,

among others, 11,400 Jewish childrenwho were deported from France to theAuschwitz death camp, often crammedtogether in cattle trucks, between 1942and 1944.

The Nazi state paid Deutsche Bahn’swartime predecessor, the Reichsbahn, 25Reichsmarks, the equivalent of 38 dollars,for each child it transported to the camp.

The exhibition opened in Berlin in Januaryand was being shown at eight other stationsin Germany. It would eventually travelthrough Poland to the site of Auschwitz.

Instead of stopping at Hauptbahnhofthe exhibition train stoppped at the smallGrunewald station in Berlin, which wassuggested as an alternative by DeutscheBahn and is home to the “Platform 17”Holocaust memorial.

The Nazis began deporting Jews to con-centration camps from Grunewald inOctober 1941 in their brutal campaign ofpersecution that led to the death of six mil-lion Jews by the end of World War II.

HOLOCAUST TRAIN BANNED

FROM BERLIN CENTRAL STATION

Austria will tighten rules requiring therestitution of art seized during the

Nazi period, the government said follow-ing criticism from the Jewish community.

Culture Minister Claudia Schmied saidan exemption for private foundations,which has excluded claims againstVienna’s Leopold Museum, would be re-examined.

“I am seeking a clear regulation of thematter of restitution regarding the LeopoldFoundation. The debate of the past fewweeks has not enhanced the reputation ofthe republic and especially not that of theLeopold Foundation,” she said.

Property belonging to Jews was confis-cated as a matter of course during Nazi rulein Germany and neighboring countries.

Debate was revived after Austria’sJewish community leader, Ariel Muzicant,said in a television interview in Februarythe Leopold Museum should be closeddown until the law was changed.The museum, one of Vienna’s majortourist attractions, is classed as a privatefoundation, even though it is state-funded.In addition, the government will seek thereturn of works taken between 1933,when Hitler first came to power in

Germany, and 1945, when Nazi Germanywas defeated.

The current law covers from 1938, whenAustria was annexed by Nazi Germany, to 1945.

The change in the law would also broadenthe definition of property that could be returnedand includes goods expropriated in all areas ofinfluence of the Nazis’ Third Reich.

Thousands of artworks have beenreturned to their original owners or theirheirs under the present law. It was unclearhow much more property would be cov-ered by the changes.

Sophie Lillie, an art researcher, toldReuters the most significant work at issueis “Haeuser am Meer” (Houses on theSea) by 20th-century expressionist EgonSchiele. It was seized by the Nazis in1938 and is claimed by a British family.One report values it at $15 million.

“Any national museum would havegiven it back long ago,” Lillie said.

Rudolf Leopold, 83, founder of the collec-tion and an expert on Schiele, was quoted bycultural weekly Falter last month as refusingto return “Haeuser am Meer.”

“I have never extorted from anyone andnever bought anything that I knew hadbeen Jewish property,” he said.

AUSTRIA TO RETURN MORE ART

NAZIS STOLE FROM JEWS

After years of delay, the Polish gov-ernment aims to complete the issue

of Holocaust property restitution by theend of the year, Polish Ambassador toIsrael, Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewskasaid.

The core of a bill, which was acceptedby the Polish parliament in draft form twoyears ago, is ready, and the Polish gov-ernment hopes to reach a resolution bythe end of the year, she said in a briefingwith Israeli journalists.

The draft bill passed its initial reading inthe previous parliament, but it needs to bereintroduced due to the recent change ofgovernment. The bill would pay 20 percentcompensation to former property-owners –both Jewish and non-Jewish – whose prop-erty was seized during World War II.

Polish officials estimate that the Jewish-

owned private property makes up nearly20% of all property taken.

Moreover, many of the areas populatedby Jews ahead of WWII – the so-calledGalicia region – are now located outsidethe boundaries of present-day Poland andfall in Ukraine.

Magdziak-Miszewska said it was importantfor Poland to finalize the agreement for bothhistorical and economic reasons, sinceclaimants who have taken their cases direct-ly to Polish courts have been receiving 100%compensation for their property.

“It is [both] moral justice and the realeconomic interest of Poland to end thisissue,” she said.

The total value of seized property is esti-mated to be around $21b.-24b., accordingto Polish groups working to attain thecompensation.

POLAND WANTS HOLOCAUST PROPERTY

RESTITUTION LAW BY END OF YEAR

Page 4 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

B O O K R E V I E W SB O O K R E V I E W SBeyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. By

Rebecca Wittmann, Harvard UniversityPress: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005.336 pp. $35 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

“There is one incident I can neverforget: it must have been around

November 1944. A truck, carrying Jewishchildren drove into the camp. The truckstopped by the barracks of the PoliticalDepartment. A boy – he must have beenabout four or five years old – jumped out.He was playing with an apple that he washolding in his hand. Boger took the childby his feet and smashed his head againstthe wall . . . Later, I was called in to dosome translation for Boger. He was sittingin his office, eating the boy’s apple.”

The above is but an excerpt from thetestimony given by Douna Wasserstrom,a survivor of Auschwitz, given at theAuschwitz Trial in the 1960s – a trialexceptionally well-documented inRebecca Wittmann’s, Beyond Justice:The Auschwitz Trial.

Interestingly, it all began in March, 1958,when Adolf Rögner, “a prisoner in theBruchsal penitentiary convicted of fraud”complained about his heart medication ina letter to the prosecutor’s office inStuttgart. In this selfsame letter, he alsobegan to talk about an SS ObersharführerBoger, known as “the Devil of Birkenau.”

He said Boger was alive, that he had beena mass murderer in Auschwitz whereRögner was once a prisoner, and that hewanted to press charges against Boger . .. and did. Thus the pros-ecutors heard Rögnerout . . . and his chargewould lead to “the largestmost public and mostimportant [trial of its kind]ever to take place inWest Germany usingWest German judgesand West German law.”

It is at this point that theauthor, Wittman, makesus privy to the WestGerman legal way ofdoing things – quite dif-ferent from our own way.It is here, too, thatWittman makes us privyto the fact that “somefour hundred witnessinterrogations, and the investigation ofas many as eight hundred perpetratorsat Auschwitz” was part of this trial. Inthe end, twenty men – most all SS-men– faced the court of three judges andsix jurists.

Eyewitness testimony was mostimportant at this trial, which began

December, 1963. Hence, there was thetestimony of Dr. Tadeusz Paczula, a

Polish surgeon who “witnessed the resultsof the most heinous crimes committed bydefendant Josef Klehr.” He characterizedKlehr as a “sadist” and a “lusty killer” as

he injected prisonerswith phenol, murderingthem on his own volition.Then there were theJewish women, secre-taries in the PoliticalDepartment, who sawWilhelm Boger’s swing“and the unrecognizablestate in which most pris-oners appeared afterbeing brutalized on it.”They spoke. There wasevidence against OswaldK a d u k . Te s t i m o n yagainst him showed him“fond of drowning, beat-ing, whipping, shooting,running over, or in anyother way killing prison-

ers.” As far as SS private and block offi-cer Stefan Baretski, “a soft-spokenAustrian Jewish doctor named OttoWolken” testified about his witnessingBaretski’s “favorite ritual, a ‘rabbit hunt.’”“Prisoners at roll call were ordered to taketheir hats off, and those who reacted tooslowly were beaten and murdered on theelectrical fence.”

Not surprisingly, those I’ve noted would

receive life sentences, often with addi-tional years tacked on. But where therewas no eyewitness testimony of a defen-dant going above and beyond their usualmurderous duties, where there was noproof that “defendants had acted on theirown, exceeding (my emphasis) theorders of the SS in Berlin,” they couldnot be found guilty of murder. Perhapsthey could be found guilty of “aiding andabetting,” but that was it!

W ittmann finds this rather “para-doxical,” as would any normal

human being. For, in fact, the court, incoming to its verdicts on the various indi-viduals on trial utilized the “laws of thecamp” (Auschwitz) as its “standard.”Hence those who followed orders, whoherded thousands into the gas cham-bers, are not guilty of murder accordingto this “standard.” That was the law inAuschwitz! Only those who murderedwith “base motives” and with “individualinitiative” are guilty!! . . . Strange . . .very strange . . . It makes one wonderabout justice . . .

Surely Beyond Justice: The AuschwitzTrial is a unique addition to Holocaust lit-erature and should be of interest to stu-dents of the Holocaust . . . and the law.

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia and Communication Arts at PaceUniversity.

BEYOND JUSTICE: THE AUSCHWITZ TRIAL

A gift from the heavens. By ChavaPressburger and Elena Lappin. AtlanticMonthly Press, 2007. 192 pp. $16.32.

REVIEWED BY BILL GLAUBER

The dutiful diary of Petr Ginz, killedat Auschwitz at 16, has been recov-ered — oddly, asa result of theColumbia spaceshuttle disaster.

“The Diary ofPetr Ginz”

is a gift from histo-ry, a gift from theheavens — a frag-ment of a life extin-guished by theHolocaust. Ginzwas almost 14,Jewish, a resi-dent of Prague,when he began adiary, “the equiva-lent of a captain’slog on a sinkingship,” translatorElena Lappin writes.

A budding artist, author and voraciousreader, Ginz records the slow ebbing ofeveryday life for Prague’s Jews. The writ-ing is spare, without emotion, as Ginznotes signposts on the long trail of deathfor Europe’s Jews, draws the yellow starhe is forced to wear, counts the 69 “sher-iffs” he sees on his way to school.

An introduction and concluding story byPetr’s sister, Chava Pressburger, addcontext. So do family photos, and Petr’slater essays.

But Petr’s flat prose is powerful. OnJan. 1, 1942, he writes: “What is quiteordinary now would certainly cause upset

in a normal time. For example, Jewsdon’t have fruit, geese, and any poultry,cheese, onions, garlic and many otherthings. Tobacco ration cards are forbid-den to prisoners, madmen, and Jews.”

By the hundreds and then thousands,Prague’s Jews are transported away. To

Petr, the numbers arepeople, the Levituses,the Poppers. Finally,in August 1942, a finaldiary entry: “In themorning at home.”Petr is sent toTheresienstadt. TheGermans claimed itwas a spa town; inreality, it was a Jewishghetto and transitcamp where Petr con-tinued to grow, read-ing, drawing andpainting and writingfor a secret newspa-per.

In 1944 he died atAuschwitz.

There, the story might have ended. Butsome of Petr’s artwork and writings sur-vived. In 2003, Israeli astronaut IlanRamon took a piece of the Holocaustinto space — a copy of Petr’s drawing ofa moonscape. Ramon and the othermembers of the space shuttle Columbiacrew died when the ship broke up in thesky on Feb. 1, 2003 — what would havebeen Petr’s 75th birthday.

News of the painting reached a manin Prague, who realized he was in pos-session of a most unusual item in hisattic. From tragedy came a remarkablediscovery: Petr’s long-lost war diarywas found.

A GIFT FROM THE HEAVENSThe Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

By Daniel Mendelsohn. Harper Collins,2006. 528 pp. $18.45

REVIEWED BY DON OLDENBURG

As a boy growing up on Long Island,Daniel Mendelsohn loved stories his

Orthodox Jewish grandfather told about theancestral home in the Ukrainian shtetl ofBolechow and relatives who left it for Israeland America.

But, over the years,Mendelsohn’s curiositygrew about those whodidn’t leave Bolechow —great-uncle ShmielJager, a prominentbutcher, his wife, Ester,and their “four beautifuldaughters.” He realizedthe stories about themnever went beyond thewhispered epitaph “killedby the Nazis.”

As if their fate alonesaid it all.

It didn’t for Mendelsohn,whose new book, TheLost: A Search for Six ofSix Million, recounts insometimes numbing butmostly riveting detail his five-year odysseyin search of what happened to these sixwho perished in the Holocaust.

Trying to recover identities from theanonymous mass graves of EasternEurope, the author studied old photos,prowled online genealogy sites and badg-ered elderly kin for anything they mightremember.

Mendelsohn’s detective-like mission

became an obsession. But it didn’t come to

life — for him or in the book — until he vis-

ited Bolechow, and then Australia, Israel,

Sweden and elsewhere, to talk to survivors

of the Nazi “aktions” in Bolechow.

The personalities and age-challenged

memories of these remarkable old people,

the author narrates masterfully. They

become the lifeblood of the book, making it

more intimate than just another generic

Holocaust tome.

But be forewarned. This isn’t an easy

read — and not only

because of the horrify-

ing historic events. A

classicist and literary

crit ic, Mendelsohn

overburdens the read-

er, especially early on,

with extraneous details,

digressions, repetition

and a self-indulgent

style he describes as

“Homeric,” likening it to

his grandfather’s story-

telling.

To draw parallels to

the book’s themes of

origins, family, betrayal

a n d d e a t h ,

Mendelsohn weaves in

italicized medieval

Jewish interpretations

of the biblical stories of Creation, Cain and

Abel and the Flood. That proves more

exhausting than enlightening for the reader.

But the powerful ending — that final visit

to Bolechow and the streets where Shmiel

and his family lived and died — is poignant

and heart-rending enough to eclipse the

excesses and turn The Lost into a memo-

rable, insightful book about what can be

tragically lost — and ultimately, with persist-

ence, found.

First published in USA Today.

WHAT HAPPENED TO “THE LOST”?

