Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to get UK funding

The Auschwirz-Birkenau concentration camp is an enduring symbol of the Holocaust

The government is set to contribute £2.1m towards the preservation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, it has been announced.

The joint contribution will mainly be provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Foreign Office. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation will be funded over the next three years.

More than a million people were murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The concentration camp was the largest site for the mass murder of Jews. In recent years a number of countries have contributed to the fund to maintain the main concentration camp, Auschwitz, and its nearby satellite camp of Birkenau.

Auschwitz and Birkenau were operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and opened as a museum in 1947.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the camp, which stands as an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, was an importance place of remembrance which served to educate people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Speaking at the Jewish Museum in London, he said: "It is our collective responsibility to ensure that Auschwitz-Birkenau stands as a perpetual reminder of the pain and destructive force of hate. We must ensure that the lessons from the Holocaust are taught today and to future generations."

And Foreign Secretary William Hague said Auschwitz-Birkenau underlined "the horrific consequences of intolerance".

Mr Hague said he was "proud that the UK is able to play a part in commemorating the millions of victims who died there" and was helping to ensure the camp's preservation to educate future generations on "the evils of that period in history".

And Lord Greville Janner of Braunstone, who chairs the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the financial support sends a clear message that the camp should be maintained for future generations. He said: "Through our Lessons from Auschwitz Project, the Holocaust Educational Trust gives over 3,000 British students each year the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. This announcement will ensure that when young people visit Auschwitz, they will see for themselves what can happen when racism and prejudice is allowed to go unchecked."

BBC

Holocaust Memorial Day – January 27th

Each year on 27 January the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). HMD has been held in the UK since 2001 and the United Nations declared this an International event in November 2005. 27 January was chosen as the date for HMD because it was on this date in 1945 that the largest Nazi killing camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

HMD is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur. HMD provides us with an opportunity to honour the survivors but it’s also a chance to look to our own lives and communities today. Genocide doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a gradual process which begins when the differences between us are not celebrated but used as a reason to exclude or marginalise. By learning from the lessons of the past, we can create a safer, better future.

Each year, we announce a theme for HMD which provides a focal point and a shared message for the hundreds of events which take place around the UK. The theme for HMD 2011 is Untold Stories.

Anyone can organise a HMD activity and we provide free resources to enable you to do so. Order our free Campaign Pack to find out how you can become involved. There’s no such thing as a right or wrong HMD event – whether events are for invited guests in a council chamber, open to the general public in a large public space or a closed event within a school or college – each event marks HMD as a key date in the equalities and human rights calendar.

HMD is a day for everyone. It’s an opportunity for all the diverse strands of our communities to come together. It’s also an opportunity for groups or organisations to remember the past and commit to creating a better future. HMD can be commemorated individually or collectively.

HMD has taken place in the UK since 2001. It was established at a meeting on 27 January 2000, when representatives from forty-four governments around the world met in Stockholm to discuss Holocaust education, remembrance and research. At the conclusion of the forum, the delegates unanimously signed a declaration. This forms the HMD Statement of Commitment which is used a basis for HMD events internationally.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Three jailed for Auschwitz theft

Three men were jailed today for stealing the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) sign from the Auschwitz memorial site last year. Their sentences ranged from six months to two-and-a-half years.

The court in Krakow said the men confessed to the theft, which meant the case did not have to go to trial. The theft happened overnight between December 17 and December 18, a brazen act that shocked Holocaust survivors and many others committed to preserving the Auschwitz-Birkenau site.

The former death camp gets more than a million visitors a year and is one of Europe's most important sites honouring the memory of the Nazis' victims and of warning the world about the dangers of hatred and totalitarianism.

The thieves left traces in the snow and then cut the sign into three pieces to make it easier to transport. They also left behind the last letter "i" in the snow. Authorities later said that the Polish men who carried out the theft were petty thieves working on commission for someone else.

A Swedish man with a neo-Nazi background, Anders Hogstrom, is also a suspect. He is under arrest in Sweden and due to be extradited to Poland. Two other Polish suspects remain imprisoned and under investigation. Poland has said little about the case against Hogstrom and other aspects. They have not specified what role they believe Hogstrom played, nor said if he was the ultimate buyer.

Some reports have suggested that a British collector of Nazi memorabilia commissioned the theft, but police have not confirmed that. Officials with the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum have their doubts about the collector hypothesis given that the theft was so badly botched.

Police tracked down the cut up sign in a snow-covered forest on the other side of Poland less than three days after it was stolen.

The cynical slogan on the Auschwitz sign has come to be a potent symbol of Nazi Germany's atrocities during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Between 1940 and 45 more than a million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau or died of starvation or disease while forced to perform hard physical labour at the camp.

