5/5 in SF: Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day

International and Multi-Generational Gathering of Survivors and their Families

3-9 May 2005

Yad Vashem, Har Hazikaron, Jerusalem

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel invite you to an international and multi-generational gathering of survivors and their families marking Yad Vashem’s Jubilee Year and 60 years since the end of World War II.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/jubilee/survivors/home_survivor.html

Yom HaShoah - This day, which was established to remember the Holocaust and the six million Jews who perished, is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, .
http://www.torah.org/learning/yomtov/holocaust/

The road to Auschwitz was built by hate,
but paved with indifference
http://www.amit.org.il/learning/english/Holocaust/

Published May 5 2005


For 60 years, cherry blossoms have been Anita Schorr's symbol of freedom.

The pink-petaled trees are what Schorr remembers of her ride down the German autobahn after the British Army liberated her and thousands of other prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-nor.holocaust1may05,0,17580.story?coll=stam-news-local-headlines

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/b-yar

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-krak-liq.htm

http://www1.yadvashem.org/remembrance/rememberance_day/rememberance_day2005/home_rem_day_2005.html

Member of the Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust

The spirit of "And We Were Children" is summarized in our dedication:

for our children
for our grandchildren
for the future

http://www.dianawang.net/b_group.html
--------

Melbourne - Australia
Descendants of the Shoah Inc. began in Melbourne, Australia in 1991 as a group of sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors wanting to explore our parents experiences, the similarities in our childhoods and how this would affect our own children, the third generation.

http://www.dosinc.org.au/

http://www.jewishpost.com/holocaust/holocst3.htm

"Was it possible that I lived through that?" says Gertrude Boyarski, referring to her experiences during World War II. "Sometimes I say, 'Was it only a nightmare, or was it true?'"

http://www.aish.com/holocaust/people/Fighting_Back.asp

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html#b-yar

http://history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/a/kovner.htm

Members of Greece's small Jewish community held a ceremony Sunday to mark 62 years since thousands of Jews from the northern port city of Thessaloniki were sent to Nazi concentration camps.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115519110720&p=1078397702269

http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/friends/world_wide/friends_spain.html

ADL's Curriculum Connections To Honor Holocaust Remembrance Day


New York, NY, May 3, 2005 … To commemorate Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is making available to high school educators a new line of curriculum so classrooms can explore what the world has done to achieve the ideal of "Never Again!" and why these efforts have fallen short of averting atrocities in places such as Rwanda and Sudan.

The first two lessons in the Spring 2005 unit of ADL's Curriculum Connections for high school students introduce the concept of "Never Again!" as a response to the Holocaust and highlight the one-man crusade by a Polish, Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor to establish a convention in international law that would prevent and punish the crime of genocide. The second half of the unit examines the barriers that have thwarted the realization of "Never Again!" since World War II, with a special emphasis on the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

"This season's Curriculum Connections unit is particularly timely because it marks 60 years since the liberation of Auschwitz," said Ed Alster, ADL Director of Education. "We hope this will teach teens the concept of "Never Again!" but also, the importance of learning the lessons of the Holocaust as they apply to today's crises in the world."

Curriculum Connections is a series of online teaching resources developed by ADL to help elementary, middle and high school educators integrate multicultural, anti-bias and social justice themes into their lesson plans. It was launched at the end of 2004. Each issue is organized around a particular topic or theme and is distributed via e-mail three to four times per school year. In January, ADL distributed to middle and high school educators a lesson plan based on the life and accomplishments of Shirley Chisholm, a key civil rights figure and the first Black woman elected to Congress.



The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

The Affair Friedman and the “Friends of Léon Degrelle” Society

CEDADE devoted much attention to defence of Nazis and their collaborators being prosecuted by law, such as Klaus Barbie, and in particular, Léon Degrelle. Degrelle, founder of Belgian fascism, and former commander of the Valona Legion that fought with Hitler’s troops on the Eastern Front, was one of the principle promoters of CEDADE. The organization’s Ediciones Nothung in Barcelona published a number of Degrelle’s books, such as Our Europe and Hitler for 1000 Years. Other publishers connected with the Spanish extreme Right, like Editorial Fuerza Nueva and Ediciones D, translated Passionate Spirits, Memories of a Fascist, Open Letter to tPope about Auschwitz, and Léon Degrelle’s Signature and Flourish, with a preface by José Utrera Molina, a Falangist and minister in the Franco regime.