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 5

BY TOBY AXELROD, JTA

It was the spring of 1943 when OttoErnst Duscheleit, a Hitler Youth leader,

received the call: Join the Waffen-SS orbe sent to a penal battalion.

“I was 17 and I knew little about whatwas happening,” Duscheleit recalls.

He would spend two years on the front.Duscheleit helped set Russian villages

ablaze during the retreat of Germanforces, and though he says he did notcommit atrocities, he watched as Jewswere loaded onto trains for deportation todeath camps.

“They were wearing the yellow star,”Duscheleit says. “I saw them, but I didn’tthink about what was happening.”

Some 40 years later, Duscheleit had adream in which someone called him an “SSpig,” and the former Nazi began to reflect onhis past. Overcome by shame, he soonstarted meeting with students and childrenof survivors to tell them his story. In 2006 hepublished an autobiography.

“When I tell my story to older people,some also start to tell what they remem-ber,” he says of fellow Germans. “I givethem courage to speak about their past.

“But sometimes it is such a torture thatthey cannot speak about it. And then, aftera short time, they die.”

Duscheleit, who lives in Berlin, is amonga small group of former Nazis relatingtheir stories. Their stories represent afast-disappearing opportunity to recordthe history of the Holocaust based on rec-ollections of former perpetrators, collabo-rators or sympathizers.

Still, most living ex-Nazis do not wantto share their stories, and those thatare willing often offer unreliableaccounts. Unlike Duscheleit, few areconfronting their pasts critically.

“Many who had suchexperiences won’t talkabout it, or they will try toturn themselves into vic-tims, or they will lie,” saidGerman filmmaker MalteLudin, who wants tolaunch a project to recordthe ex-Nazis’ stories andbuild an archive of perpe-trators’ testimony.

It’s not that Ludin expectsany earth-shattering revela-tions. He hopes the inter-views help teach the worldhow crucial it is to opposegenocide.

Ludin’s 2005 film, “2 or 3Things I Know About Him,” shows how hisown family buried the truth about hisfather, an executed war criminal.

While tens of thousands of Holocaustsurvivors have recorded personal testi-monies of their experiences, no compara-ble collection exists from Nazi perpetra-tors or sympathizers.

In recent years, however, several peo-ple like Ludin, who uncovered the Nazi

pasts of their parents or grandparentshave published their stories.

Psychotherapist Ute Althaus startedprobing her father’s Nazi past in earnestonly after he died. Her father, Ernst Meyer,had been sentenced to 10 years in prisonafter the war, but she said his war crimeswere never discussed in the family.

After Meyer’s death in 1993, Althausread his prison letters. Her researchwas recorded in her 2006 book “I wasNo Nazi Officer.”

“After the war, committed Nazis like myfather presented themselves as non-Nazis and as victims of Hitler,” Althaustold JTA.

In the postwar letters, Althaus said her

father wrote that Hitler and his people“committed genocide without the knowl-edge of the Germans.”

“I don’t find any empathy with the vic-tims in my father’s letters,” she added.“We children of Nazis grew up in a fraud-ulent world.”

As to the testimonies of the perpetratorsthemselves, it’s not so much what theysay but how they say it that’s interesting,says Stephan Marks, a social scientist atthe University of Freiburg in Germany.

“As oral history it is not very fruitful,” Markssaid. “But if you look at the hidden content, itturns out to be very interesting. There is akind of addictive relationship that followers ofHitler have with the Third Reich.”

Interview subjects often insult their inter-viewers, suggesting that they could neverunderstand how it was back then, saysMarks, the author of the 2007 book, “WhyDid They Follow Hitler? The Psychologyof Nazism.”

One interview subject had placed oldgrenades on the posts of his gate and evennailed his Nazi military ID to the front door.

It’s difficult to know how truthful perpe-trators are when recounting their

memories, says Israeli sociologist DanBar-On, the author of the 1989 book“Legacy of Silence.”

“Many are apologetic, but they don’ttell you much about what really hap-pened and about how they felt,” Bar-Onsaid.

The more a perpetrator has to say, theless important the testimony, saysEfraim Zuroff, the Israel director of theSimon Wiesenthal Center.

“It is incredibly rare that perpetratorsown up to their crimes,” Zuroff told JTA.“If they can talk about their crimes, theyhave nothing interesting to tell us.”

Even in trial testimony, “most thoughtthey were innocent and had done theright thing,” Zuroff said. “That can teachus about the nature of people who havebeen brainwashed about Nazi ideology.”

“They were not persons who camefrom outer space or Mars,” said MichaBrumlik of the Institute for GeneralPedagogy in Frankfurt am Main. “It isimportant to prove to the younger gener-ations that moral evil is very close to us.”

Marks says it’s important to explorehow well-educated and intelligent peo-ple became so excited by the Nazimovement.

“The emotional underground thatmade this possible is something wehave hardly started to touch,” he said.

Sometime after Duscheleit began

speaking publicly about his years in the

Waffen SS, he said he was confronted

by several right-wing youths after a

speech.

“One young man came to me and said,

‘How can you speak that way as a for-

mer SS man and Hitler Youth leader?’ ”

“I answered, ‘I have learned something

since then.’ And the young man turned

around and left.”

AS PERPETRATORS DIE OUT, PUSH TO COLLECT NAZI STORIES

Followers of Adolf Hitler, left, with Nazi henchman, had a “kind of

addictive relationship” with the Third Reich, says the author of

“Why Did They Follow Hitler?”

The ship was filled with Jewishrefugees, desperately seeking a newlife in the Promised Land after the hor-rors of Nazi concentration camps. But,thanks to the Royal Navy, they weresent back to prison camps in Germany.

BY ROBERT VERKAIK, THE INDEPENDENT

When British soldiers reached theconcentration camps of Nazi

Germany in the last days of the SecondWorld War, the survivors of the Holocausthailed them as saviors.

The troops’ gruesome discoveries atBergen-Belsen in 1945, where piles ofskeletal corpses lay amid the camp’sdeath ovens and gas chambers, prompt-ed Britain’s political leaders to promisethat the world would never forget the suf-fering of the Jews.

Yet, just two years later, the British gov-ernment was accused of mistreating thou-sands of Holocaust survivors, who, whenprevented from fleeing to Palestine, hadbeen forcibly sent back to barbed-wiredetention camps in Germany, staffed byGermans.

Secret papers released at the NationalArchives for the first time this April revealthe fate of Jewish immigrants aboard the1947 refugee ship Exodus and the bitterpropaganda battle that ensued whenBritain used force to return them toGermany.

British soldiers, ordered to storm thetransport vessels to which the Jewishimmigrants on board Exodus had beentransferred, were accused of behavinglike “Hitler Commandos,” “gentleman fas-

cists” and sadists.As the British soldiers clashed with the

Jewish refugees at the port of Hamburg,dockside banners read: “You are bringingus back to Germany, to a concentrationcamp worse than Belsen.”

The episode proved hugely embarrass-ing for the British. But the internationalcondemnation which accompanied thespectacle of Jews being marched off shipsand put on trains for internment campshelped create the political climate for thecreation of Israel the following year.

At the end of the war, it was left to theBritish to try to stem the flow of illegalimmigration to Palestine, where the British

government, con-scious of Arab sen-sitivities in theregion, decided tomaintain strict quo-tas upon Jewishentry. So it wasthat, in July 1947,the Exodus, underthe close scrutinyof the Royal Navy,docked in Marseilleand picked up4,553 Jewishrefugees, eachdetermined to defythe British block-ade of Palestine.

On its voyage,later made into aHollywood film star-ring Paul Newman,the Exodus was

escorted by the British cruiser Ajax and aconvoy of destroyers. The ship’s captain,Yossi Harel, who died at the age of 90 lastmonth, had planned to slip away from theescorts as he neared the coast ofPalestine but, in the end, he decided toignore the British warnings to stop, andmade a run for the port.

The British response to that was to fire awarning shot into the Exodus’s bow,immediately followed by the dispatch of aboarding party.

The passengers and crew resisted, andfierce fighting broke out on the Exodus.Three passengers and a soldier died, andmany were wounded. The British then

towed the Exodus into Haifa harbour, fromwhere it was planned that the passengerswould be sent back to France on threeseparate transport vessels.

But when the ships reached Marseilles,the refugees refused to disembark andthe British decided the only course ofaction left to them was to escort themback to Germany.

By the time they had docked atHamburg, many of the refugees

were in defiant mood. When they first setout on their historic quest, they hadbelieved they were days away from arriv-ing at a Jewish homeland. The prospect ofbeing sent to prison camps in Germanyrepresented a pitiful failure of their originalmission and for many of the Holocaustsurvivors, it was almost impossible tobear.

But the British government had no inten-tion of backing down or relaxing its policy.

Under Operation Oasis, plans were putin place to storm the ships.

The British had identified one of theships, the Runnymede Park, as the vesselmost likely to cause them trouble.

A confidential report of the time noted:“It was known that the Jews on theRunnymede Park were under the leader-ship of a young, capable and energeticfanatic, Morenci Miry Rosman, andthroughout the operation it had been real-ized that this ship might give trouble.”

One hundred military police and 200Sherwood Foresters troops were orderedto board the ship and eject the Jewishimmigrants.

(Continued on page 12)

BRITAIN’S HOLOCAUST SHAME: THE VOYAGE OF THE EXODUS

Migrants from Europe on board the Exodus.

Page 6 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

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 RBY JAMES BARRON, THE NEW YORK TIMES

The back story of how a Torah gotfrom the fetid barracks of Auschwitz

to the ark of the Central Synagogue atLexington Avenue and 55th Street is onethe pastor of the Lutheran church down thestreet sums up as simply “miraculous “.

It is the story of a sexton in the syna-gogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim whoburied most of the sacred scroll before theGermans stormed in and later renamedthe city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewishprisoners who sneaked the rest of it – fourcarefully chosen panels – into the concen-tration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priestto whom they entrusted the four panelsbefore their deaths. It is the story of aMaryland rabbi who went looking for itwith a metal detector. And it is the story ofhow a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-oldson helped lead him to it.

This Torah, more than most, “is such anextraordinary symbol of rebirth,” saidPeter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of CentralSynagogue. “As one who has gone to thecamps and assimilates into my being thehorror of the Holocaust, this gives mean-ing to Jewish survival.”

On April 30, the restored Torah wasrededicated in honor of HolocaustRemembrance Day, which for more than20 years the congregation of CentralSynagogue has observed in conjunctionwith its neighbor, St. Peter’s LutheranChurch, at Lexington Avenue and 54thStreet. The senior pastor, the Rev.Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter,the Holocaust memorial is “the mostimportant service I attend every year.”

For years, Jews around the worldhave worked to recover and rehabilitateTorahs that disappeared or weredestroyed during the Holocaust, return-ing them to use in synagogues.

This Torah remained hidden for morethan 60 years, buried where the sextonhad put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus,who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs thenonprofit Save a Torah foundation, beganlooking for it about eight years ago. Overtwo decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foun-dation has found more than 1,000 dese-crated Torahs and restored them, apainstaking and expensive process. Thisone was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus wasdetermined.

He had heard a story told by Auschwitzsurvivors: Three nights before theGermans arrived, the synagogue sextonput the Torah scrolls in a metal box andburied them. The sexton knew that theNazis were bent on destroying Judaismas well as killing Jews. But the survivorsdid not know where the sexton had buriedthe Torah. Others interested in rescuingthe Torah after the war had not found it.As for what happened during the war, “Ipersonally felt the last place the Naziswould look would be in the cemetery,”Rabbi Youlus said in an interview, recall-ing his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late

2000 or early 2001, insearch of the missingTorah. “So that was thefirst place I looked.”

With a metal detector,because, if the story wascorrect, he was huntingfor a metal box in a ceme-tery in which all the cas-kets were made of wood,according to Jewish lawsof burial. The metaldetector did not beep.“Nothing,” the rabbi said.“I was discouraged. “

He went home toMaryland. One of hissons, Yitzchok, then 13,wondered if the cemeterywas the same size as in1939. They went online

and found land records that showed thatthe present-day cemetery was far smallerthan the original one.

Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 withhis metal detector, aiming it at the

spot where the gneeza – a burial plot fordamaged Torahs, prayer books or otherpapers containing God’s name – hadbeen. It beeped as he passed a housethat had been built after World War II.

He dug near the house and found themetal box. But when he opened it, he dis-covered the Torah was incomplete. “It wasmissing four panels,” he said.

“The obvious question was, why wouldthe sexton bury a scroll that’s missing fourpanels? I was convinced those four pan-els had a story themselves.”

They did, as he learned when he placedan ad in a Polish newspaper in the area“asking if anyone had parchment withHebrew letters.”

“I said I would pay top dollar,” RabbiYoulus said. “The response came the nextday from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactlywhat you’re looking for, four panels of a

Torah. I couldn’t believe it.”He compared the lettering and the pagi-

nation, and paid the priest. The priest “toldme the panels were taken into Auschwitzby four different people,” Rabbi Youlussaid. “I believe they were folded and hid-den.” One of the panels contained the TenCommandments from Exodus, a portionthat, when chanted aloud each year, thecongregation stands to hear. Another con-tained a similar passage fromDeuteronomy.