Independent

Sobibor survivor: 'I polished SS boots as dying people screamed'

Thomas Blatt (above) will give evidence at the trial of John Demjanjuk this week

Thomas Blatt testifies this week at the trial of John Demjanjuk. Here, he tells Tony Paterson of his life in the camp and an extraordinary escape

He is a small, energetic looking man with thick spectacles and white hair. He speaks English with a thick, slightly American accent. As he stands in the queue outside Munich's criminal court in his beige zip-up jacket, he looks like any ordinary pensioner with time on his hands. He might have come to watch justice being done merely as an impartial observer.

Yet Thomas "Toivi" Blatt is no ordinary senior citizen. Aged 82, he is one of the last people alive to have survived the hell of the Nazi extermination camps in which millions were systematically slaughtered by brutal German and Ukrainian SS henchmen during the Second World War.

Only 82 people survived the death factory camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Blatt is one of them. He still has a bullet lodged in his jaw to show for it. He got it when he was shot in the face and had to "play dead" after a miraculous escape from Sobibor in October 1943.

This Tuesday, having travelled from his home in California, he will enter the witness box in the clinical surroundings of Munich's modern neon-lit criminal court and recall the horror he endured as a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner in Sobibor, where 250,00 people including his parents and his 10-year-old brother were murdered.

Mr Blatt's testimony is expected to be crucial in deciding the outcome of what has been called the world's last Holocaust trial. The alleged former Nazi SS guard John Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen, who was extradited to Germany from Cleveland, Ohio last year, is accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 mainly Dutch Jews who were gassed or beaten to death at Sobibor in the spring and summer of 1943.

Demjanjuk, who is 89 and suffering from numerous ailments, is refusing to speak at his trial, and follows the proceedings in court lying on a hospital stretcher with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He has denied complicity in mass murder.

Mr Blatt has not been able to identify Demjanjuk as having been one of the 100 Ukrainian guards at the camp, although he believes he was certainly there at the time he was a Sobibor prisoner. His testimony will nevertheless make it chillingly clear that anyone employed as a Sobibor guard was a vital cog in the machinery of genocide. "We were terrified of the Ukrainian guards at Sobibor. They were worse than the Germans – and I was there at the same time as Demjanjuk," he said.

Mr Blatt was born in Izbica, only 43 miles from the Sobibor death camp. A Nazi SS squad picked him up with his father, mother and young brother during a routine "Jew round-up" in April 1943. They were bundled into a truck. "The camp gate opened to reveal what looked like a beautiful village," he said. "We had heard what went on in there, but we refused to believe it. But I knew better, I was 15 and I realised that I was going to die," he added.

He remembers a man standing next to him peering through a hole in the truck's side at a group of Ukrainian guards equipped with bull whips. The man said, in Yiddish, how the place was "black" with them in reference to their black SS uniforms. Within a matter of seconds the Jewish prisoners were herded out of the truck and set upon by the screaming, whip-wielding guards who drove them up a path known as the "Himmelfahrtstrasse" or "road to heaven" towards the gas chambers.

"They mistreated us, they shot the old and the sick new arrivals who couldn't walk anymore. And they were the ones who drove the naked people into the gas chambers with their bayonets. They would come back with splashes of blood on their boots," Mr Blatt told The Independent on Sunday. "I often had to work a few feet away. If they refused to go on, they hit them and fired shots. I can still remember their shout of 'Idi siuda', which means 'come here'," he added.

Young Thomas saw his father being beaten with a club."Then I lost sight of him. I said to my mother, 'And yesterday I wasn't allowed to drink the rest of the milk, because you absolutely wanted to save some for today'. That strange remark of mine still haunts me today – it was the last thing I said to her. My brother stayed at my mother's side. They were all murdered in the gas chambers within the hour." A few weeks later, Thomas Blatt was forced to watch his best friend, Leon, being slowly beaten to death.

Middle-class Dutch Jews started being sent to Sobibor shortly after his arrival and the SS changed their tactics to trick them. "When a Dutch transport arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He would apologise for the arduous journey, and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to shower first. Then later they would be given jobs. Some of the new arrivals applauded. They had no idea what was in store," he recalled.

He survived only because the SS had executed a number of so-called "work Jews" at Sobibor the day before he arrived. The camp commandant was looking for replacements and 15-year-old Thomas pushed himself forward, pleading "Take me, take me!".

His jobs included polishing SS men's boots, sorting the clothes and shaving the hair off naked women prisoners before they were driven into gas chambers pumped full of exhaust fumes. It took up to 40 minutes for those inside to die. "We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.