CEDADE gave particular support to Degrelle when he was sued by Violeta Friedman. Born in Transylvania (Romania), Friedman was a survivor of Auschwitz who later immigrated to Spain. She filed a suit under a Spanish law to protect her honor after Degrelle, in the July 1985 issue of Tiempo and on Spanish television, said “If there are so many Jews at present, it is difficult to believe they are alive and kicking after the gas chambers.” The courts found against Friedman in the first trial and subsequent appeal. Degrelle’s lawyer was his son-in-law, Juan Servando Balaguer, a leader of the Juntas Españolas party.

After this, however, private prosecution was rejected in consecutive judicial petitions, arguing that the claimant lacked the necessary legitimacy. In November 1991, the Constitutional Court revoked the previous sentences and recognized the corresponding legitimacy of Friedman’s case, that is to say, her right to honor against Degrelle’s statements. The high court argued that even though the Holocaust is recognized as historical fact, publication of distortions of this history was protected under guarantees of freedom of speech. Nevertheless, the court’s judgment was that such declarations have a “racist and antisemitic connotation” and therefore form an indecent assault against the human dignity of the Jewish people, including of course, the claimant Violeta Friedman, and all who were “interned in the Nazi concentration camps.” The court decision recognized that the principle of freedom of speech cannot protect “declarations or expressions whose objective is to scorn or generate feelings of hostility against fixed ethnic, foreign, or immigrant groups.”

In the following four years, there were important judicial reforms designed to combat racism. In April 1995, the House of Commons passed a bill making it a crime to justify the Holocaust or deny that it happened. The Spanish legislature approved a reform of the penal code in November 1995 that went into effect in May 1996. The previous code had prohibited only incitement to discrimination. Adding to the list of “aggravating circumstances,” the revised code prohibits offences motivated by racism, antisemitism, or the victims’s national or ethnic origin, or religion. Included are acts of any kind that justify or advocate genocide. Diffusion by any means of ideas or doctrines that “attempt to re-establish regimes or institutions that condone practices leading to such crimes, will be punished with a prison sentence of one to two years.”

http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Holocaust/20050506-ADL.htm

Generation after generation, Jews and non-Jews alike confront the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity—the Holocaust. Individuals and nations try to comprehend how the largest and most vibrant Jewish settlement that thrived in Europe for a millennium was eradicated in a matter of years.

Just as Jewish fate differed from that of other nations under Nazi rule, so too did the nature of Jewish opposition to the Nazis. Driven by the sheer will to survive, millions of persecuted Jews in Nazi Third Reich territory and the occupied countries resisted the oppressor. On the eastern and western fronts, hundreds of thousands of Jews fought and died in Allied armies.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/magazine/magazine_new/jewish_resistance.html

The car stopped for a moment. An elderly lady pushed her head out of the window and shouted; "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves? Today is Holocaust Day, and you are demonstrating for Arabs?!"
The cause of her anger was a large group of demonstrators opposite the Ministry of Defense in Tel-Aviv, last Thursday, the official Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. Many things happened on that day.