The priest, who was born Jewish, washimself an Auschwitz survivor. He toldRabbi Youlus that the people with the foursections of the Torah gave them to himbefore they were put to death.“He kept all four pieces until I put that adin the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soonas I put that ad in the paper, he knew Imust be the one with the rest of the Torahscroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priesthas since died.)

Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half theTorah’s lettering needed repair, work thatthe foundation has done over the past fewyears.

Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdyTorah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65years.” The plan is to make it availableevery other year to the March of theLiving, an international educational pro-gram that arranges for Jewish teenagersto go to Poland on HolocaustRemembrance Day, to march fromAuschwitz to its companion death camp,Birkenau.

“This really is an opportunity to look upto the heavens and say, he who laughslast, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “TheNazis really thought they had wiped Jewsoff the face of the earth, and Judaism.Here we are taking the ultimate symbol ofhope and of Judaism and rededicating itand using it in a synagogue. And we’ll takeit to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”

First published in the New York Times

For decades, Marek Edelman hasfound it painful to talk about his time

as a leader in the ill-fated 1943 struggleby a handful of scrappy, poorly armedJews in Warsaw to rise up against theNazi’s trained and equipped army.

If he ever returns to the traumatic mem-ories of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it isonly to bring a word of warning to the con-temporary world.

“Man is evil: By nature, man is a beast,”Edelman told The Associated Press dur-ing an interview in his home in the centralcity of Lodz.

He said people “have to be educatedfrom childhood, from kindergarten, thatthere should be no hatred.”

“They have to be shown that all peopleare the same, that skin color, race, religiondon’t matter,” he said. “We have only onelife and we must not murder each other.We see the sun only once.”

Sixty-five years after the revolt,Edelman is reluctant to recall details of thethree weeks he and some 220 otheryoung Jews spent fighting the Germans –who had begun liquidating the ghetto,sending the remaining tens of thousandsof residents to death camps.

“It was the first, most important and most

spectacular” instance of Jewish armedresistance to the Nazi Holocaust, saidAndrzej Zbikowski, head of the JewishHistorical Institute in Warsaw.

For years, Edelman – the last living com-mander of the struggle – and a handful ofsurvivors have marked the April 19 anniver-sary of the uprising by laying flowers at theMonument to the Heroes of the Ghetto. Heviews the observances as “part of educat-ing people and fighting genocide.”

Edelman, who still works as a doctor in aLodz hospital, becomes emotional when hespeaks of the struggle he helped launch.

“I remember them all – boys and girls – 220all together, not too many to remember theirfaces, their names,” he said. The Nazis “want-ed to destroy the people, and we fought toprotect the people in the ghetto, to extend theirlife by a day or two or five.”

They scraped together guns and ammu-nition that they and Polish resistancemanaged to smuggle in from the outside.Still, “there weren’t enough guns, ammu-nition. There was not enough food, but wewere not starving. You can live for threeweeks just on water and sugar,” whichthey found in the homes of those deport-ed to death camps, he said.

Edelman, then 24, took command ofone of the revolt’s three groups of

fighters, all between the ages of 13 and22. His brigade included 50 so-called“brush men” because their base was abrush factory.

They adopted hit-and-run tactics. Withtime, as supplies and forces began to runlow, they resorted to attacks at night, formore safety.

“Every moment was difficult. It was twoor three or 10 boys fighting with an army,”Edelman said. “There were no easymoments.”

“It lasted for three weeks, so this great

German army could not cope so easilywith those 220 boys and girls,” he saidwith a grain of pride.

The uprising ended when its main lead-ers – rounded up by the Nazis – commit-ted suicide on May 8, 1943. The Nazisthen razed the ghetto, street by street.

About 40 surviving fighters escapedthrough the city’s sewers and joined thePolish partisans.

“No one believed he would be saved,”said Edelman. “We knew that the strugglewas doomed, but it showed the world thatthere is resistance against the Nazis, thatyou can fight the Nazis.”

Edelman and a few others remained inWarsaw to help coordinate and supply theJewish resistance groups. Some fightersstill live in Israel and Canada. Edelman isthe last one in Poland.

Despite the ghetto struggle’s ultimatefailure, “it was worth it,” Edelman said.“Even at the price of the fighters’ lives.”After the war, Edelman chose to remain inPoland, becoming a social and a demo-cratic activist, and guardian of the ghettofighters’ memory.

“When you were responsible for the life ofsome 60,000 people, you don’t leave andabandon the memory of them,” he said.

FROM AUSCHWITZ, A TORAH AS STRONG AS ITS SPIRIT

Rabbi Menachem Youlus removes dirt from a Torah that had been

buried in a Polish cemetery to keep it from the Nazis.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING LEADER SPEAKS OF STRUGGLE

Marek Edelman

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 7

BY DAVID RISING, AP

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked inthe hospital at Mauthausen concen-

tration camp, had no trouble rememberingthe first time he watched SS doctor AribertHeim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jewhad been sent to the clinic with a footinflammation. Heim asked him about him-self and why he was he so fit. The youngman said he had been a soccer playerand swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner’sfoot, Heim anesthetized him, cut himopen, castrated him, took apart one kid-ney and removed the second, Lotter said.The victim’s head was removed and theflesh boiled off so that Heim could keep iton display.

“He needed the head because of its per-fect teeth,” Lotter, a non-Jewish politicalprisoner, recalled in testimony eight yearslater that was included in an Austrian war-rant for Heim’s arrest uncovered by TheAssociated Press. “Of all the camp doc-tors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was themost horrible.”

But Heim managed to avoid prosecu-tion, his American-held file in Germanymysteriously omitting his time atMauthausen, and today he is the mostwanted Nazi war criminal on a list of hun-dreds who the Simon Wiesenthal Centerestimates are still free.

Heim would be 93 today and “we havegood reason to believe he is still alive,”said Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal

Center’s top Nazi hunter. He spoke in atelephone interview from Jerusalemahead of the center’s plans to release alist of the most-sought fugitives onWednesday, and toopen a media campaignin South America thissummer highlighting the$485,000 reward forHeim’s arrest posted bythe center, along withGermany and Austria.

GLOBAL MANHUNT

The hunt for Heimhas taken investi-

gators from the Germanstate of Baden-W u e r t t e m b e r g a l laround the world.Besides his home coun-try of Austria and neigh-boring Germany, wherehe settled after the war,tips have come fromUruguay in 1998, Spain,Switzerland and Chile in2005, and Brazil in2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judgeof the Baden-Baden state court, whereHeim was indicted in absentia on hun-dreds of counts of murder in 1979.

Thousands of German war criminalswere prosecuted in West Germany afterWorld War II. In the 1970s, Westerndemocracies began a hunt in earnest forEastern European collaborators who hadfled West, claiming to be refugees from

communism, and the end of the Cold Wargave access to a trove of communist filesin the 1990s.

“All of a sudden, there was pressure oncountries like Latviaand Estonia to putthese people on trial,”Zuroff said. “So twotimes in the past 30years we’ve beengiven a tremendousinfusion of new energyand new possibilities.”

The WiesenthalCenter’s previousannual survey counted1,019 investigationsunder way worldwide.The number is lowerthis year and inexactbecause not all coun-tries responded, butnew investigationswere up from 63 to202, Zuroff said.

Still, a lack of politicalwill in many countries,and what Zuroff called

the “misplaced-sympathy syndrome” —reluctance to pursue aging suspects —has meant that few people have beenbrought to trial and convicted.

GRUESOME EXPERIMENTS

Lotter, the witness to Heim’s atrocity,was in Mauthausen because he

fought with the communists in the SpanishCivil War. His statement from the 1950

arrest warrant was viewed by the AP atthe National Archives in College Park, Md.

Now that the necessary evidence is inplace, numerous witness statements havebeen taken and Heim has been indicted;all that’s left is to find him.

Born June 28, 1914, in Radkersburg,Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in1935, three years before Austria wasbloodlessly annexed by Germany.

He later joined the Waffen SS and wasassigned to Mauthausen, a concentrationcamp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctorin October and November 1941.

While there, witnesses told investiga-tors, he worked closely with SS pharma-cist Erich Wasicky on such gruesomeexperiments as injecting various solutionsinto Jewish prisoners’ hearts to see whichkilled them the fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trialby an American Military Tribunal in 1946and sentenced to death, along with othercamp medical personnel and command-ers, Heim, who was a POW in Americancustody, was not among them.

Heim’s file in the Berlin DocumentCenter, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered toobliterate any mention of Mauthausen,according to his 1979 German indictment,obtained by the AP. Instead, for the periodhe was known to be at the concentrationcamp, he was listed as having a differentSS assignment.

This “cannot be correct,” the indictmentsays. “It is possible that through data

(Continued on page 12)

HUNT ON FOR NAZI DOCTOR

BY JONATHAN BECK , THE JERUSALEM POST

Twenty five German professors co-signed a manifesto published in

the Frankfurter Rundschau calling onGermany to stop giving Israel “prefer-ential treatment,” because, amongother reasons, the country “helped”establish Israel by expelling Jews fromGermany during the rule of the ThirdReich. Approximately 160,000 Jewswho were expelled from Nazi Germanyended up in the British mandate ofPalestine and strengthened the Jewishpresence here at the expense of theArab population, they claimed.

Visiting in Israel as guests of theFriedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and theAcademic College of Netanya, four pro-fessors and co-signatories on the mani-festo were debating their claims withIsraeli academics who opposed them.They claimed that approximately 160,000Jews who arrived in mandatory Palestineenlarged Jewish control of the land fromjust six percent during the British mandateto approximately 60% after the War ofIndependence. Additionally, the Germanssaid their country has “paid off” its debt tothe Jewish people by the sums it hadgiven the Israeli government and sur-vivors until today.

They admitted that the Holocaust was,nevertheless, an indelible stain inGermany’s history.

The professors called on the Germangovernment to improve its relations withArab countries by adopting an “even-handed” approach to both Israelis andArabs. The debate was initiated by DovBen Meir, one of the heads of the

Center for Strategic Dialogue at the col-lege and formerly chairman of theKnesset. Prof. Moshe Zimmerman,an expert on German history, wasalso sitting on the Israeli side. BenMeir published his own counter-man-ifesto, rebuking the Germans’ claimsone by one.

F irst and foremost, unchecked datastated as fact has led the

Germans to reach conclusions which,were unjustified. For example, regard-ing the 60% of land controlled by Jewsafter the War of Independence, as citedin the manifesto, Ben Meir said most ofit was in fact not Arab land butunclaimed “state land,” i.e. land belong-ing to the British and to the OttomanEmpire before them. “They owe ussomething of an apology,” he said.

He even claimed that, due to Israel’srecognition of Germany following theReparations’ Agreement between thecountries, the entire world came to seethe country as “a different Germany.”He said Israel purchased from Germanyten times more merchandise than whatthe Germans offered as part of theReparations’ Agreement, stressing thatthese funds should not be construed asspecial treatment and should be consid-ered the “debt of a rogue to his victim.”Ben Meir warned about Germany return-ing to the “black days” of Hitler if the coun-try would stop its special treatmenttowards Israel.

Prof. Gert Krell, a retired professor ofInternational Relations at Frankfurt’sJohann Wolfgang Goethe University whospecialized in the Middle East conflict,admitted after the panel finished its dis-cussions that the manifesto was “well -meant but not good enough.”

“NAZI GERMANY HELPED

ESTABLISH ISRAEL” If you don’t think anti-Semitism is risingin Europe, look at the political car-

toons. A Greek cartoon suggests Israeliskill Christians on Easter. An Italian cartoonshows the baby Jesus worried that theIsraelis are going to kill him again.And then there are the cartoons that com-pare the Jews to the Nazis. It remindsJews of another period: the 1930s, thetime before the Holocaust.

In Europe today, most Jews are at leastanxious. Some are scared, and manyhave already left for Israel or the UnitedStates. Because, even though manyEuropean governments have condemnedthe new rise in anti-Semitism, there is aclear perception among many Jews thatEurope’s terrible history is somehow com-ing back to life.

“Jewish communities around the worldare under more pressure now than at anytime since 1945,” says Prof. RobertWistrich of Hebrew University in Israel.Wistrich is the son of Polish Jews who fledthe Holocaust. “Here we are 60 yearsafter that and what lessons have beenlearned? Not enough.”

Throughout Europe, distorted and one-sided news coverage has created anIsrael that is aggressive and evil.“It’s a demonization based on a radicalde-textualization, de-legitimization that’sbeen going on,” Melanie Phillips, a Britishconservative, says. “And if you’re theaveragely ignorant Brit, watching your TV,listening to your radio, you believe it.That’s your world view.”

In France, a court is deciding whether agovernment TV channel, France2,showed faked footage of the supposeddeath of a Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Durah, during the second intifada in 2000,to make it look like he was killed by Israelisolders. When the judge ordered France2

to turn over all of its footage of the inci-dent, it also showed the boy moving hisarms and peering through his fingers afterhe was supposed to be dead.

But Muslim rage at the original France2news story led to countless reprisalsagainst Jews around the world. It waseven mentioned by terrorists as a reasonfor the beheading Daniel Pearl.

The EU says Muslims are responsiblefor half of all attacks on Jews in Europe. InFrance, Muslims outnumber Jews 10 to 1.Nidra Poller, an American writer and com-mentator in Paris, says the governmentand media are afraid of the Muslims.