He survived by supplying his Ukrainian tormentors with the gold coins he found in the victims' clothing after they were gassed. The guards used the money to pay for prostitutes. He tried to look healthy, strong and useful to avoid being murdered in the routine executions of the "work Jews". "I knew the Germans like it when you were clean and healthy looking," he said. "I watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled and that they kept their creases and I always went around looking for possibilities to escape," he added. The chance came in October 1943 soon after a group of Jewish Red Army soldiers arrived at the camp. Within two weeks they had planned an uprising, which later became the subject of a book by Blatt The Forgotten Revolt, and an award-winning television film Escape from Sobibor. Thomas Blatt helped to kill 12 SS officers by tricking each one separately into believing that a fine leather coat had been saved for them from one of the Jewish transports. Prisoners armed with axes and knives killed the SS men as they arrived to collect their booty.

A breakout ensued. Jewish prisoners scaled the perimeter fence under a hail of gunfire from the camp watchtowers, which were still manned. The ones who got over the fence were blown up by mines that surrounded the camp. Mr Blatt escaped this fate because his jacket caught on the fence. He eventually got through the minefield by jumping through the pits in the ground caused by the explosions.

He and a friend bribed a Polish farmer to hide them under the floor of a barn in return for loot they took from the camp. But after stripping off some of their clothes and hiding them in a pit, the farmer decided it would be safer to kill them. The farmer shot at them and Thomas was hit in the face. He pretended to be dead and then managed to escape, spending the rest of the war hiding in woods or abandoned buildings and scavenging for food.

Mr Blatt says he is not seeking vengeance. "I don't care if he [Demjanjuk] goes to prison or not – the trial is what matters to me," he said.

"The world should find out how it was at Sobibor. As the camp's last living perpetrator, Demjanjuk should confess, he knows so much."

IoS

Auschwitz hero Denis Avey in line for Israeli honour

A former British prisoner of war who helped a Jewish inmate survive Auschwitz is being considered for a major honour, the BBC has learned

Denis Avey, 91, who lives in Derbyshire, helped save Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau. He is being considered for the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The story emerged following a recent BBC investigation.

Mr Avey said it would be "marvellous" if he were chosen for the title, which is awarded to those who helped save Jewish people. It is an accolade previously awarded to the likes of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who is thought to have saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust and whose story was immortalised in the Hollywood film Schindler's List.

Some 22,000 individuals, mostly from central and eastern Europe, have received the treasured title so far, but if he is successful Mr Avey will become only the 15th British citizen to be honoured in Jerusalem's Garden of the Righteous. The standard is high, the conditions are rigorous and their research is only now beginning. In the end a commission headed by a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel has to make the decision.

The authorities at Yad Vashem took up the case after BBC viewers and listeners contacted them directly on hearing his moving story.

Mr Avey described the news that he was being considered for the award as "fantastic". He was no ordinary British soldier and he became an extraordinary prisoner of war. He had fought with special forces against General Rommel's Africa Korps behind enemy lines in the desert. He was wounded and captured by the Germans, and the ship transporting to him to captivity was sunk. He escaped into the sea and survived the explosion of depth charges close by.

After 20 hours in the water he made it to land in southern Greece. He then hiked the length of the Peloponnese before being recaptured and sent to Germany as a POW. After two spells in a punishment camp and being sent to work down a mine, he was transported to a compound for British prisoners connected to a sprawling concentration camp. Its name - then unremarkable - was Auschwitz.

There the "fiery" soldier with red hair and a Van Dyck beard saw at first hand the suffering of the Jewish victims of Hitler's slave labour programmes. Although in the British camp they enjoyed better conditions, by day they worked alongside the Jewish prisoners.

He told the BBC how he had hatched an audacious plan to swap clothes with a Jewish inmate to smuggle himself into their sector of the camp. He fully intended to get as far as Birkenau, where the gas chambers and crematoria were constantly in operation, belching acrid fumes. He only made it as far as Auschwitz III, where he spent the night on two occasions. Detection, he said, would have meant death.

"They'd have shot me out of hand", he said. "I took a hell of a chance."

He was determined to bear witness with the intention of telling the world after the war. He recalled the camp as being "evil" like "Hell on earth". But it is for his part in helping Mr Lobethall, later Ernie Lobet, that he could yet be honoured. Through letters to his mother, Mr Avey succeeded in contacting Ernst's sister Susana, who had escaped to England before the war.

He arranged for cigarettes - as valuable as gold in the camps - to be sent to him, which he then smuggled in to Ernst in the Jewish camp. But he had always assumed that his erstwhile friend had died in the icy death march when the camps were cleared by the SS as the Russians advanced. Only after the BBC investigation did Mr Avey learn that Mr Lobethall had survived and that it was his smuggled cigarettes that had given him his chance.