Thousands of Israelis flew to Poland, to take part in the annual "March of Life" between the two death camps whose very names inspire dread: Auschwitz and Birkenau. In Auschwitz, an official ceremony was held. Ariel Sharon made a political speech to promote his political agenda. He reminded the Israelis how the world had kept silent during the Holocaust, and asserted that now, too, we should not trust the world. Ellie Wiesel, the inevitable Holocaust cultist, with his inevitable tortured expression, delivered his inevitable speech. For the guests of honor, places of honor were reserved, according to rank, in the first rows of the white plastic chairs. It was another official ceremony, much like hundreds of other official ceremonies held for some purpose and on some subject or other, an occasion for politicians to utter their platitudes. The real content, the world-embracing human lesson of the Holocaust, was lost between the ceremonies and the words.
At the same time, another group of 7000 Israelis left for Moscow. Not to celebrate the victory over the Nazis 60 years ago, in which the Red Army played such an important role, nor to thank the veterans for liberating the death camps and putting an end to the extermination. No, they were accompanying a basketball team.
Israel is a global basketball power. The victories of its teams abroad fill the average Israeli with national pride. The match in Moscow was very important, and while it went on, life in this country almost came to a standstill. Everybody was following the game on State Television. Is the preoccupation with basketball on Holocaust Day, of all days, proper? On the face of it, no. The Holocaust was the defining event in the Jewish history of the last century, and perhaps of all times. It was a warning to all humanity. Is it fitting to be occupied with a sports event on such a day?
My answer is yes. I am not a very enthusiastic sports fan. But sport, too, symbolizes the fact that the Jews have survived the Holocaust, that Jewish life is thriving in many places around the world. Adolf Hitler swore to eradicate "World Jewry" once and for all, together with the "Asiatic Hordes" of Russia. And here, 60 years after his sordid end in the Berlin Bunker, Israeli sportsmen compete in Moscow. One can be happy about that.

At the very same time, the spontaneous demonstration in front of the Defense Ministry in Tel-Aviv was taking place. Its purpose was to protest the killing of two Palestinian boys, aged 14 and 15, at Beit Likiya village, during a demonstration against the Fence.
Beit Likiya lies some kilometers south of Bil'in, the site of the large demonstration I reported on last week. The circumstances are similar: the land of Beit Likiya is also being stolen by the Fence. The bulldozers work from morning to night and their rattle, rather like a continuous burst of heavy-machine-gun fire, resonates around all the villages in the vicinity.
The villagers know that beyond this fence, on their land, their source of livelihood for many generations, new neighborhoods of the nearby settlement will be built. Like the villagers of Bil'in, they protest every day. Men, women and children march towards the armed soldiers, with blaring loudspeakers, lying down on the ground, chaining themselves to their olive trees, and sometimes the youngsters of the village throw stones and are brutally driven away by the soldiers. When Jewish Israelis take part in the demonstrations, the soldiers generally use tear gas, stun grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets, and now also salt-bullets. When there are no Jews around, they may use live ammunition, too. This time, a group of soldiers stood facing the village boys, who threw stones. Nobody was seriously hurt. Nobody's life was in danger. But the commander, a lieutenant, fired live rounds. Two boys were killed. One of the boys was wounded only in the thigh. The wound was probably not mortal, but the boy was left to bleed to death. The army did not treat him, as it would have treated a wounded soldier. It seems that an ambulance from the village was not able to approach. Within a few hours, Israeli peace activists mounted a protest. The call was transmitted by word of mouth, by phone and e-mail. About 250 men and women gathered in front of the Defense Ministry, many young people, not a few elderly ones, among them some from the Holocaust generation. Some of the drivers using this central Tel-Aviv artery raised their thumbs or sounded their horn in support. Others disapproved, like the shouting woman. How can one demonstrate for Arabs, especially on Holocaust Day?

Well, it's a good question. And there is a good answer. The answer expresses one of the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, a lesson that should be raised like a banner on Holocaust Day: That decent persons must come to the aid of a persecuted minority.
That loyalty to your country does not justify agreement with the occupation of another country and the oppression of another people. That you must not accept an ideology telling you that you belong to a master nation, to a superior race, to a chosen people - and that other people are inferior and subhuman. The use of lethal force on Palestinian demonstrators, even when they throw stones, expresses abysmal contempt for the life of non-Jews. That same officer would not have fired on Jewish demonstrators in similar circumstances. The thought would not even have crossed his mind. But Palestinians, and Arabs generally, are not considered full human beings. Opening live fire on unarmed 14 and 15- year old boys shows a deeply-rooted racist mentality. The boys' age was clear to the officer who shot them. They could not have "endangered his life", as he claims, if they had not been quite close. He certainly would have found other ways to drive them off if they had been the children of orthodox Jews or settlers. The protection of children is a profound human instinct. A person must be a hatred-ridden racist, or have a twisted mind, for this instinct to be put out of action, whatever the origin of the boys. There is no more appropriate day to protest against such an act, and the mental attitudes lurking behind it, than Holocaust Day.