“The French are using the Muslims,allowing the Muslims, to express thisvicious and violent, murderous Jewshatred, and they get a free ride on their oldfashioned anti-Semitism,” Poller said. “Thewhole Lebanon war was shown from theHezbollah point of view. Israel was the vil-lain. And Hezbollah were the innocents whowere suffering. So all the Muslims in Francegot another dose of Jew hatred.”And when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006,anti-Semitic violence in Europe surged.

Anti-Semitism is by no means just aEuropean phenomenon. But it is in Europe,the place of the Holocaust, where the returnof anti-Semitism is so surprising.

As a boy in the Netherlands, ManfredGerstenfeld hid from the Nazis in anupstairs apartment. He may have neverbelieved it could happen again. But henow believes Europe is re-living the1930s.

“A senior Dutch politician told me a fewmonths ago, ‘Look, the Jews have tounderstand that in the Netherlands, theyhave no future,’ he said.

In large part because Israel lost themedia war in Europe long ago, and theJews are still paying for it.”

ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE RISE IN EUROPE

Dr. Aribert Heim in a 1950 photo released

by the State Office of Criminal Investigation

in Stuttgart, southern Germany.

Page 8 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

WOMEN OHIGHLIGHTS FROM THE AMERICAN SOCIETY F

“INTOLERANCE MUST BE FOUGHT

WHEREVER AND WHENEVER IT APPEARS”

DR. ROCHELLE CHERRY, 2008 ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON HONOREE

Iam honored to be here today, but this honor is as much for my parents – Sol and Gloria Silberzweig, as it isfor me. They both grew up in Warsaw and were survivors of the Holocaust. They met when my mother was

12 and my father 17. Their families vacationed together in the summer. They fell in love in the Warsaw Ghetto. Both my parents fought in the uprising, and were later transported to concentration camps. They lost and found

each other many times. Sol and Gloria experienced unspeakable atrocities in the camps. My mother lost her entirefamily. The only one of my father’s six siblings that survived was his brother, who had left Poland before the war.

The story of the Holocaust was told to me in snippets by my mother. Even as a child, the Holocaust was part ofmy life. I did not realize it then, but I was one of the lucky ones, because the Holocaust was not kept as a darksecret. As the oldest child, more details were shared with me than my two siblings. Survivors always question whythey were spared death and never forget their family members and friends who were not so lucky. So many of thestories she told me were about her parents, siblings, and others in her family. She knew how lucky she had beenbecause, with green eyes and blonde hair, she was often spared because she looked like a beautiful Polishwoman. She died before she could write her story. Gloria was a wonderful caring mother and grandmother, whoalways gave me unconditional love. My parent’s story inspired my husband, an American-born Jew, to study theHolocaust and he has written a book, Rethinking Poles and Jews, about Polish-Jewish relations then and nowwhich was published last summer.

My father did not really talk about the Holocaust until after my mother’s death in 1979. Just before his death in2004, he wrote his memoir, Mama It Will Be Alright, which was published by Yad Vashem.

After the war my parents found each other, got married, and had me. I was the first person in my family to go tocollege, and then graduate school. I became an audiologist because I always wanted to help people. I have taught stu-dents who wanted to be audiologists at Brooklyn College for the last twenty-eight years. And I have tried to instill inthem the respect for patients and a desire to help them that has motivated me.

I grew up hearing about the Holocaust, and how one group of people wanted to destroy another only becausethey were Jewish. The lesson I learned was to treat all people with respect and not judge them based on race,religion, or class. Intolerance must be fought wherever and whenever it appears.

Mindy Schall, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Co-Chair; Rita Levy, 2008 Annu

Luncheon Co-Chair; Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American & International So

Yad Vashem, and Dr. Rochelle Cherry, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree.

Cheryl Lifshitz, Eli Zborowski, Chairman (American Society for Yad Vashem) and Stella Skura.

Halpern Family Table. Standing (left to right) Gail Propp, Leiba Halpern, Batsheva Halpern, Sima

Schall, Sharon Halpern, 2006 Annual Spring Luncheon Chairwoman, Yonina Halpern, David Halpern.

Sitting (left to right) Shelley Paradis, Chavcia Halpern, Gladys Halpern, 2007 Annual Spring Luncheon

Honoree and 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Women's Spring Luncheon Chairwoman, Mindy Schall, 2008

Annual Spring Luncheon Co-CHair, Alan Schall, Abbi Halpern.

Elizabeth Wilf, Regina Peterseil and Fanya Gottesfeld Heller.

Gladys Halpern, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Women’s Committee Chairwoman and 2007 Annual

Spring Luncheon Honoree, and Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Guest Speaker.

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 9

OF VALOROR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON

“I HAVE SO MUCH TO BE THANKFUL FOR”

JEAN GLUCK, 2008 ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON HONOREE

Iam deeply honored to be selected as an honoree at this beautiful Yad Vashemluncheon, an institution which not only documents the history of the Holocaust,

but preserves the memories of the six million victims and enables their legacy to bepassed on to our children and our children’s children.

As someone who experienced that dark hour of Jewish history, I accept this honorwith humility, and with a sense of responsibility to the memory of those who did notsurvive to tell their own stories.

As a young woman who was liberated from Auschwitz, after witnessing the mosthorrific crimes to our people, I had no idea what the future would bring.

So many questions – so many emotions. It is hard to imagine How surviving the atrocities that we witnessed would make us feel closer to G-d

– but we did. We felt Him guiding us every step of the way.After sixty years, we are all here as testimony. Those who survived came out of

Europe with nothing – no family, no possessions, no home. But we persevered. Wehad faith – and we dedicated our lives to rebuilding the Jewish people.

Our lives and our children’s lives are a vibrant demonstration of what the lives ofsix million Jews could have been.

I have so much to be thankful for, but first and foremost, I must thank G-d for beingwith me all of my life, guiding me, giving me strength and courage, and blessing mewith a wonderful husband and magnificent family, of whom I am so proud.

To even imagine, that after going through unspeakable horrors, we would not onlysurvive, but build a beautiful home and have so much nachas. That is somethingwords cannot express.

It is certainly evidence of the eternity of Am Yisrael. May we merit to continue imparting this message to future generations until we

experience the ultimate salvation.

ual Spring

ocieties for

Mindy Schall, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Co-Chair; Gladys Halpern, 2008 Annual Spring

Luncheon Women’s Committee Chairwoman and 2007 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree; Rita

Levy, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Co-Chair and 2007 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree; Jean

Gluck, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree; Eugen Gluck and Eli Zborowski, Chairman

(American Society for Yad Vashem).

The family of Jean Gluck, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Honoree, and Eugen Gluck

Sharon Halpern; Mindy Schall, 2008 Annual Spring Luncheon Co-Chair and David Halpern.

Ariel Zborowski, Eli Zborowski, Chairman (American Society for Yad Vashem), Elizabeth and Joseph Wilf.

Stefanie Shulman, Marilyn Rubenstein, Helene Dorfman.

Page 10 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

REPORT FROM REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMYAD VASHEMBY ISABEL KERSHNER, NTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

The gray walls of Yad Vashem havelong documented the horrors of the

Holocaust. Now an oddly vibrant exhibi-tion at the official Holocaust Martyrs’ andHeroes’ Remembrance Authority is tellinga less-known story of the renaissance ofthe survivors in Israel, and the extraordi-nary role they played in shaping the char-acter of the new state.

“My Homeland: Holocaust Survivors inIsrael” opened at the end of April week tomark the 60th anniversary of the founda-tion of the Jewish state in 1948, and forHolocaust Memorial Day, which was heldMay 1. But instead of gas chambers andghettoes, it showcases models in design-er beachwear and boldly colored postersthat launched such potent Israeli symbolsas the national airline El Al.

Each exhibit is a tribute to the survivorwho created it. Of more than 90 artistsand innovators who are featured, onlyabout half have lived to see the day.

In the past, a dominant image of sur-vivors in Israel has been that of frail citi-zens living out their final years in cold andhunger, battling the state bureaucracy formonthly stipends. Of the roughly 250,000survivors now in Israel, as many as80,000 are said to be living on or near thepoverty line.

Last August survivors took to the streetsof Jerusalem in protest; a few wore yellowstars reminiscent of the ones the Nazisforced Jews to display. But experts saythat the suffering of those left behind intheir old age does not negate an immigra-tion success story they describe as unpar-alleled anywhere in the world.

“The story of the Holocaust can be toldfrom many different angles,” said HannaYablonka, a historical consultant to theexhibition. “To me, one of the most impor-tant aspects is the question of where youtake such a huge disaster. You can turn torevenge, or to building.”

Lea Gottlieb, who turns 90 this year, hidfrom the Nazis during the German occu-pation of Hungary and stepped off a boatat the Port of Haifa in 1949. “We camewith nothing, without money, withnowhere to live,” Gottlieb recalled, view-ing her corner of the exhibition an hourbefore the official opening. “The first twoor three years were very, very hard.”

Petite and manicured, in a blackpantsuit and sensible leather shoes,Gottlieb recounted in halting Hebrew howshe and her husband opened a raincoatfactory like one they had left behind. Butfor months “we saw no rain, only sun-shine,” she said. So they founded Gottex,the swimwear company that quickly grewto become a leading Israeli brand nameabroad.

One of her grandchildren, Danny Shir,said Gottlieb would occasionally recollectan ugly experience from the past – likewhen she hid herself and her children in apit behind the home of their gentile hostafter spotting a Nazi with a pistol outside.

Almost half a million Jews who survivedthe camps and the ghettoes, or whoemerged out of hiding, arrived here in theyears after World War II. Having cheated

death once, many headed again for thebattlefield: half the fighters in the 1948 warwere Holocaust survivors, and they madeup a third of the number who fell.

By 1952, Kariel Gardosh, the caricatur-ist known as Dosh, had created Srulik, afigure in sandals, a blue work shirt and ablue canvas hat. Srulik became the sym-bol of what native-born Israelis saw astheir quintessential selves – guileless andpioneering, with none of the complexesand pretenses of Europe.

Born in Hungary in 1921, Gardoshwas sent to mine copper as forced

labor; his family was murdered inAuschwitz. After immigrating to Israel in1948, he drew a daily political cartoon inthe Hebrew paper, Maariv, for almost 50years, and died in 2000. Srulik is the sym-bol of the Yad Vashem exhibition today.

“Like many Israelis, I tended to look atthe Holocaust survivors as victims,” saidMichal Broshi, a consultant curator. Asshe learned about the extent of theirimprint on her Israeli identity, “I couldn’tbelieve my ears,” she said.

The survivors penetrated every sphere,from the arts and academia to commerce,industry and defense.

“They were acting as a normal part ofthe fabric of life. Actually, it was a miracle,”said Yehudit Shendar, a Yad Vashemcurator.

The encounter between the newcomersand the early Zionist pioneers was notalways easy. The veterans disdained any-thing to do with Jewish exile, and the sto-ries the survivors might have wanted toshare were at first “beyond what a normalhuman being could grasp,” said AvnerShalev, chairman of the directorate of YadVashem.

But the survivors took it upon them-selves “to be integrated, to be more Israelithan the Israelis.” The only differencebetween them and other Israelis, he said,“was that the pain never left them.”

Six decades later, the immigrantswho were accepted as Israelis are

being honored as survivors, as well.“I would prefer another reason to be cel-

ebrated,” said Dan Reisinger, 73, a graph-ic designer. “But survival is something oneshould appreciate every day.”

Reisinger was born in 1934 inYugoslavia, and spent the German occu-pation hidden by a Serbian family. Heimmigrated to Israel with his mother andstepfather in 1949.

After studying at the Bezalel Academy ofArts and Design in Jerusalem and spend-ing time in Belgium and London, hereturned to revolutionize Israeli design.

On display at Yad Vashem is a collectionof Reisinger’s distinctive corporate logosthat have become ingrained in the Israeliconsciousness, including that of El Al. “Iwanted to bring something fresh, some-thing new, something more cheerful tocompensate for the dark years I wentthrough,” Reisinger said.

Reisinger, who also designed medalsfor the Israeli Army and a perpetual calen-dar for the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork, likes to define his life in colors, splitinto three parts: yellow for the yellow star;red for the Russian Army that liberatedhim; and blue for the Israeli sky.

A STORY OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE

BY DR. DAVID SILBERKLANG AND GABI HADAR

Anka My Dearest!More than 18 months have passed

since we were most brutally parted.During all that time, I have not stoppedstriving and searching for an opportunityto relate to you, at least in some smallmeasure, my sad experiences throughoutthose dark months since our separation. Amuch too difficult task for my worn-outstrength….

I wish that this bundle of memories,soaked in blood and tears, will serve as aperpetual tombstone for you, my dearest,and for our children, parents, brothers,sisters, and the millions of men, womenand children who were murdered togetherwith you.

With these poignant words to hismurdered wife, Oskar Strawczynski

began his Treblinka memoir, written whilehiding in a Polish forest in 1944.

Israel Cymlich, who escaped from theTreblinka I penal forced labor camp inApril 1943, began his memoir more blunt-

ly: “I have decided todescribe my warexperiences. Twoc o n s i d e r a t i o n sprompted me to doso: my slim chancesof surviving the war;and my desire tocommunicate my for-tunes to my sister inArgentina.”