The evidence corroborating Mr Avey's story appeared in a video interview that Mr Lobethall had given to the Shoah Foundation, which gathers the testimonies of the camp survivors. He had recorded it towards the end of his life in 1995. In it he described the soldier he knew only as "Ginger" who smuggled cigarettes, chocolate and even a letter from his sister in England into the Jewish camp for him. He said it was like being given the "Rockefeller Centre".

Trading the cigarettes for favours, Mr Lobethall had heavy soles put on his boots, and that saved his life during the death march in 1945 when tens of thousands had died. Anyone who stumbled had been shot.

"They fell like flies," he recalled in the video.

A special commission in Jerusalem will determine on the basis of the evidence whether Mr Avey receives the honour and becomes one of the "righteous". Successful or not, his remarkable story is now getting the attention it deserves.

"This title is really a very high honour," says Irena Steinfeldt of Yad Vashem. "Apparently this story touched people. Denis Avey never knew this (Mr) Lobethall. He could just as well have said 'I am a prisoner of war, I don't know when I will see my family, I am in no position to help anyone else.'. It is a noble and extraordinary act."

After the war Mr Lobethall made it to the United States, and enjoyed a successful and prosperous life. And despite being drafted into the Korean War, he remained a man of "unfailing good cheer" until the end of his days, according to a life-long friend who also heard the original broadcast and contacted the BBC. He died in 2002 and never found out the real name of the soldier he called "Ginger" whose buccaneering spirit gave him a chance to live.

BBC

German Newspaper Gives Blueprints for Nazi Death Camp to Israel

Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister
Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers,
crematoria, delousing facilities and watch towers drawn to scale.

"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift to Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."

Netanyahu lingered over the large sheets spread on a table. Stamped with the Nazi abbreviation for concentration camp "K.L. Auschwitz," one of the largest featured multi-colored sketches, with barracks and even latrines drawn in detail. Other smaller sheets showed architectural designs of individual buildings, drawn from various angles.

The Israeli leader was accompanied by his wife, Sara, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II. She watched somberly as the documents, which date from 1941 to 1943, were unfolded. Also present was Yossi Peled, an Israeli Cabinet minister and former general whose father was killed by the Nazis and whose mother survived Auschwitz in one of the barracks detailed in the blueprints. Peled himself was hidden until age 7 by a family in Belgium who raised him as a Christian. He discovered his Jewish roots in 1948 and was taken to Israel two years later.

In Germany for a visit that combined talks on the Mideast conflict with acknowledgments of the painful past that binds the two countries, Netanyahu drew a clear parallel between the events of the Nazi era and the present day. The world did not do enough to stop the murder of Europe's Jews, he said, and must be careful now to take rapid action against "armed barbarism."

"We cannot allow those who wish to perpetrate mass death, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state to go unchallenged," Netanyahu said.

Though he did not explicitly mention Iran, his comments were a clear reference to the Tehran regime and its nuclear program, which Israel sees as a grave threat and wants blocked by stronger international sanctions. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Axel Springer Verlag, the publisher of the mass circulation Bild newspaper, obtained the Auschwitz blueprints last year from a German man who said he found them when cleaning out an apartment in what was formerly East Berlin. The publisher and Germany's federal archive have confirmed the documents' authenticity.

Numbering found on the back of the plans indicates they may have been taken from an archive, possibly the collection of documents on the Third Reich kept by the Stasi.

The documents were displayed for several weeks earlier this year in the lobby of Bild's headquarters in Berlin. The newspaper's editor, Kai Diekmann, said the publisher decided to give the sketches to Israel to ensure that as many people as possible could see them.

"These plans have an important function — they remind us of a crime that, with the passing of time, seems ever more incomprehensible," Diekmann said. "It is of the utmost importance to continue to be reminded of it."

While they are not the only original Auschwitz blueprints that still exist — others were captured by the Soviet Red Army and brought to Moscow — they will be the first for Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, its chairman, Avner Shalev, told The Associated Press.

"This set is a very early one, which was found here in Berlin, from the autumn of '41," Shalev said. "It brings a better understanding of the whole process, and the intention of the planners of the complex, and from this perspective it is important."

Shalev said the sketches will be on display in Jerusalem beginning Jan. 27 as part of a special exhibit marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The blueprints include general plans for the original Auschwitz camp and the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where most of the killings were carried out. They were initialed by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.

One of the drawings, dated Oct. 14, 1941, shows plans for construction of a "Waffen SS prisoner of war camp" with rows of what appear to be barracks. A notation in the bottom right says it was drafted by a prisoner identified only by his number: "Nr. 471."