That morning, the newspaper Haaretz presented its readers with a nice gift: every copy of the paper came with a large national flag attached. One woman took this flag, painted a blood-red stain on it and held it aloft throughout the demonstration. Should she be ashamed of herself? On the contrary. I think that she expressed the spirit of Holocaust Day better than any other person in Israel or at the Auschwitz ceremony.

April 1, 2005

Holocaust conference to focus on 60th anniversary of liberation
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The 24th annual Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, entitled We Remember: 60 Years After Liberation, will take place on April 10-16 at various locations on the Purdue University campus and in the surrounding community.

The conference, which roughly coincides with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, is sponsored by the Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Committee.

World War II in Europe officially ended May 8, 1945, when the Allies announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Although it was not until months later that all of Germany was occupied and the ethnic atrocities there ended, that date also marks the informal end of the Holocaust, said conference chair Susan Prohofsky.

"Keeping memories of the Holocaust alive always has been the primary goal of our annual conference, but an anniversary year such as this certainly brings Holocaust remembrance to the forefront," Prohofsky said.

"It is very important for people to understand that even though the Holocaust ended 60 years ago, it continues to influence the lives of people all over the world. Unfortunately, the world does not seem to have learned from the Holocaust, either. Both genocide and anti-Semitism are rampant throughout the world even to this day."

Adam Koenig was one of eight siblings in a Jewish family.

A week after World War II began, at age 16, he was sent to a concentration camp. It was the beginning of nearly six years of horror.

"They take off our hair, haircut, the clothing away, had a shower, cold, and they hit us," Koenig remembers. "My first impression was, that's ... (what) hell would look like."

Koenig survived Sachsenhausen and other Nazi death camps as a manual laborer. In October 1942, he was transferred in a cattle car to Auschwitz.

''Who isn't able to work they sent to Birkenau, which meant to come to the killing factory. That we knew, we saw it, you could smell it. It smells like burnt meat. Sweet. A certain smell, it's hard to forget it.

"A lot of people committed suicide when they saw there is no hope."

With Soviet troops advancing on Auschwitz in January 1945, the Nazis moved tens of thousands of prisoners -- Koenig included -- to other death camps.

''Later in history they called it the death march. And it was like that. Those who couldn't continue, and fell, were too weak to continue to march, they were shot."

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 60 years ago this week. Less than three months later, on April 15, British troops liberated Koenig at Bergen-Belsen.

But it wasn't a day of joy for him.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/01/23/auschwitz.survivor.burns/index.html

Fuck Uri Avnery. Jesus christ, I wish he would die already. And fuck the stupid Palestinian propaganda shit.

HEY CENSOR, DELETE THE PREVIOUS REMARK: ITS FILLED WITH PROFANITY, I MEAN JUST WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE HERE???????????????????

WERE NOT STORMTROOPERS HERE MURDERING IRAQI CHILDREN FOR FUN.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

February 2, 2004

Auschwitz. It stands as the ultimate symbol of evil.

Fifty-nine years ago this week, the infamous Nazi camp was liberated. The machinery of death boggles the mind.

At Auschwitz alone, over a million Jews were systematically murdered.

This week many European countries mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It’s a day to recall the six million Jews, including a million and a half children, who were killed in the Nazi death camps, as well as the many other victims of Nazi terror.

It’s also a day to rededicate ourselves to the struggle against anti-Semitism. Tragically, it didn’t entirely disappear with the Nazi defeat.

In recent years, we’ve seen a new wave of anti-Semitism, particularly in the Islamic world and Europe. But no country is immune from this cancer, not even our own.