These two mem-oirs, written clandes-tinely during the war,comprise the newest release in theHolocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Series:Escaping Hell in Treblinka. Cymlich’s isone of the very few Jewish accounts ofTreblinka I, which lay only two kilometersfrom the extermination camp, Treblinka II.Strawczynski’s memoir is one of the firsttwo written eyewitness accounts of the 2August 1943 uprising in Treblinka II. Bothaccounts provide new information andinsight about the life of the inmates in thatinfamous death camp.

Until this publication, very little wasknown about the Jews in Treblinka I.

Much of whatCymlich relatesabout the brutallyharsh conditions,the camp popula-tion (mostly Jewish,it turns out), itsoperation, andmany of the officialsand prisoners isnew. Strawczynski’ssometimes graphicdescriptions ofvicious Jewish

camp officials and German staff, the cor-ruption and debauchery in the camp,preparations for the uprising, and life afterthe mass escape are equally riveting.

Why did people write during the war? Towhom were they addressing theirthoughts? For what purpose? The reasonsare as varied as the people themselves.Some simply wished to communicate,report events or find some kind of normal-cy in their lives through their writing. Otherssought to encourage their families to strug-gle on and to survive, or wished to leave alegacy after their own certain death.

Whereas only a fraction of what was writ-ten has survived, that small amount pro-vides an insight that is inaccessible fromother sources. These writings open a win-dow onto a scene that the rest of us canunderstand only from a distance.

Yad Vashem has published dozens ofdiaries and other first-hand

accounts and documents over the years.The insights into what Jews thought, whatthey discerned regarding their circum-stances and their fate, and how theyreacted are invaluable to our understand-ing of the Holocaust and of human behav-ior in extreme adversity. Many more suchbooks are planned during the comingyears. Will this body of first-hand, contem-poraneous accounts explain theHolocaust for us? Of course not. But theircontribution to our understanding isimmense; without it we understand verylittle indeed. And with that in mind, YadVashem publications will continue to try toretrieve those voices from the oblivion towhich the Nazis sought to confine them, inthe hope that we can shed additional lighton the event that has ruptured history aswe know it.

Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev guides Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the

new exhibition.

PERSONAL WRITING FROM THE SHOAH

Excerpt from the handwritten copy of Oskar

Strawczynski’s 1944 Yiddish memoir about his

experiences in Treblinka.

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 11

A dedication of the Monument to the

Murdered Jewish Citizens of DvurKralove nad Labem in Czech Republic

was held on February 16. Rabbi

Norman R. Patz was the initiator of this

project that started more than 30 years

ago. Below is his account of the event.

BY RABBI NORMAN R. PATZ

Our visit to Dvur Kralove on February16, 2008 was the completion of

mission: to memorialize the Jewish citi-zens of Dvur Kralove who were deportedand murdered during the Holocaust. Thatmission started in 1975 when the congre-gation of Temple Sholom of West Essex,in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, received intrust a Torah scroll from the MemorialScrolls Trust in London. The small scroll,we were told, came from a town in north-eastern Bohemia, where Jews had beenleaders in textile manufacturing, and 111of them had been murdered by the Nazis.In 1975, that was all the information wewere able to learn about the Jewish com-munity of Dvur Kralove nad Labem.

But we did know how this Torah scrollfrom Dvur Kralove got to the WestminsterSynagogue in London. When the Nazistook over the remaining territory ofCzechoslovakia in March 1939, just sixmonths after the infamous Munich confer-ence, they confiscated all Jewish proper-ties, including synagogues. Then theNazis started gathering the ritual objectsof these synagogues, and had them sentto Prague to form the basis of a museumdedicated to the "exterminated ethno-graphic species." To this day, we cannotexplain how or why the decision to gatherthese Jewish ritual items – Torah scrolls,silver Torah ornaments, embroidered cur-tains for the Holy Ark, etc. – was made. In

all of the other countries that the Nazisinvaded and conquered, they plunderedthe synagogues and used the buildingsfor stables or storehouses, or as assem-bly points for Jews about to be murdereden masse or deported to one of the deathcamps in Poland.

Yet, in Prague, a collection of nearly200,000 ritual objects was assembled andcatalogued under Nazi supervision.

With the end of World War II, few CzechJewish communities could be reconstitut-ed, so it was the Jewish Museum inPrague which attempted to cope with thetreasures that had come into its posses-sion. After the Communist coup, theJewish Museum, like all other Czechmuseums, was nationalized. In 1962, theCommunist leadership, looking forWestern cash, sold the 1,564 Torahscrolls in the museum's collection to anEnglish art collector who helped createdthe Memorial Scrolls Trust. The Trust con-served the scrolls and then started lend-ing them to synagogues which could usethem and thereby memorialize the Jews

who had been murdered.

When Temple Sholom of WestEssex applied to the Trust for

one of these Torah scrolls, the man whofunded the acquisition had two requests:That the scroll be small in size, so thatchildren could carry it in processionswithout difficulty, and that it be a kosherscroll – fit for ritual use, for reading theword of God in public worship services.

The scroll that best suited our needscame from the destroyed "Tempel" inDvur Kralove. And since then, everyyoung person who becomes Bar or BatMitzvah in the congregation reads from"our" Dvur Kralove scroll.

All of the Confirmation class studentswho came to Dvur Kralove for the dedica-tion ceremony (and some of their parents)had read from the Dvur Kralove scroll andall of them knew the story well. They knewthe names of the deportees and they hadseen the drawings done secretly atTerezin by three Jewish children fromDvur Kralove – Petr Hellman, age 9,Marianna Schonova, age 10, and Ota

Hammerschlag, age 11. All of the mem-bers of my congregation who joined mywife and me at the dedication came with asense of personal involvement in this history.

The idea of building a monument onthe site of the synagogue first came

up when my wife and I visited DvurKralove in 2005. At that time, we present-ed a copy of the monograph we had writ-ten about the Jewish community – "ThusWe Remember"– to then-mayor Jiri Rain.He showed us the location of the syna-gogue on old town plans, and then tookus to see where the synagogue hadstood. We spoke then about erecting asmall memorial. That conversation start-ed a process that led to a partnershipbetween the municipality of Dvur Kraloveand the congregation of Temple Sholomof West Essex, the commissioning of OtaCerny to sculpt the monument that hislate father had designed, and the actualplacing of the Star of David monumentwhere the entrance doors of the syna-gogue once stood.

We could not imagine how moving andemotional the ceremony would be. Thescouts in their uniforms lined up as anhonor guard for the flags of the CzechRepublic, the USA and Israel were sovery impressive (and so cold!). Thesinging of the anthems by the assembly,led by the school children, who hadlearned Hatikvah, was thrilling! Thespeeches by the three ministers ofChristian faith praising the dedicationand warning of the dangers of extremismand totalitarianism were inspiring, andthe letters from the Czech Ambassadorto the US, Petr Kolar, the USAmbassador to the Czech Republic,Richard Graber, and the Executive VicePresident of the Jewish Federation of theCzech Republic, Tomas Kraus – all ofwhich were presented to Mayor Lukes –gave an official aspect to the day.

COMPLETING A MISSION

The dedication of the Monument to the Murdered Jewish Citizens of Dvur Kralove nad Labem.

Italy and the United States are the twomost successful countries in bringing

former Nazi war criminals to justice ormanaging to at least convict them inabsentia.

The praising report comes from theJerusalem office of the Simon WiesenthalCentre (SWC), the international Jewishhuman rights organization dedicated to“repairing the world,” a task that includesconfronting anti-Semitism, hate, and terror-ism, but also chasing Nazi war criminals.

In a conversation with EJP, EfraimZuroff, the SWC Jerusalem coordinator,recited by heart the latest data concerningItaly: “Between 2005 and 2006, Italy con-victed six Nazi criminals in absentia. Thenbetween April 2006 and March 2007, theItalian justice convicted 14 Germans andone Austrian man. Overall, Italy issued 21judgments in absentia.”

Recently, the media’s attention focusedon the Italian justice against a former SS,corporal, Michael Seifert, extradited byCanada to Italy, where he was sentencedto life imprisonment in his absence.

From June 1944 to April 1945, Seifertserved as commander of the concentrationcamp of Bolzano, an Italian town close tothe Austrian border. Seifert, who had beenliving in Canada since 1951, was foundguilty of 11 murders by the military tribunalin Verona in 2000, and the life sentencewas confirmed in October 2002.

Better than Italy are only the UnitedStates, who get a full “A” for their “HighlySuccessful Investigation and ProsecutionProgram,” granted to the countries that haveadopted a proactive stance on the issue.

Less brilliant a grade, “C”, was given to

Denmark, Serbia and Hungary (“MinimalSuccess That Could Have Been Greater,Additional Steps Urgently Required”).

The SWC then gave France andRomania a “D” (“Insufficient and/orUnsuccessful Efforts”), highlighting thatParis and Bucharest “could achieveimportant results if they were to changetheir policy.”

Bosnia, Finland, Russia, Slovakia andUruguay only scored an “E” and aredescribed as “countries in which there areno known suspects and no practical stepshave been taken to uncover new cases”.

Following are Norway, Sweden, Syria,F1 countries that, according to the SWC,“refuse in principle to investigate, let aloneprosecute, suspected Nazi war criminalsbecause of legal (statute of limitation) orideological restrictions.”

The report then lists the F2 countries(Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia,Estonia, Germany, Great Britain,Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine )“whose efforts (or lack thereof) haveresulted in complete failure during theperiod under review, primarily due tothe absence of political will to proceed.”

And it ends with a long list of SouthAmerican but also European countries“which did not respond to the question-naire, but clearly did not take any actionwhatsoever to investigate suspectedNazi war criminals during the periodunder review” (grade: X, Argentina,Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic,Greece, Luxemburg, Netherlands, NewZealand, Paraguay, Slovenia, Spain,Venezuela).

Some 10,000 young Jews, Poles andWorld War II survivors took part in

the March of the Living on May 1, anannual event at the former Nazi deathcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau that honorsthe memory of some 6 million Jews whoperished in the Holocaust.

This year’s march, the 17th, started withthe blowing of the shofar at the iron gate— crowned with the words “Arbeit MachtFrei,” or “Work Sets You Free” — thatleads into the former camp of Auschwitz.

The misleading inscription was to sug-gest to inmates they were coming to work,not die here.

The Israeli army chief of staff, Lt. Gen.Gabi Ashkenazi, led the long column ofmarchers, accompanied by some campsurvivors carrying the Torah, and fellowIsraeli troops in uniform.

“Each and every one of us should do ourutmost to ensure: Never again,”Ashkenazi said.

The Kaddish was spoken at a hugestone monument to the camp’s victims atBirkenau.

At least 1.1 million people, includingJews, Poles and Roma, perished in thecamp’s gas chambers, or from starvation,disease and forced labor, before Soviettroops liberated it in January 1945.

In Poland marchers from some 50 coun-tries in matching raincoats formed a seaof blue, with Israeli white-and-blue nation-al flags fluttering overhead. There was anoccasional drizzle as they walked inOswiecim, the Polish city where the occu-pying Germans built the complex.

They walked in silence along a 2-milestretch from the red brick houses of

Auschwitz to Birkenau, another area ofthe camp that is the site of wooden bar-racks and ruins of the gas chambers.

Survivor Leib Zisman was visitingBirkenau for the first time since January1945, when the Nazis forced the inmatesto walk out of the camp in frost and snowto flee the advancing Soviet army.

“I walked into the barracks in Birkenauand I recognized the beds that I slept in,”said Zisman, 77, of Long Island, N.Y. “Thememories are very vivid; I remembereverything.”

The then-13-year-old Zisman wasbrought to Birkenau in 1944 from theKovno ghetto in Lithuania, where his par-ents died. From Birkenau, he was taken tocamps in Germany, where he was liberat-ed by U.S. troops.

Among the marchers was Avram Grant,the Israeli manager of English soccer clubChelsea. It was his seventh visit toAuschwitz. This time, he brought his 14-year-old son, Daniel, and wife, Tsofit. HisPolish-born father survived the Holocaust,but many other members of his familywere killed.

“It was terrible how people behaved toother people,” Grant said. “It is good thatthey kept a place like this as a memoryand as education that to hate someone isnot the right way.”

Teenage participants also stressed thepower of remembering.

“The most amazing feeling of the marchis togetherness,” said Elana Weiner, a 17-year-old student from Tucson, Ariz. “Weare the key to the future and if we remem-ber and promise to never forget, then therest of the world won’t.”

NAZI HUNT: ITALIANS DO IT BETTER MARCH OF THE LIVING 10,000 STRONG

Page 12 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

(Continued from page 5)

The officer in charge of the operation,Lt-Col Gregson, later gave a very

frank assessment of the success of thestorming of the ship, which, according to asecret report, left up to 33 Jews, includingfour women, injured in the fighting. Sixty-eight Jews were held in custody to be puton trial for unruly behavior. Only three sol-diers were hurt.

But it could have been a lot worse.Gregson later admitted that he had consid-ered using tear gas against the immigrants.

He concluded: “The Jew is liable topanic and 800-900 Jews fighting to get upa stairway to escape tear smoke couldhave produced a deplorable business.”He added: “It is a very frightening thing togo into the hold full of yelling maniacswhen outnumbered six or eight to one.”