German historian Ralf Georg Reuth, who reviewed the documents after they were discovered, noted that it was common to have prisoners draw up the plans for gas chambers where they would later be killed. More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation at Auschwitz, which the Nazis built after occupying Poland.

Later Thursday, Netanyahu visited a house on Berlin's Wannsee Lake that was the site of an infamous Jan. 20, 1942, meeting at which top Nazis formalized plans for the systematic killing of Europe's Jewish population.

Germany and Israel, which was established three years after the Nazi defeat, today enjoy close ties. On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel underlined Germany's special commitment, saying it was her country's obligation to "defend Israel always."

After those statements, she and Netanyahu shared a spontaneous and warm handshake.

Fox News

Scottish heroine of the Holocaust will be awarded national honour

A Scottish woman who was gassed by the Nazis in Auschwitz after she refused to abandon Jewish orphans in her care will finally be honoured by the British government.

Jane Haining is among a group of British heroes of the Holocaust who are to be recognised with a new award. Yesterday's announcement follows Prime Minister Gordon Brown's visit to the concentration camp earlier this week and is a victory for a Scotsman campaign that backed calls by the Holocaust Education Trust.

Details of the award will be decided in talks between the UK government, the trust and families of the Holocaust heroes, but it is understood a permanent memorial may be created and a specific award given to the families.

The decision to honour the heroes is understood to have been made by Mr Brown before his trip to Auschwitz this week. The Prime Minister has been a supporter of the trust's work and, as Chancellor, found Treasury money to pay for school trips to the infamous death camp.

Yesterday Mr Brown said: "My visit to Auschwitz left me absolutely determined that we must learn from the past as we build our future. Part of this must be proper recognition for those who made extraordinary contributions to protect others during the Holocaust."

He added: "These heroes, many of whom have now died, are a true inspiration to everyone in Britain. I believe that, together, their brave actions form a critical part of our nation's wartime history and they deserve to be recognised through a special award."

The announcement has delighted the Holocaust Education Trust, members of which saw the awards as an important step in spreading their message of using the atrocity to teach young people about prejudice. The Holocaust led to the murder by the Nazis of six million Jews and other so-called undesirables.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the trust, said: "We are delighted that this initiative has received widespread support, including from The Scotsman, and that the Prime Minister and British government will create an award of recognition in memory of these British heroes."

The formal announcement was made during a debate in Westminster Hall on the issue, initiated by Dumfries and Galloway Labour MP Russell Brown, who represents the constituency in which Ms Haining was born.

"This is great news," he said. "It is very important that Jane Haining and the others get the formal recognition they deserve so their brave actions will not be forgotten."

However, the trust's original campaign for them to receive awards through the honours system will not happen. Honours can only go to people who are still alive.

Jane Haining was born in Dunscore, Dumfries. In 1932, she went to Hungary to work as a missionary. At the outbreak of the Second World War, she ignored orders and advice to return to Scotland, and stayed with the Jewish children in her care. When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, she was arrested along with the children and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was gassed. Her name is now inscribed near Oskar Schindler's on the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

She is not the only Scot in line for recognition. Tommy Noble was among a group of British prisoners of war who found a Jewish girl, Sarah Hannah Rigler, who had escaped from a death march. They hid and fed her in their camp, saving her life.

Scotsman

UK promises to help fund upkeep of Auschwitz

Gordon Brown responds to plea from Poland for help with the conservation of the former extermination camp

The British government is to fund crucial maintenance work at Auschwitz-Birkenau to help halt the deterioration of the crumbling former concentration camp. Gordon Brown is responding to a plea made by the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, for the international community to help with the conservation of the camp, which is nearly 70 years old.

In February Tusk wrote to European leaders calling for the creation of a €120m pot to pay for the upkeep of the site. Today Brown was making his first visit to the two sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

In a book of condolence at Auschwitz, Brown was expected to write: "In this place of desolation I reaffirm my belief that we all have a duty. Each and every one of us, not to stand by but to stand up against discrimination."

Auschwitz was built as a Polish army barracks in 1940 but adapted to become a concentration camp shortly afterwards. Birkenau was established 3km away as a death camp, and it is thought that more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed there. The two camps were merged in 1942 becoming the Nazi's largest camp.

At the moment the Polish government shoulders the burden of the funding for site maintenance and the running of its museums, directly funding half the required 20 million zloty (£4m) with unreliable tourism revenue making up the rest. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war the museum was involved in repairing buildings. These had been destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence in the face of Red Army advances.

Though Brown said today the UK will provide funding for this site, government aides were unable to say how much or when. Speaking ahead of his visit to Auschwitz, Brown told a press conference: "We will join with other countries in supporting the maintenance and retention of the memorial at Auschwitz."