How best to fight it? People of good will must stand up and speak out. Make no mistake about it, while anti-Semites may target a specific group, their ultimate target is democracy itself.

This is David Harris of the American Jewish Committee.

http://www.ajc.org/Terrorism/CommentariesDetail.asp?did=222&pid=2166

"It is for everyone to remember what happened,'' said Fritzie Fritzshall as she left the majestic rotunda in the Capitol on Thursday. "To remember my brothers, my mother and my grandparents who did not survive.''

A few minutes before, the somber notes of the El Moleh Rachamim (God, full of compassion) chant, usually heard at Jewish funerals, filled the hall.

A survivor never forgets
http://www.suntimes.com/output/sweet/cst-nws-sweet06.html

Simon Wiesenthal's Statement
On The Occasion of Receiving
The Medal of Freedom
From President William Jefferson Clinton
The White House, August 9, 2000
Copyrights, The Wiesenthal Center

I am grateful to President Clinton for this special honor and I will always treasure it as one of the highlights of my life. I accept it, not as a personal honor, but as a custodian of those who perished in whose memory I have dedicated my life.

I am now ninety-one years old. Fifty-five years ago, weighing less than ninety pounds, I was liberated from the Mathausen Concentration Camp by members of the United States Armed Forces. Together my wife and I lost eighty-nine members of our families in the Nazi Holocaust. Only we ourselves remained.

My life was never to be the same. I was an architect by profession, trained to beautify communities. Now, I began submitting profiles on those who had destroyed them. I was never trained for such a role, but I felt it was my duty to those who perished in the Holocaust. I was haunted by their memories and committed to bringing their murderers to justice.

For a half a century, I have worked on more than 1,100 cases involving Nazi war criminals, bringing to justice the commandants of Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, the inventor of the mobile gas vans and the individual who arrested Anne Frank.

My cause was justice, not vengeance. My work is for a better tomorrow and a more secure future for our children and grandchildren.

As a believer that all of us are accountable before our creator, I have always believed that when my life is over, I shall meet up with those who perished, and they will ask me, "What have you done?" At that moment, I will have the honor of telling them; I have never forgotten you.

In 1936, Simon married Cyla Mueller and worked in an architectural office in Lvov. Their life together was happy until 1939 when Germany and Russia signed their "non-aggression" pact and agreed to partition Poland between them; the Russian army soon occupied Lvov, and shortly afterward began the Red purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners and other professionals. In the purge of "bourgeois" elements that followed the Soviet occupation of Lvov Oblast at the beginning of World War II, Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs - Soviet Secret Police) and eventually died in prison, his stepbrother was shot, and Wiesenthal himself, forced to close his business, became a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Later he saved himself, his wife, and his mother from deportation to Siberia by bribing an NKVD commissar. When the Germans displaced the Russians in 1941, a former employee of his, then serving the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary police, helped him to escape execution by the Nazis. But he did not escape incarceration. Following initial detention in the Janwska concentration camp just outside Lvov, he and his wife were assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn Works, the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad.

Early in 1942, the Nazi hierarchy formally decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem" -- Annihilation. Throughout occupied Europe a terrifying genocide machine was put into operation. In August 1942, Wiesenthal's mother was sent to the Belzec death camp. By September, most of his and his wife's relatives were dead; a total of eighty-nine members of both families perished.

Because his wife's blonde hair gave her a chance of passing as an "Aryan," Wiesenthal made a deal with the Polish underground. In return for detailed charts of railroad junction points made by him for use by saboteurs, his wife was provided with false papers identifying her as "Irene Kowalska," a Pole , and spirited out of the camp in the autumn of 1942. She lived in Warsaw for two years and then worked in the Rhineland as a forced laborer, without her true identity ever being discovered.