Describing the assault, the officer wroteto his superiors: “After a very short pause,with a lot of yelling and female screams,every available weapon up to a biscuitand bulks of timber was hurled at the sol-diers. They withstood it admirably andvery stoically till the Jews assaulted, andin the first rush, several soldiers weredowned, with half a dozen Jews on top,kicking and tearing ... No other troopscould have done it as well and ashumanely as these British ones did.”

He concluded: “It should be borne inmind that the guiding factor in most of theactions of the Jews is to gain the sympa-thy of the world press.”

One of the official observers who wit-nessed the violence was Dr Noah Barou,secretary of the British section of theWorld Jewish Congress, who had 35years experience of reporting. He gave avery different account of the fighting.

He described young soldiers beatingHolocaust survivors as a “terrible mentalpicture.”

“They went into the operation as a foot-ball match ... and it seemed evident thatthey had not had it explained to them thatthey were dealing with people who hadsuffered a lot and who are resisting in

accordance with their convictions.”He noted: “People were usually hit in the

stomach and this, in my opinion, explainsthat many people who did not show anysigns of injury were staggering and mov-ing very slowly along the staircase, givingthe impression that they were half-starvedand beaten up.

“When the people walked off the ship,many of them, especially younger people,were shouting to the troops ‘Hitler com-mandos,’ ‘gentleman fascists,’ ‘sadists’.”

Dr Barou was “especially impressed” byone young girl who “came to the top of thestairs and shouted to the soldiers, ‘I amfrom Dachau’. And when they did notreact she shouted ‘Hitler commandos’”.

While the British could find no evi-dence of excessive force, they

conceded that in one case a Jew “wasdragged down the gangway by the feetwith his head bumping on the woodenslats”.

After the soldiers had cleared the ships,the refugees were packed on to trains andtaken to two camps in the British zone,Poppendorf and Am Stau.

At the camps, the treatment of therefugees caused an international outcryafter it emerged that the conditions could

be likened to the concentration campswhere six million Jews had perished.

Dr Barou was once again on hand towitness events. He reported that condi-tions at Camp Poppendorf were poor andclaimed that it was being run by a Germancamp commandant. That was denied bythe British.

But the allegations of cruel and insensi-tive treatment would not go away and, on6 October, 1947, the Foreign Office sent atelegram to the British commanders in theregion demanding to know whether thecamps really were surrounded withbarbed wire and guarded by Germanstaff.

It turned out that Barou’s reports hadbeen only partially accurate. There wasno German commandant or guards, butthere were German staff carrying outduties inside the camp.

As winter set in, the British governmentmade a further attempt to end the stalemate.

In return for leaving Germany and goingto France, the refugees were offeredincreased rations.

It turned out to be yet another diplomat-ic blunder, leaving the British vulnerable tothe accusation that they were adopting apolicy of “starvation or return to France.”

In an explanation of its policy, a ForeignOffice document states: “Those who refusetransport to France and choose to remain inGermany will be accommodated in campsprovided by the British authorities.

“Those who volunteer to return toFrance will continue to receive the presentgenerous ration of 2,800 calories per dayup to and including the time of their depar-ture. Those who choose to remain inGermany will receive the same basicscale ration as that received by the normalconsumer.”

Only two Jews chose to accept the offerof the transfer.

A telegram written by Jewish leaders ofthe camps on 20 October 1947 makesclear the determination of the refugees,mostly displaced from Germany and east-ern Europe, to find a home in Palestine.

“Nothing will deter us from Palestine.Which jail we go to is up to you (theBritish). We did not ask you to reduce ourrations, we did not ask you to put us inPoppendorf and Am Stau.”

Britain’s impossible position was latersummed up by John Coulson, a diplomatat the British Embassy in Paris.

He pointed out: “The pros and cons ofkeeping the Exodus immigrants in camps... there is one point that should be kept inmind. Our opponents in France, and Idare say in other countries, have madegreat play with the fact that these immi-grants were being kept behind barbedwire, in concentration camps and guardedby Germans.

“If we decide it is convenient not to keepthem in camps any longer, I suggest thatwe should make some play that we arereleasing them from all restraint of thiskind in accordance with their wishes andthat they were only put in such accommo-dation for the preliminary necessities ofscreening and maintenance.”

In the end, the Government decidedto follow this advice, and the Jewishmigrants were set free. The vast major-ity did find their way to Palestine andhelp in the struggle to create andsecure the state of Israel.

BRITAIN’S HOLOCAUST SHAME: THE VOYAGE OF THE EXODUS

Refugees arriving at Haifa, where they had been towed in by the British Navy after it had fired a

shot at the ship.

(Continued from page 7)manipulation the short assignment at thesame time to the (concentration camp)was concealed.”

There is no indication who might havebeen responsible.

SEARCH FOR HEIM POINTS TO SONS

The U.S. Army Intelligence file onHeim could shed light on his

wartime and postwar activities, and isamong hundreds of thousands transferredto the U.S. National Archives. But theArmy’s electronic format is such that staffhave so far only been able to accessabout half of them, and these don’tinclude the file requested by the AP.

Heim was relatively well-known, howev-er, having been a national hockey playerin Austria before the war, and there wereplenty of witnesses from his time atMauthausen.

Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrestwarrant to American authorities inGermany who initially agreed to turn himover, then told the Austrians in a Dec. 21,1950, letter obtained by the AP that theycouldn’t trace him.

What happened next is unclear, but in1958 Heim apparently felt comfortableenough to buy a 42-unit apartment blockin Berlin, listing it in his own name with ahome address in Mannheim, according to

purchase documents obtained by the AP.He then moved to the nearby resort townof Baden-Baden and opened a gynecol-ogical clinic – also under his own name,Heister said.

In 1961 German authorities were alertedand began an investigation, but when theyfinally went to arrest him in September1962, they just missed him – he apparent-ly had been tipped off.

Heim continued to live off the rents col-lected from the Berlin apartments until1979 when the building was confiscatedby German authorities.

Proof that he is alive may lie in the factthat no one has claimed his estate. Heimhas two sons in Germany and a daughterwho lived in Chile but whose currentwhereabouts are unknown.

In Frankfurt, Heim’s lawyer said he stillofficially represents the fugitive, but hasnot heard from him for 20 years and has“no clue” to his whereabouts.

Asked in a telephone interview if Heimwas dead, Fritz Steinacker said only: “Idon’t know.”

Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, wouldnot comment when telephoned at hisBaden-Baden villa.

“All I can say is that it has been impliedthat I am in contact with my father, andthat is absolutely false,” he said. “The restis speculation, and I can’t enter into that.”

HUNT ON FOR NAZI DOCTOR

BY JULIE STAHL, CNSNEWS.COM

Tova Mendel looked worried as sheand her husband Salomon Findling

and their four children walked down thestreet of Stropkov, Slovakia, with othermembers of the Jewish community in May1942. We’ll never know what she was think-ing, but a picture of the family carrying theirbelongings as they were being deported bythe Nazis now appears on Web site of YadVashem, Israel’s main Holocaust memorial.

In honor of Holocaust Martyrs and HeroesRemembrance Day Yad Vashem expandedits Internet presence by opening an onlinedatabase containing nearly two-thirds of the200,000 photos in its archives.

Tova’s picture is one of 130,000 photosthat can now be accessed online. Anotherphoto shows Jewish women and children atthe Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.Deemed “not fit for work,” they are sitting onthe grass before being gassed.

“It is part of the ongoing effort to harnesstechnology to further the cause ofHolocaust remembrance,” said EsteeYaari, Yad Vashem’s foreign media liai-son. Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalevsaid that putting the photo collection onthe Internet would make the vastcollection easily accessible to the public.“We are hoping that it will increase public

awareness of the archives’ tremendousimportance and encourage people whohave similar photographs and documentsto send them to Yad Vashem forsafekeeping,” Shalev said.

Dr. Haim Gertner, director of the YadVashem Archives, said he hopes the publicwill join the ongoing efforts to decipher thepictures and identify the people in them.

The archives are the largest and mostcomprehensive collection of photos of theJewish people from that period.The online edition contains photos of thelives of Jews before, during and after thehorrors of World War II.

The Website makes it easy for users tosearch for words that are spelled in anumber of different ways.

ISRAEL’S HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

OPENS PHOTO ARCHIVE ON THE INTERNET

Nordhausen, Germany, Prisoners in uniform,

liberation, 1945.

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 13

Budapest, November 1944: AnotherGerman train has loaded its cargo of

Jews bound for Auschwitz. A youngSwedish diplomat pushes past the SSguard and scrambles onto the roof of acattle car.

Ignoring shots fired over his head, hereaches through the open door to out-stretched hands, passing out dozens ofbogus “passports” that extendedSweden’s protection to the bearers. Heorders everyone with a document off thetrain and into his caravan of vehicles. Theguards look on, dumbfounded.

Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official ofa neutral country, with an unimposingappearance and gentle manner.Recruited and financed by the U.S., hewas sent into Hungary to save Jews. Hebullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazisto prevent the deportation of 20,000Hungarian Jews to concentration camps,and averted the massacre of 70,000 morepeople in Budapest’s ghetto by threaten-ing to have the Nazi commander hangedas a war criminal.

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

And because he was a rare flicker ofhumanity in the man-made hell of theHolocaust, the world has celebrated himever since. Streets have been namedafter him and his face has been onpostage stamps. And researchers havewrestled with two enduring mysteries:Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did hereally die in Soviet custody in 1947?

Fresh documents are to become publicwhich might cast light on another puzzle:Whether Wallenberg was connected,directly or indirectly, to a super-secretwartime U.S. intelligence agency knownas “the Pond,” operating as World War IIwas drawing to a close and the Sovietswere growing increasingly suspicious of

Western intentions in Eastern Europe.Speculation that Wallenberg was

engaged in espionage has been rife sincethe Central Intelligence Agency acknowl-edged in the 1990s that hehad been recruited for hisrescue mission by an agentof the Office of StrategicServices, the OSS, whichlater became the CIA.

Despite dozens of booksand hundreds of documentson Wallenberg, muchremains hidden. TheKremlin has failed to find ordeliver dozens of files,Sweden has declined toopen all its books, and TheAssociated Press haslearned as many as100,000 pages of declassi-fied OSS documents awaitprocessing at the National Archives.

The Russians say Wallenberg died inprison in 1947, but never produced aproper death certificate or his remains.

But independent research suggests hemay have lived many years – perhapsuntil the late 1980s. If true, he likely washeld in isolation, stripped of his identity,known only by a number or a false nameand moving like a phantom among Sovietprisons, labor camps and psychiatric insti-tutions. In 1991, the Russian governmentassigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputyhead of the KGB intelligence service, tospend months searching classifiedarchives about Wallenberg.

“I think I found all the existing docu-ments,” Nikonov e-mailed The AssociatedPress last month. The Soviets believedWallenberg had been a spy, he said, butunlike many political detainees he neverhad a trial.

Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”

***

Wallenberg arrived in Budapest inJuly 1944. With the knowledge of

his government, his task as first secretaryto the Swedish diplomatic legation was acover for his true mission as secret emis-sary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, cre-

ated by PresidentFranklin D. Rooseveltin a belated attempt tostem the annihilationof Europe’s Jews.

In the previous twomonths, 440,000Hungarian Jews hadbeen shipped toAuschwitz for extermi-nation. They wereamong the last of sixmillion Jews slaugh-tered in the Holocaust.

Of the 230,000 whoremained in theHungarian capital inmid-1944, 100,000

survived the war.After the Red Army arrived in January,

Wallenberg went to see the Russian mili-tary commander to discuss postwarreconstruction and restitution of Jewishproperty. Two days later he returnedunder Russian escort to collect some per-sonal effects, then was never seen in pub-lic again. And what did his country or hisinfluential cousins do about it?

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

“It is inconceivable“, says Wallenberg’shalf-sister, Nina Lagergren “Here is a mansent out by the Swedish government torisk his life. He saved thousands of peopleand he was left to rot.”

***

Some time around 1994, SusanMesinai, who had by then been

researching the Wallenberg case for fiveyears, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey,

Wallenberg’s cousin, at her home inConnecticut. After lunch, Kelsey caughtup with Mesinai as she got into the carand told her: “Raoul was working for thehighest levels of government.”

“So I said to her, ‘How high? Do youmean the president?’ And she nodded herhead,” Mesinai said, disclosing to AP aconversation she had kept confidential for14 years.

Rather than clarify anything, Kelsey’scryptic remark only deepened the fog.

Wallenberg’s rescue mission inevitablyplaced him in a vortex of intrigue and espi-onage involving the Hungarian resistance,the Jewish underground, communistsworking for the Soviets, and British, U.S.and Swedish intelligence operations. Healso had regular contact with AdolfEichmann and other Nazis running thedeportation of Jews.

Whether or not he himself was passingon intelligence, Russia had plenty of rea-son to suspect him of spying, either for theAllies or Germany, or both.

“Wallenberg had ties to all the majoractors in Hungary,” says Susanne Berger, aGerman researcher who collaborated withthe Swedish-Russian research project.

The Stockholm chief of the War RefugeeBoard, Iver C. Olsen, was also a keymember of the 35-man OSS station in theSwedish capital, and it was he whorecruited Wallenberg, who in turn kept theU.S. connection secret by sending hiscommunications through Swedish diplo-matic channels.