As chancellor in 2005 Brown made funding available to send two teenagers from every British secondary school to visit Auschwitz annually. The funding for this has now been extended to 2011. Future government plans include the creation of a new award to recognise those Britons who helped protect Jews during the second world war.

Guardian

Holocaust memorial journey ends

A train commemorating the thousands of children murdered by the Nazis has ended its journey near the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

The train, which has been touring Germany since November, features an exhibition of pictures and letters from Holocaust victims. It is expected to open at the main train station in the town, now known by its Polish name of Oswiecim. The train was not scheduled to enter the site of the former camp.

Organiser Hans Minow said he felt humbled to have been allowed to finish the journey at the site of the former camp.

"It is not easy to confront ourselves because we are not the victims but we are the sons and daughters of the perpetrators," Mr Minow said. "We say this knowing that perhaps our fathers and mothers - if not participated - they did not do what they had to do when the crimes started," he added.

Controversy

A wreath-laying ceremony was scheduled at the site where the deportations arrived. About 230,000 children, mainly Jewish, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War.

Hundreds of young people from across Germany accompanied the commemorative train on its final stage.

Earlier in the journey the state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn drew heavy criticism from the exhibition's organisers when it refused to allow the train to stop at Berlin's central station in April. Deutsche Bahn said this would have caused major disruption to normal services. The exhibition took place at Ostbahnhof, the main station of the former East Berlin. The company also faced criticism over its demand for $110,000 (£55,000) in fees for use of its network. The government urged it to drop the charge.

Deutsche Bahn took over responsibility for Germany's rail network from the Nazi-era Reichsbahn, which was used to transport millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

BBC

Nazi eradication of Krakow ghetto recalled

Hundreds of people joined two dozen Holocaust survivors, including several saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, in a march Sunday marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis.

Family members, historians and Krakow residents and officials gathered with the survivors in a square in the heart of the former ghetto to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.

The group then set out to retrace the steps of Jews driven from the ghetto during its 1943 liquidation to the forced labor camp in Plaszow about a mile away where some 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish Poles perished during the war.

Some survivors were making their first trip back to Poland since World War II.

On March 13, 1943, German soldiers started a two-day action in which they emptied the ghetto of its estimated 16,000 Jewish residents, shipping them to Plaszow and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some 2,000 Jews left behind were executed.

USA Today

Guardian obituary for Leon Greenman

While confined in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1943, Leon Greenman, who has died aged 97, vowed that if he ever survived, he would spend the rest of his life testifying about nazism. But it was not until 17 years after his release from the Buchenwald concentration camp - in the early 1960s as he listened to Colin Jordan, then one of the new coterie of British Nazis, expressing the views that had led to the destruction of his life and that of his family - that this mission began to be realised. Leon then started giving the talks that would define the rest of his life. He believed that if he could tell enough people the truth about nazism, then it could never happen again.

Leon was one of six children - three brothers and three sisters - born in Whitechapel, in the East End of London. His family background was Dutch-Jewish; his mother died when he was two. His paternal grandparents were Dutch and when his father remarried he took his children to live with them in Rotterdam. Leon's stepmother beat him, as did his Dutch teachers. By the 1920s he had returned to London and was apprenticed to a barber in Forest Gate.

He was keen on boxing and on singing. In the 1930s he joined an amateur operatic society where he met Esther "Else" van Dam. In 1935 they married at Stepney Green synagogue, and spent their honeymoon in Rotterdam, staying with Else's grandmother. This was to be a decisive moment in Leon's life. Else decided to stay, to look after her grandmother. He commuted between Britain and Holland, working in his father-in-law's book business.

In 1938, fearing that war was approaching, Leon decided to bring Else home to Britain. The night he arrived in the Netherlands to collect her, the young couple heard Neville Chamberlain on the radio - following the British prime minister's meeting with Hitler in Munich - in which Chamberlain had spoken of "peace for our time". Reassured, Leon decided to stay. The British consul told him that if war came, as a British national he would be evacuated. On March 17 1940 their son Barnett ("Barney") was born. On May 10 the Germans invaded the Netherlands. The British embassy staff fled.

But Leon believed that, as an Englishman, and under the Geneva Convention on treatment of enemy civilians, he and his family would be protected from Hitler's race laws which were being rigorously applied. By late April 1942 the Nazis had enforced the wearing of the yellow star of David on Jews in the Netherlands and France. Leon had meanwhile given his family's savings and passports to non-Jewish friends for safe keeping. His friends, scared of reprisals for helping Jews, burnt the documents.