With the help of the deputy director, Wiesenthal himself escaped the Ostbahn camp in October 1943, just before the Germans began liquidating all the inmates. In June 1944, he was recaptured and sent back to Janwska where he would almost certainly have been killed had the German eastern front not collapsed under the advancing Red Army. Knowing they would be sent into combat if they had no prisoners to justify their rear-echelon assignment, the SS guards at Janwska decided to keep the few remaining inmates alive. With 34 prisoners out of an original 149,000, the 200 guards joined the general retreat westward, picking up the entire population of the village of Chelmiec along the way to adjust the prisoner-guard ratio.

More

http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=242921

The Holocaust was arguably among the most fearsome tragedies that have befallen the Jewish People in its long history, in which six million Jews, fully one third of World Jewry, including one and a half million children, were murdered.
And the murderers were not a People who would normally be called "barbaric." On the contrary, the majority of the officers of the so-called Concentration "Camps" were medical doctors (!), or doctors of philosophy, or respected professionals. A degree of evil was exhibited which perhaps has never been exceeded in all of human history.

It is not true that the murderers' evil was unopposed. Tremendous bravery was exhibited by relatively small numbers of Jews and Gentiles, such as at the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jewish Community acted in concert, and by hundreds of individuals whose efforts resulted in the saving of tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives.

Although the saving of a single life is comparable to the saving of an entire world, the dimensions of the tragedy vastly outweighed all attempts to avert it, and the sweet taste of the good deeds was indistinguishable against the bitterness of the evil.
http://www.ou.org/yerushalayim/yomhashoah/

White supremacists clashed with an angry crowd outside Faneuil Hall, where Holocaust survivors and their families were commemorating the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115605168781&p=1078397702269

Born in Poland in 1945, daughter of Shoah Jewish survivors. In 1947 came to Argentina and lives there.
Psychologist specialized in Family Therapy, she writes about her profession as well as about Shoah survivors and their descendants. Author of four books: "Por una margarita", a travel chronicle (unpublished); "Con una piedra en el zapato", testimonial fictionalized novel (unpublished); "De terapias y personas", psychological text with Musia Auspitz (published) , and "Surviving Survival", a collection of essays about Shoah survivors (published in Spanish). Many of her notes and articles have been published in the media.

In the psychotherapeutical field, she worked since 1970 in the Psychoanalitic theory and technic and since 1985 in the Sistemic perspective.

Regarding Shoah she was involved in the testimony project by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation founded by Steven Spielberg. Today she co-facilitates the Children of the Shoah in Argentina group and the Survivor´s Children group (2G). She belongs since september 2003 to the Advisory Board of the International Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust.

She was part in the making of the testimonial film "And We Were Children" (2001) by Bernardo Kononovich, a video about the experience of survivors that were children during the Shoah.Frequently writes about the issue and lectures in schools and institutions locally and abroad. Her main interest is located in the awarness of totalitarian phenomenons, their internal dynamics, ideological and pragmatical substractum, because far from being a past issue they are dangerously alive in today´s world.

In March 2004 assumed as Chairman of the Generaciones de la Shoá en Argentina (Generations of the Shoah in Argentina), the blending of two groups: Children of the Shoah and Second Generation.
http://www.dianawang.net/a_index_ing.html

Six million Jews perished under Nazi tyranny - perished for no reason
other than the fact that they were Jews.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like many other Jewish Australians, I am the descendant of Holocaust survivors - Polish Jews who through courage, severe hardship and plain, simple luck lived through the ghettoes and the concentrations camps. That survivor generation is starting to disappear. Everyday, there are fewer and fewer eye-witnesses left to the Nazi crimes against humanity.
I believe it to be a sacred duty for their descendants to maintain the memories of the Holocaust, to remind the world of man's cruelty to man and to counter the efforts of those who, for whatever warped political or social reasons, try to rewrite history to convince others that the whole thing never happened.

The Web is an invaluable way of keeping alive the memories of the Holocaust. On this page are but some of the many resources available on the Internet. (If you know of others please tell me.) I created this page as my simple way of remembering those who perished and of honouring those who survived.


Never Again!
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aragorn/holocaus.htm

Why were they, too, not warmly embraced by the diverse communities to which they fled after the war?