In 1955, Olsen denied to the CIA thatWallenberg ever spied for the OSS, andMesinai and Berger offer a different likeli-hood: that the Swede was a source for thePond, which was a rival to the OSS knownonly to Roosevelt and a few insiders in theWar and State Departments.

A small clandestine intelligence- gather-ing operation, the Pond relied on contactsin private corporations and hand-picked

(Continued on page 15)

SCHOLARS RUN DOWN MORE CLUES TO AHOLOCAUST MYSTERY

Raoul Wallenberg

Fifty years ago, Michael Maorreturned to his native Germany on

behalf of the Mossad, and photographeddocuments that led to the conviction ofHolocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

On April 30, he lit a torch at Yad Vashemin memory of those who perished in theHolocaust – including his entire family.“I’ve never seen a day of peace in my life,”Maor, 75, told The Jerusalem Post. “Ofcourse it is a big honor to be at YadVashem.”

Attending photojournalism school inGermany in the 1950s, Maor was askedby the Mossad to gather evidence onEichmann.

Under the cover of darkness, hesneaked into the office of the generalprosecutor in Baden Essen to photographdocuments proving Eichmann’s involve-ment in the murder of Jews.

“The room was heavy with cigar smoke,and when I started to take the pictures [Irealized] the documents were ofEichmann,” Maor said.

The assignment almost got him caught.At one point, a cleaning lady was about toenter the room, but hesitated, allowingMaor to leave unnoticed.

“I saw documents you never thoughtyou would see,” he said.

Eichmann was executed by Israel in1962, the only Nazi to have been sen-tenced to death by the Jewish state.

Maor is one of six survivors selected to

light a torch on the eve of this year’sHolocaust Remembrance Day in honor ofthe six million Jews who perished.

Born in 1933 in Halberstadt,Germany, Maor – an only child –

and his family fled the Nazis, first to Italyand then to Yugoslavia, where both of hisparents were murdered while hiding in thewoods.

“I was running for my life in the forest,”Maor said.

Hiding with various foster families and atan orphanage, he eventually made hisway to Mandatory Palestine, ending up onKibbutz Mizra, near Afula, in 1945. One of

the families Maor hid with came to Israelin 1949, settling in Nahariya; Maor is stillin contact with them.

Describing his life in Israel, Maor speakswith a full German accent and a matter-of-fact delivery that is broken up by an occa-sional laugh – almost as if he himself finds ithard to believe some of the events of his life.

Following service in the ParatroopersBrigade, he returned to Germany for pho-tojournalism school. Some of the teachershad been officers in the Nazi army.“I told them, I am not only a Jew, I am anIsraeli officer,” Maor said.

Every morning, one of his teacherswould give him a salute saying “Goodmorning, Mr. Maor.”

When he returned to Israel he workedas a photojournalist, including five yearsat the Post.

Maor didn’t remain in journalism forlong.

“Before the Six Day War, I went back tothe army and left all of these jobs behind,”he said.

He eventually founded the BorderPolice’s intelligence branch, serving for 15years as a national intelligence officer. Heretired in 1999.

Despite all the hardships he hasendured during his life, Maor said hewas happy with his situation today.“I have a wife, three children, fourgrandchildren, and I have a good life,”Maor said.

HOLOCAUST TORCH-LIGHTER TELLS OF ROLE IN EICHMANN CAPTURE

Michael Maor.

YAD VASHEM MOURNS THEPASSING OF ETA WROBELEta Chait Wrobel died on Memorial

Day, soon after her twin great-grandchil-dren were born. Her life was filled withthe love of giv-ing and off i g h t i n g f o rtruth, justice,and the Jewishpeople. "Wefought to sur-v i v e , " s h ewould say. "Wefought so thatsome of uswould get outof there andm a k e n e wfamilies, to spit in the Nazi’s eyes. Ourbabies are our revenge."

Eta grew up with nine siblings, andshe was the sole survivor of her family.

After the war she fled theCommunists and settled in Brooklyn.

In time, the family moved to KewGardens, where Eta used her hometo rally survivors to support YadVashem. Eta Wrobel was a partici-pant of the first meeting that was heldin the Stella and Sam Skura’s home,where American Society for YadVashem was established. Eta wasalso an active and vocal member ofthe National Council of the AmericanGathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendants.

Page 14 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768

Oskar Schindler saved more than1,000 Jews from the gas chambers,

but after 1945 he fell into obscurity andpoverty and died without the recognitionhe deserved, a new exhibition in Frankfurtshows.

After years of ill health and a string offailed business ventures, Schindlerdied a bitter man aged 66 in 1974, twodecades before Steven Spielberg’s1993 film “Schindler’s List” made himfamous worldwide.

“He was an unusual man for an unusualtime. But (the war) was the high point ofhis life, and afterwards, things went down-hill,” says Ursula Trautwein, a friend ofSchindler in Frankfurt, where he livedfrom 1957 until his death.

His beginnings and early life were hard-ly auspicious, and he remained somethingof an enigma to the end.

Born in 1908 into a middle-class familyin a German-speaking area of Austria-Hungary, which after 1918 became part ofCzechoslovakia, he left school at 16.

His marriage, in 1928, to Emilie, was

childless and not a happy one. He wasfond of a drink, was a notorious womaniz-er and fathered two illegitimate children.

He was also no angel in other ways, andhis activities before the war suggestedneither business acumen nor any readi-ness to let his conscience get in the wayof looking after Number One.

After several years that included var-ious jobs and periods of unemploy-

ment, which did nothing to temper hispenchant for fast cars and the high life, hewas arrested in 1938 by theCzechoslovakian secret police for spying.

Ironically, the rise of Hitler and hisannexation of the Sudetenland – theGerman-speaking part of Czechoslovakia– saved Schindler’s neck at this point.

He was released from prison and inSeptember 1939 became a card-carryingmember of Adolf Hitler’s NationalSocialists and moved to Poland, where heacquired a formerly Jewish-owned factoryin Krakow at a knock-down price.

Most of the employees were Jewish, atfirst simply because they were cheaperbut as Schindler began to be horrified bythe increasing brutality of the Nazis,something changed in his mind, and hebegan protecting them.

Schindler managed to convince theauthorities, including concentration campcommander Amon Goeth, that his factorywas vital to the Nazis and that even chil-dren and old men had skills vital to thewar effort.

Still only in his 30s, the Gestapo arrest-ed him three times, but Schindler alwaysgot out, and as the Red Army approachedin 1945, he even managed to transfer hisJewish workers to a new factory in theSudetenland.

He and his workers survived the war,but the charm, people skills and luckneeded to pull all this off seemed to deserthim after 1945.

Schindler was lucky to escape with hislife and fled Eastern Europe, heading firstwith Emilie to Regensburg in Bavaria,where things did not work out. Four yearslater, the couple emigrated to Argentina.

Once there, Schindler opened a chickenfarm and bred nutrias – beaver-like SouthAmerican creatures also known as coy-pus – for their fur, but the venture was adisaster and in 1957 he returned, bank-rupt, to then-West Germany.

He left not only debts in Argentina, butalso Emilie, whom he neversaw again, and settled inFrankfurt, Germany’s drabbanking capital, where he wasto remain until his death.

Perhaps he only knew how torun a loss-making factory mak-ing things no one needed,because when it came to run-ning a going concern, Schindlerstruggled.

He tried various ventures,helped by friends in Israel. In1962 he bought a concrete fac-tory which went bankrupt in lessthan 12 months. When he triedto get it going again, he suf-fered a heart attack that nearly killed him.

While his war heroics had won him recog-nition in Israel – he planted a tree at the YadVashem memorial – back in West Germanyhe was largely unknown despite receiving amedal in 1956, something which left him“bitter,” Trautwein told AFP.

It was her late husband, DieterTrautwein, a provost, who trackedSchindler down after learning of his story– in Israel – and found him in 1966 livingin a small apartment just across from theFrankfurt train station.

“My husband rang the bell ... and said, ‘Ihave a report here about one OskarSchindler who rescued Jews,’ and theman said, ‘Yes, that is me,’” recounts

Ursula Trautwein.

Afriendship began, along with effortsto secure recognition in Germany. In

1966 he was awarded the“Bundesverdienstkreuz” (the order ofmerit) and two years later was honored bythe Roman Catholic Church.

But it was all too little, too late. OskarSchindler died in 1974 in Hildesheim,where his partner at the time lived.

A large memorial service was held inFrankfurt – when people discovered for

the first time the existence of his two chil-dren – and he was buried in Israel.

According to Ursula Trautwein, bothThomas Keneally’s 1982 book“Schindler’s Ark” – which Leopold Page, aJew saved by Schindler, persuaded him towrite – and Spielberg’s film give an accu-rate picture of Schindler the man.

“Keneally had such intuition. When Iread his book, I could even hear OskarSchindler laughing and talking, and hedidn’t even know him,” Trautwein says.“The film brought it all together very well.”

“His wife (who died in 2001) receivedevery honor going – she was given anaudience with the pope, by the US presi-dent... I wish Schindler could have hadjust a small piece of that,” she says.

A Holocaust survivor saved by Schindler.

Emilie Schindler.

OSKAR SCHINDLER, FROM HOLOCAUST HERO TO OBSCURITY

In March and April, events commem-

orating the liquidation of the CracowGhetto were held in Florida. Below are

excerpts from the speeches given by

the president of New CracowFriendship Society, Roman Weingarten

at these events.

March 13 1943, a day that isingrained in the memory of those

who survived it as well as of those wholost members of their families on that day.In the words of Franklin D. Roosvelt, thiswas a “day of infamy” the day of the liqui-dation of the Cracow Ghetto, when 3000of our brethren men, women and children,were brutally murdered and their blooddrenched the pavements of the streets ofPodgorze. And for those who survived,this was only the beginning of a nightmarethat was to last for two more years.

But the history of the Jews of Cracowwould be little more than a meaninglessinterlude of murder if we failed to place itin a larger context. This observancerelates to a story of mass murder that tookplace on a small piece of land that wehave known as the city of Cracow duringthe six years of the WW II. Six years is rel-atively a short time when compared to thethousands years of history of a peoplethat had known all forms of disasters, per-secution and suffering, but I dare to statethat this experience has been so unique inits monstrosity that it has no parallel in thehistory of mankind. So, if we do not buryour dead with honor, safeguard their dig-nity and give meaning to their sacrifice

then future generations will regard themmerely as so many sheep led to theslaughterhouse of history.

Our purpose here today is not to recre-ate the horrors, but to remember and payhomage to the people whom we lost andto the traditions we hold dear.

From the dawn of history, the Jews werethe only people whose historic experiencehas traveled from biblical times to modemscience, and it indeed is a history full ofmystery and dreams. One of the deepestmysteries is the one of suffering. How canone rationalize this unique experience of apeople attracting so much hatred and vio-lence that has distorted mankind's spiritu-al values? And how are we to understandthat obsession with a nation that broughtto the world the doctrine of monotheismand the teachings of "Love thy neighboras yourself.”

For the average Jewish person, whenone mentions the Holocaust, they

think of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek,Belzec and other concentration and exter-mination camps. When we gather to com-memorate the liquidation of the CracowGhetto, what passes in front of our eyesare the thousands of our brethren, ourfamilies and friends as they were chasedto Plac Zgody in Podgorze to their destinyand death. For most of them, this was thelast time that they walked on this earth.

The grip that those memories haveupon us and the awareness that we arethe last eyewitnesses to an eventunparalleled in the history of mankind is

the main reasons that our organizationcontinues with the observance of thiscommemoration.

On this occasion, we take time torecall the martyrdom and heroism

of a small group of young people, many ofwhom I knew personally. The plan was toattack three coffee houses in Cracowsimultaneously; the Esplanada, theCyganeria and the Zakopianka . All oper-ations were carried out as planned andthe attack on Cyganeria, where sevenGermans were killed and many otherswounded, was the most successful. Theevent gave a great boost to the spirit ofthe fighters.

However, as fate would have it, theattack on Cyganeria was the last of theunderground activities, because after that,most of the leadership was arrested andexecuted, which gave a death blow to themovement. But as we are paying tribute tothe memory of those brave men andwomen, we include all who perished,because each and every Jew was a heroin his or her own rights.

For the survivors, the Holocaust in gen-eral continues to be the defining event,trying to understand not only the course ofhistory during the 20th century but thecourse of human events. We are caught inthe middle because we are the ones whoexperienced the Holocaust first-hand withall the horrors of starvation, deprivationand death.

We belong to a traumatized generationthat witnessed the defeat of Nazism and

communism, but not of hatred. Theseemotions are still very much alive.

Some of the reasons that we are meet-ing here today, besides for the need topay tribute and remember our Kedoshimis to expose denial and hatred. Soonafter liberation, we were naïve to thinkthat anti-Semitism and hatred will neveragain raise its ugly head. Surely, wethought, humankind has learned its les-son from the greatest and cruelesttragedy in recorded history. Never againwill anti-Semitism be a seductive imagein the lives of civilized people. So wethought!!!

But we now know better, we know thatanti-Semitism and hatred did not die inthe gas chambers, Jews did.

Now, 65 years after the nightmarewas lifted, many good things have

happened. The survivors have learnedto build on ruins. Family life was recreat-ed, children were born, friendships wererevived, and we lived to see the rebirthof the Jewish nation in its own home-land, the State of Israel.