Leon's efforts to get new papers to prove his nationality failed. On October 8 1942 Leon, Else, Barney and their grandmother were rounded up and taken to Westerbork, a Nazi concentration camp in the Netherlands. In mid-January 1943 they were told they were being deported to a Polish "work camp". As British citizens, Leon informed the camp commandant that they should not be deported. He was told they had to go. Years later he discovered that the commandant had found the Greenmans' replacement papers after the family had left. By then they were en route to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In his autobiography, An Englishman in Auschwitz (2001), Greenman describes how "the women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends..."

Else, her grandmother and Barney were sent straight to the gas chambers. Leon's last sighting of them was as they were taken away in an open truck. Else had made capes with peaked hoods for herself and Barney from bright red velvet curtains. Leon saw the two splashes of red. He called out, but his wife never heard him or looked back.

"I thought they must be still alive," Greenman told the Guardian's Stephen Moss in 2005. The thought that he would see them again kept him going.

Leon had been selected for work. After six weeks in Birkenau he was taken to the main camp at Auschwitz. There, despite his protestations of "I am an Englishman, I should not be here", he was subjected to "medical" experimentation. He was convinced that it was his skills that saved him, earning extra food for shaving prisoners and singing for the kapos - prisoners chosen by the Nazis to head work gangs - in the evening. He believed the physique he had developed while training as a boxer enabled him to survive the selections held to weed out and murder the weak and sick. And he fought to survive, in that hope that Else and Barney might still be alive.

In September 1943 Leon was sent to the Monowitz industrial complex within Auschwitz. By January 1945, as the Red Army advanced, the Nazis began moving the slave labourers westwards. Leon and others were force-marched 90km to Gliwice in southern Poland and then, in open cattle trucks in freezing conditions, to Buchenwald, near Weimar. On April 11 1945 he was liberated by the US army. Of the 700 people transported from Westerbork, Leon was one of only two survivors.

He never remarried. In London he started to rebuild his life. He became a tradesman, travelling the country with a suitcase full of bric-a-brac, and a singer. Then came the afternoon in Trafalgar Square.

I first met Leon in 1992 on an Anti-Nazi League counter-demonstration against a meeting in London by the Holocaust denier, David Irving. A homemade badge on Leon's coat read "Auschwitz - Never Again" and "98288", the number tattooed on his arm in the camps. He was an inspirational speaker, and people were moved by his courage and dignity. He spoke at schools, synagogues, trade union and student meetings. He spoke about Jews, the Roma, communists, homosexuals and all the others persecuted and exterminated by the Nazis, and asked people to continue his fight.

I often saw him addressing schoolchildren. Sometimes, the teachers would be nervous that the classes would become restless, as Leon usually talked for more than an hour. Yet, even with the most difficult pupils, he would hold their attention.

He led many delegations to Auschwitz - I went with him four times and there were three Anti-Nazi League visits. He was impatient to ensure we learned as much as possible. He once told me that he wished he could live near the camp, to guide groups around it each day. He marched too, against the British National party and the National Front. Unity and organisation could defeat Nazis, he would say, and that they had to be confronted wherever they tried to gain a foothold. You could never argue with Leon that he should take things easy as he got older. In 1993 he took part in the demonstration to shut down the BNP headquarters in Welling, Kent. As mounted police charged the demonstrators, he had to be lifted over a garden wall for safety. In 1993, following the election of a BNP councillor in east London, a death threat arrived - thrown through his living room window, attached to a brick. He had mesh shutters installed in his Ilford house as a protection. In 2003 local fascists sent him a Christmas card telling him he would make a lovely lampshade.

There was a permanent exhibition of Leon's life at the Jewish Museum in north London, which will be back, in a new form when the museum reopens during the next year. He also contributed to the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibition. He was awarded the OBE in 1998.

Leon was quite extraordinary, and he moved all those who met him. I shared endless car journeys with him, where he would tell jokes and sing and he also described how lonely he was. Had it not been for those terrible events, he would have happily lived the quiet life of a husband, father and grandfather. Leon had that option stolen from him. But he fought so that others would be free to enjoy it.

Recently, when I visited him in hospital, his mood had turned weary, but then we spoke of our campaigning times. He smiled. "Those," he said, "were the days, when we were fighting the Nazis". What a fighter he was.

Leon Greenman, campaigner and witness to the Holocaust, born December 18 1910; died March 6 2008

Guardian

Leon Greenman OBE, Auschwitz survivor 98288 (1910 – 2008)

The very sad news has reached us of the death of Leon Greenman at the great age of 97. I won't say anything about Mr Greenman's personal story which is pretty well covered in the Guardian piece from 2005 (below), but I will say that I had the very great pleasure of meeting and talking to him when he came to Lancaster a few years ago to speak at a meeting of the then Anti-Nazi League. Despite even then being over eighty, one was immediately struck by his boundless energy where it concerned travelling anywhere to spread the word about the Nazis and the Holocaust, what it had meant to him personally and what it means now to fight and keep on fighting to keep the menace of the far-right at bay.