I shrink at the mere thought of putting myself in the same category as those brave souls who not only survived hell on earth, but went on to build productive lives, raise well-adjusted families and still maintain a sense of humor when we good-naturedly imitated their European accents.

Were they also not deserving of massive assistance, both financially and emotionally? Were they not – are they not – the bravest and strongest of our people in modern times?
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115705338842

"The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Justice Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. Counsel to the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany, November 21, 1945

http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/dor/

Armed Resistance

There are many instances of Jewish Resistance in the Ghettos. Such actions were usually short lived and punishment was always fatal.
http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/resist.htm

http://www.germanculture.com.ua/library/history/bl_holocaust.htm

Other forms of resistance in concentration camps consisted of efforts organized by the underground to inform the world about Nazi brutality, the cruel physical conditions, and the Nazis' systematic annihilation of Jews in the extermination camps.

On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg (who later took the name Rudolf Vrba), escaped from Birkenau. The motive for their escape was to warn the Hungarian Jews of the Germans' plans for their destruction. They hid in bunkers outside the camp fence near places where prisoners worked for three days, the length of the state of alert the SS imposed after any escape. After a journey of several days on foot, Wetzler and Vrba reached Slovakia, where they presented to Jewish leaders a long report illustrated with sketches describing installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including details about the gas chambers.

These reports and news of the first gassings of Hungarians at Auschwitz were confirmed in late May by two Polish Jewish escapees, Arnost Rosin and Czelaw Mordowicz. That summer, the reports reached the Allies, who had earlier (in late 1942) confirmed the news of the mass murder of Jews. The Allies, however, rejected the request by certain Jewish activists in Europe that Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to the camp be bombed. The allies continued to make winning the war their highest priority. Some 437,000 Jewish men, women, and children were deported from Hungary on 148 trains between May 15 and July 8, 1944. Most -- as many as 10,000 each day -- were gassed soon after their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1998-no-frames/resistance.htm

May. 11, 2005 12:54
Bronfman: Jews 'greatest survivors' in history
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

The Jewish people are "the greatest survivors in the history of the world," and despite the profound internal strife among Israelis over the upcoming Gaza pullout plan, the State of Israel will overcome the divisions and carry on, prominent Canadian philanthropist Charles Bronfman said Tuesday on the eve of Israel's 57th Independence Day.

Bronfman will become one of the first non-Israelis to light a torch at the official Independence Day ceremony at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl on Wednesday night, an honor bestowed on the Montreal native in recognition of his lifelong contributions to the State of Israel.

"Throughout its 57-year history, Israel has had one difficulty after another, but its people have always overcome," he said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post from Montreal ahead of his trip to Israel for the ceremony.

Israel's 57th birthday celebrations – taking place three months before its planned unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and four isolated northern Samaria settlements – come at a time of virtually unprecedented internal divisions within the country over the 'disengagement plan' and the future of the state.

"None of these things are easy, but there is so much more to unite us than to divide us," Bronfman said, rejecting the definition of the current state of affairs as a "crossroads" for the future of the state.

Over the last several years, Bronfman's name has been most commonly associated in Israel with the birthright israel program, which he cofounded together with philanthropist Michael Steinhardt six years ago, offering young Jewish teens and young adults a free first-time educational trip to Israel.

Over the last five years, the program has brought 80,000 students to Israel from 45 countries around the world.

"I have been terribly fortunate to have been involved in this wonderful program which has engendered so much hope and unity among Jewish people all over the world," he concluded.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115777943719&p=1078027574097

By DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writer
Fri May 13, 8:36 AM ET


BERLIN - Within hours of the opening of Germany's national Holocaust memorial to the public, a vandal scratched a swastika into one of the 2,711 gray slabs, a spokesman for the memorial said Friday.

The small swastika was spotted by security guards and quickly removed, though the vandal was not caught, spokesman Uwe Neumaerker said.

"What else can we do?" he said. "There are some security forces and they walk through and if they find something they remove it. ... You can't be everywhere at once."

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was officially inaugurated Tuesday after years of debate and delay. It opened to the public Thursday.