So, perhaps there is some logic in theargument "Let's make up". Perhaps thetime has come to reconcile our differ-ences with the Allmighty. But regardlessof what we think, we can never allowourselves to forget the infamous day ofMarch 13 1943, the day of the liquidationof the Cracow Ghetto. We must and wewill continue to remember the dead, paytribute to their courage and pledge"Never to Forget.”

WE PLEDGE “NEVER TO FORGET”

May/June 2008 - Iyyar/Sivan 5768 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 15

(Continued from page 13)embassy personnel. It worked closely withthe Dutch electronics company N.V.Philips, “which had access to ‘enemy’ ter-ritory as well as a far-flung corporationintelligence apparatus in its own right,”said former CIA analyst Mark Stout whowrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

So far, no evidence has emerged thatWallenberg worked for the Pond, andStout said in an interview he had not seenWallenberg mentioned in any papers hehas reviewed.

“The Pond was centered aroundPresident Roosevelt’s office and rumorsof a special mission, intelligence or other-wise, for Raoul Wallenberg have persistedthrough the years,” said Berger, who sus-pects the Soviets knew about the agency.It may have been just one more reason forStalin to order his arrest, she said.Regardless of whether Wallenberg wasinvolved, “the Pond’s activities clearlywould have served to enhance Sovietparanoia about Allied activities and aimsin Hungary.”

Wallenberg’s very name may have beenenough to arouse Russian distrust.Throughout the war, his cousins Marcusand Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of abanking and industrial empire, had donebusiness in Germany, producing the ballbearings that kept its army on the move.The Wallenbergs also were involved indiscreet, unsuccessful peace effortsbetween the Allies and Germany, whichStalin feared would leave him excluded, aforetaste of global realignment that wouldlead to the Cold War.

***

In December 1993, investigator MarvinMakinen of the University of Chicago

interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired

orderly at Moscow’s Vladimir Prison since1946. She remembered a foreigner whowas kept in solitary confinement on thethird floor of Korpus 2, a building usedboth as a hospital and isolation ward.Though it was decades earlier, the prison-er stood out in Larina’s memory. He spokeRussian with an accent and “complainedabout everything,” she said.

He repeatedly griped that the soup wascold by the time Larina delivered it. Prisonauthorities ordered her to serve him first.

“This is very unusual,” Makinen said inan interview. Normally, such complaintswould condemn an inmate to a punish-ment cell. “The fact that he wasn’t meanshe was a very special prisoner.”

When shown a gallery of photographs,Larina immediately picked outWallenberg’s one never published before,Makinen said.

She recalled he was in the opposite cellwhen another prisoner, Kirill Osmak, diedin May 1960.

That was enough for Makinen andChicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughlypinpoint the cell of Larina’s foreigner.Creating a database of cell occupancyfrom the prison’s registration cards, theyfound two units opposite Osmak’s thatwere reported empty for 243 and 717days respectively. Normally, cells were leftvacant for a week at most, Makinen said.

The researchers concluded that thosetwo cells likely held special prisoners,namelessly concealed in the gulag.Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds ofaccounts over the decades of people whoclaimed to have seen or heard of some-one who could have been Wallenberg.They established a pattern of sightings,even though many individual reports wereconsidered unreliable, uncorroborated,

deliberate hoaxes or cases of mistakenidentity with other Swedish prisoners.Some stories, like Larina’s, ring particular-ly true.

One compelling account came in 1961.Swedish physician Nanna Svartz asked aneminent Russian scientist aboutWallenberg during a medical congress inMoscow. Lowering his voice, the Russiantold her that Wallenberg was at a psychi-atric hospital and “not in very good shape.”

The Russian, Alexandr Myasnikov, laterclaimed he had been misunderstood, butSvartz stood firm. His remark, she laterreported, “came spontaneously. He wentpale as soon as he said it, and appearedto understand that he had said too much.”

A few years later the Soviets sent out feel-

ers for a possible spy swap. Envoys indicat-

ed Moscow was ready to “compensate”

Sweden if it freed Stig Wennerstromm, a

Swedish air force officer who had spied for

the Kremlin for 15 years.

Though Wallenberg’s name was never

mentioned, he was considered the only

prize worth exchanging for such a high-

value spy. The intermediary was

Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer

who engineered many Cold War prisoner

exchanges. But years of halfhearted

negotiation ended in no deal.

***

Nina Lagergren keeps a small wood-

en box in the cellar of her comfort-

able Stockholm home. The Russians gave

it to her in 1989 when she visited Moscow.

It contains her half-brother’ s diplomatic

passport, a stack of currency, a Swedish

license for the pistol he bought but never

used, and two telephone diaries. Among

the entries are Eichmann and Berber

Smit, the daughter of the Dutch spy.

They also gave the family a copy of

Wallenberg’s “death certificate“, handwrit-

ten and unstamped.“They anticipated that I would get very

moved and understand there was nomore hope,” Lagergren said.

Instead it reinforced her belief thatWallenberg had lived beyond 1947 andperhaps was even then alive. “Thisproved we could go on,” she said. Todayhe would be 95, and she concedes hemust be dead.

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

The 2001 Swedish report speculatedthat the longer he was held, the harder itwas for the Soviets to release him. Still, “itwould have been exceptional to order theexecution of a diplomat from a neutralcountry. It might have appeared simpler tokeep him in isolation,” the report said.Berger, the independent researcher, hassubmitted a new, detailed request toMoscow to release files on prisoners whoshared cells with the missing diplomat andon other foreigners in the gulag; Mesinaihopes to study psychiatric facilities whereWallenberg may have been confined;Ritter, the Hungarian researcher, is trac-ing the British spy network of Lolle Smit;and historians are awaiting the release ofthe Pond papers.

Whatever any of this reveals, a 1979State Department memo puts these ques-tions into perspective: “Whether or notWallenberg was involved in espionageduring World War II is a moot point at thisstage in history. His obvious humanitarianacts certainly outweigh any conceivable‘spy’ mission he may have been on.”

First published by Associated Press

SCHOLARS RUN DOWN MORE CLUES TO AHOLOCAUST MYSTERY

BY YURAS KARMANAU, AP

Workers rebuilding a sports stadiumon the site of an 18th century

Jewish cemetery in Belarus say they haveno choice but to consign the bones to citydumps.

“It’s impossible to pack an entire ceme-tery into sacks,” said worker MikhailGubets, adding that he stopped countingthe skulls when the number went over100.But critics say it’s part of a pattern ofcallous indifference toward Belarus’Jewish heritage that was prevalent whenthe country was a Soviet republic andhasn’t changed.

The stadium in Gomel, Belarus’ second-largest city and a center of Jewish life untilWorld War II, is one of four that were builton top of Jewish cemeteries around thecountry.

The Gomel cemetery was destroyedthen the stadium was built in 1961, but theremains lay largely undisturbed until thisspring when reconstruction began and abulldozer turned up the first bones.A Jewish leader in Gomel, VladimirGershanok, says he asked the builders toput the bones into sacks for reburial at acemetery that has a monument toHolocaust victims.

“We know we can’t stop the constructionbut we’re trying to minimize the destruc-tion,” Gershanok said.

But city authorities have ruled that theconstruction can go ahead because thebones are more than 50 years old.Igor Poluyan, the city official responsiblefor building sports facilities, says he does-

n’t understand the problem. “If somethingwas scattered there, we’ll collect it andtake it away,” he said.

A history professor, Yevgeny Malikov,sees the cemetery as part of the city’s her-itage. He has filled three sacks with bonesand pulled aside two of the unearthedmarble gravestones. Other gravestonesare piled near a trash bin or already car-

ried away. Some of the bones have beencarried off by stray dogs.

“The history of the city is being throwninto the dump together with the humanremains,” Malikov said.

Jews began settling in Gomel in the16th century and by the end of the

19th century made up more than half ofthe population. In 1903, they made histo-ry by being the first to resist a pogrom,defending 26 synagogues and prayerhouses.

Most of Gomel’s 40,000 Jews managedto flee before the Nazis arrived. The 4,000

who remained were shot in November1941. Only a few thousand Jews now livein the city of 500,000.

Oleg Korzhuyev, 38, who lives on KarlMarx Street at the edge of the site, saidthe workers aren’t happy about digging uphuman bones, “but if they find a gold tooththen it’s a real celebration.”

Another city, Grodno, experienced asimilar problem while reconstructing a sta-dium built on a Jewish cemetery. Theexcavated earth and bones were scat-tered into a ravine.

Jewish graves also have been disturbedin neighboring Ukraine.

“It’s not just a Jewish issue, it’s this gen-eral Soviet legacy,” said Ukraine’s chiefrabbi. Yakov Blaikh. “They didn’t respectpeople while they were alive and theydon’t respect them when they are dead.”

In April, the Jewish community in thecity of Vinnyntsa was able to stop con-

struction of an apartment building on apre-World War II Jewish cemetery.

Ukrainian authorities apologized, sayingthey did not realize the construction wouldaffect the cemetery. Belarus, on the otherhand, has been “one of the least respon-sive countries on all Jewish issues,”according to Efraim Zuroff, director of theIsraeli Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“The government is simply erasingJewish history from the face of this land,”said Yakov Basin, vice president of theBelarusian Jewish Council.

Before the war, about 1 million Jewslived in Belarus and 800,000 of them diedin the Holocaust. Today they number27,000 in the country of 10 million.

JEWISH REMAINS DUG UP IN BELARUS

Local history professor, Yevgeny Malikovshows human bones at a sports stadium in thecity of Gomel.

Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV aired a documen-tary on April 18 claiming that Jews

planned and perpetrated the Holocaust inorder to rid the nation of the “burden” ofthe weak and disabled.

Palestinian Media Watch, a group thatmonitors Palestinian Arabic languagemedia and schoolbooks, uploaded part ofthe program onto YouTube in a segmentcalled “Hamas Holocaust Perversion:Jews Planned Holocaust to KillHandicapped Jews.”

The Al-Aqsa TV clip edits togetherfootage from the World War II NaziGenocide, showing Jews being roundedup and taken to a train as well as emaci-ated corpses lying in a pile, alongsideimages of Israeli leaders David BenGurion and Golda Meir.

The accompanying commentary claimsthat Ben Gurion said “the disabled andhandicapped are a heavy burden on thestate.” To rid them of that scourge, thevideo claims, Ben Gurion and “the SatanicJews thought up an evil plot to be rid ofthe burden of disabled and handicappedin twisted criminal ways.”

The video also claims that Jews madeup the Holocaust and blamed the Nazisfor it in order to “benefit from internationalsympathy.”

The Holocaust “was a joke, and part ofthe perfect show that Ben Gurion put on,”said Amin Dabur, head of the PalestinianCenter for Strategic Research organiza-tion, in the video.

Dabur added that the “Jewish plan”focused on developing “strong and ener-getic youth [for Israel],” and that the figureof six million Jewish victims is mere prop-aganda.

HAMAS TV CLAIMS

“SATANIC JEWS” PLANNED,

PERPETRATED HOLOCAUST

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 American Federation of JewishFighters, Camp Inmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased

International Society for Yad Vashem

MARTYRDOM AND RESISTANCE

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NON-PROFIT ORG.U.S. POST

P A I DNEW YORK, N.Y.PERMIT NO. 10Web site: www.yadvashemusa.org

SALUTE HOLLYWOODTwo hundred people gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, California for the American Society for Yad Vashem event at the end of February. The

event, which was organized together with the Jewish Life Foundation, saluted Hollywood and the films that were made about the Holocaust. Among the par-ticipants were David and Fela Shapell; Barry and Marilyn Rubenstein; Jan and Suzanne Czuker and their son Ed with his wife Elissa; Jack Belz and son Gary withhis wife Shelly; Barbara Kort, Jona Goldrich, Maria Herskovic and daughters Patricia and Suzanne; Bernie & Hanna Rubenstein; Marilyn Ziering; Beryl Grace &Jonathan Rosenberg; Lou and Trudy Kestenbaum; Geoffrey Rolat, Sam Delug; Moshe and Helen Sassover, Jarow Rogovin, and many others.

Honorees included director Arthur Hiller for his film The Man in the Glass Booth; director Paul Verhoeven for his film The Black Book; violinist Miri Ben Ari for themusic in the film Freedom Writers, and others.

Actresses Valerie Harper, Lainie Kazan, Millie Perkins and Mare Winningham, and actor Jon Voight read from the Diary of Anne Frank and the last letters ofHolocaust victims compiled by Yad Vashem.

Yad Vashem Benefactors, Fela and David Shapell (middle) with Branko Lustig, Academy Award-

winning producer of Schindler’s List and his wife, Mirjana Lustig.

Actress Millie Perkins (left), who portrayed Anne Frank in the film Diary of Anne Frank with Yad

Vashem Benefactors, Marilyn and Barry Rubenstein.

Standing from left to right, Gary Belz, actor Jon Voight, Cheryl Simon, Yad Vashem Builder, Jona

Goldrich, Gary Belz’s wife, Shelly. Sitting from left to right, Yad Vashem supporter, Barbara Kort,

violinist Miri Ben-Ari, and Yad Vashem Benefactor Jack Belz. Susanne and Jan Czuker, Yad Vashem Benefactors.