2010-08-10 01:48163
In October of 2004, Peruvian journalist Hugo Coya visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp known as the “final station.”
While there he wondered if any Peruvians were among the victims.
[Hugo Coya, Author, “Final Station”]:
“Well I found to my amazement and to my horror 22 people. Twenty-two people born in Peru who died in the Holocaust but were born here, who had gone to Europe and had fallen into the clutches of Nazism”.
Tablet August 8, 2010 – 9:00 pm
Hans Keilson is not entirely unknown in America. His most important book, the autobiographical novel The Death of the Adversary, was published here in 1962, and was named one of Time magazine’s best books of the year. Among psychologists, he is also known for his seminal research on the psychology of traumatized children, particularly Holocaust survivors.
But it is safe to say that Keilson’s name will mean nothing to most readers, and that the republication of The Death of the Adversary, accompanied by the first English translation of his 1947 novella,Comedy in a Minor Key, is effectively his second American debut. Considering that Keilson is 100 years old—he was born in Berlin in 1909, and has lived in the Netherlands since the Hitler era—this gives his books an uncanny, time-warp quality. Just as the Holocaust is slipping from living memory into history, he arrives bearing striking new testimony.
Many countries in Europe and North America now require all high-school pupils to learn about the Holocaust. Why? Because of its historical importance, of course, but also because, in our increasingly diverse and globalized world, educators and policy-makers believe Holocaust education is a vital mechanism for teaching students to value democracy and human rights, and encouraging them to oppose racism and promote tolerance in their own societies.
That was certainly my assumption in 2005 when, as U.N. secretary general, I urged the General Assembly to pass a resolution on Holocaust Remembrance, which included a call for “measures to mobilize civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education, in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.”
(AP) – 3 days ago
WARSAW, Poland — Polish officials have unveiled a new monument honoring Jewish insurgents who took up arms against Nazi Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
It was a doomed struggle, yet some managed to survive and today the act of resistance stands as a source of pride for many Jews.
WCBSTV reports: They are memories so painful, they’re fueling a heated debate in an unexpected spot.
A neighborhood in Verona, New Jersey is divided over a Holocaust memorial. Some residents say the memorial is a daily reminder of death, and they want it moved.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
20/04/2010 22:51
This degradation has at its core a supposedly positive message: The Holocaust was a universal event from which all humanity must learn and the Palestinians can better understand the Jews if they think their Nakba is like the Holocaust and if the Jews also accept this. Last year one of the messengers was Bradford Pilcher who titled his article in the on-line magazine Jewcy: “The Holocaust… not just for the Jews.”
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By Ray Furlong
BBC, Sighetu Marmatiei |
Hedi Fried was never supposed to return home. Packed into a cattle truck in 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz with the other 17,000 Jews in Sighet, now Sighetu Marmatiei in Romania.
But like her town’s most famous son, the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, she survived and has often returned to the town to bear witness to what happened with talks and lectures.
Now, aged 85, she’s made an emotional final journey there.
The rain streams down as we draw up outside Sighet’s Jewish cemetery.
“This is my pilgrimage, the last one,” says Hedi, stepping over a large brown puddle.
| Written by Selwyn Duke |
| Friday, 05 March 2010 01:00 |
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Yet that dark time birthed another quiet hero, one who saved as many as 860,000 Jewish lives. Today, however, few know of his accomplishments, few sing his praises. And Steven Spielberg will undoubtedly never make a movie lauding him. On the contrary, this man is roundly maligned as a WWII villain who was at best indifferent to the plight of the people in the Nazis’ crosshairs. This man is Eugenio Pacelli. But he is better known as Pope Pius XII. By the lights of the popular culture and the increasingly unpopular media, it is a “fact” that Pius was practically a Nazi collaborator. British journalist John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope got a lot of press after its 1999 publication, and self-professed “anti-theist” Christopher Hitchens never misses a chance to highlight the papacy’s supposed WWII sins and silence. It has become atheist boilerplate, the barbarous vehicle through which barbarian historians sack modern-day Rome. |
By Nick Meo in Malmo, Sweden
Published: 7:30AM GMT 21 Feb 2010
When she first arrived in Sweden after her rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, Judith Popinski was treated with great kindness.
She raised a family in the city of Malmo, and for the next six decades lived happily in her adopted homeland – until last year.
They told me that trying to open the largest archive of inaccessible Holocaust-related documents would be like tilting at windmills….Too much resistance, too little compassion.
In 1998, shortly after joining the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I was invited to a meeting with the director of the International Tracing Service (ITS). The director had come to Washington in hopes of copying some archival collections I had helped the Museum acquire. When he was asked about access to ITS’s massive and secretive Holocaust-era collections, he reported that the International Commission of ITS had decided in principle to open the ITS archives—but not for three to five years, the estimated time required to make digital copies of the millions of documents in its possession. The director declined further discussion.
The word “hero” so often conjures up images of the brash and the bold. We may think of Audie Murphy’s WWII exploits, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the doomed holdouts at the Alamo. But then there are the quiet heroes, people such as Oskar Schindler. Ever since Schindler’s List hit the silver screen in 1993, his clandestine efforts resulting in the rescue of almost 1,200 Jews from Nazi death camps have been well known.