The underground information center had 2,700 visitors but many more wandered among the haunting field of slabs. Neumaerker said he could not even speculate who may have defaced the slab.

Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial in the former no man's land of the Berlin Wall is a labyrinth of narrow rising and falling pathways between the upright slabs in the ground.

It took 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over its design and message before it was finally completed.

Ahead of its opening, Eisenman said he recognized the memorial could not please everyone, and that he wouldn't mind skateboarders, children playing hide and seek or even graffiti on the slabs.

Asked Monday if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. "Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't," Eisenman said. "Maybe it would add to it."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050513/ap_on_re_eu/germany_holocaust_memorial

"'NEVER AGAIN' OVER AGAIN" — Joseph Anderson on Holocaust Remebrance Day

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1737244_comment.php#1737429

I thought that “Never again!” meant never again for all humanity — not just never again for European Jews.

This is a correction:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1736098_comment.php#1737440

I recognize that this thread is a memorial to the *Jewish* tragedy. I will soon start another thread dedicated to the Black Holocaust.

Please excuse.

Pope: Catholics and Jews can look to future with confidence

By The Associated Press

ROME - Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday that Roman Catholics and Jews could continue dialogue and look with "confidence" toward the future.

Benedict made the comments in a note prepared for the 90th birthday of Elio Toaff, the former chief rabbi of Rome who welcomed Pope John Paul II on a historic visit to Rome's synagogue in 1986.

Benedict also thanked Toaff for his work toward forging good relations between Jews and Catholics, and said he remembered "with joy" Toaff's reception of John Paul at Rome's synagogue in 1986.

The pope's note was delivered to Toaff at birthday celebrations in Rome by Cardinal Walter Kasper, who leads the Vatican's office for relations with Jews, officials said.

Toaff said at the celebrations that he hoped ties between Roman Catholics and Jews would continue under the new pope, calling John Paul's 1986 visit one of the "signals that have carried on reinforcing themselves, and that I hope will continue with his successor Benedict XVI."

Toaff was one of only two living people mentioned in John Paul's will, along with the late pope's private secretary.

"I have always believed that I was an intermediary between the various religions because whoever believes in God has a relationship with all those who think in the same way," Toaff was quoted as saying.

Jews widely admired John Paul II for his unstinting efforts to promote Jewish-Catholic reconciliation, including his ground-breaking visit to Rome's main synagogue in 1986 and his 2000 visit to Israel.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/573813.html

That's what I have read, that it was for all humanity. But JA doesn't mind.

May. 13, 2005 19:13
Pope to visit synagogue in Cologne, Germany
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

VATICAN CITY

Pope Benedict XVI has told the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican he intends to visit the main synagogue in Cologne, Germany, in August, becoming the second pontiff in history to visit a Jewish place of worship.

Ambassador Oded Ben-Hur said the pope told him of his intention following an audience with diplomats assigned to the Vatican on Thursday.

Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, made a groundbreaking visit to Rome's synagogue in 1986. The new pope has said he intends to continue John Paul's work toward improving relations between Roman Catholics and Jews.

Ben-Hur said the intended visit showed Benedict's "desire to enhance and widen the dialogue with the Jewish people."

One of Benedict's first acts in office was to invite Rome's chief rabbi to his April 24 installation Mass. During his homily that day, the pope made specific mention of "a great shared spiritual heritage" with Jews.

Benedict's effort to reach out to Jews carries an added dimension because of his membership in the Hitler Youth and later as a conscript in the German army during World War II. He said he was forced into both roles.

"Everything that the new pope has said and done since achieving the papacy demonstrates his intention to continue in the path set by his predecessor and forge even closer relations between Israel and the Vatican, between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Friday, commenting on Ben-Hur's conversation with the pope.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1115950744196&p=1078397702269

"Ben-Hur said the intended visit showed Benedict's "desire to enhance and widen the dialogue with the Jewish people.""

Ben-Hur apologized to the Pontif for not being able to join him, he's booked at a chariot race that day and can't opt out.