Lancaster Town Hall saw its biggest ever public meeting on the night he came to talk to us and there wasn't a single person in the audience who wasn't deeply affected by what he had to say. Nor was there anyone who wasn't impressed by his complete devotion to his task and the constant work he put into it. If we had a hundred Leon Greenman's, the fight against the far-right would be over in no time. Read the quote from him at the end of this article and remember it whenever you find your energy flagging. It should inspire all of us.

Leon Greenman

On January 27 1945, Soviet soldiers advancing through Poland discovered the largest and most lethal of Hitler's death camps: Auschwitz. Sixty years on, a survivor of the camp tells Stephen Moss his story

The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.

Greenman is an amazing 94, living alone in one room of his cold house; a room piled with papers and portraits of the wife and child he lost in the Holocaust, and of mementoes of his postwar days as a singer of ballads. The other rooms in the house are, he says, full of the goods he used to sell on street stalls, once the Beatles had done for the world of dance bands. He retired from the markets more than 20 years ago, so maybe the ladies' handbags in the locked-up rooms are back in fashion now.

The most poignant portrait on his living-room wall is of his son, Barnett "Barney" Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later. Child and victim of war. Long, curly hair and a gorgeous, girlish face, thrusting a hand to a future that was to be denied him. Even now, had he lived, Barney would be only 64. The Holocaust. Greenman, small, wiry, a boxer in his youth, fought on, has spent 60 years combating racism, was awarded the OBE for his struggle, but in truth never recovered from that blow.

He was born in London, one of six children, but his paternal grandparents were Dutch and his father took the family to live in Rotterdam when Leon was five. His mother had died three years earlier and his father, struggling with his large family, had married his housekeeper. She beat Leon; the schoolmasters beat Leon; he took up boxing, a pocket battleship, unsinkable. He worked in a barber's shop and later in his wife Else's father's book business, commuting between London and Rotterdam.

Greenman's failure to leave Rotterdam before the Nazi occupation of Holland in May 1940 was a catalogue of catastrophes. He intended to leave in 1938 but was reassured by the Munich agreement; the British consul told him that, as a British passport holder, he would be evacuated in the event of war, but when war came, the embassy staff fled; he gave his passport to a friend for safe keeping; the friend panicked and burned it. Greenman was paperless, stateless, friendless. In October 1942, he and his wife and son were taken to the nearby Westerbork concentration camp. Four months later, they were moved to Auschwitz. Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in that consignment; he and one other man survived.

In his book, An Englishman in Auschwitz, Greenman describes his arrival in Birkenau. "The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself."

"I thought they must be still alive," says Greenman now. "I didn't know they were gassed within hours. I didn't know about gassing. In my mind, there was nothing wrong with them. I told myself I would find them. They were somewhere in the camp. We'll wait and see. That went on day after day after day. The thought that I would see them again kept me going."

Greenman's hairdressing helped him survive: one of his jobs in the camp was to shave the inmates' beards. In September 1943, he was sent to the work camp at Monowitz, where he was employed as a builder, extending the camp. "You were there to work and to die," he says, "and the big fellers went quicker than the little ones." Greenman is a little over five feet tall and built for survival. He endured almost a year and a half in Monowitz, then a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a nightmarish five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American forces on April 11 1945. A tiny man with the largest of hearts, in this tiny, paper-strewn room that contains the century.

Guardian

“Young and old alike must learn about the Holocaust as warning against the dangers of racism. There is no difference in colour or religion. If I had survived to betray the dead it would have been better not to survive. We must not forget. Please do not forget.”

Leon Greenman

Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Lancaster

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) aims to commemorate, educate and prompt action in the UK. The Day commemorates the lives lost in the Holocaust and as a result of Nazi racial and social policies, victims of more recent genocides and those affected by present day discrimination. HMD educates about the Holocaust and its lessons for today. It encourages
action in the UK highlighting the continuing dangers of racism, anti-semitism and all forms of discrimination.

HMD is commemorated on or around 27th January each year. This is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945.

The atrocities of Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur and ongoing hate crimes show that the international community, and each of us as citizens, has not truly understood or learnt the lessons of the Holocaust.

Ultimately the aim of HMD is to motivate people – individually and collectively – to ensure that the horrendous crimes, racism and victimisations of the Holocaust and more recent genocides are neither forgotten nor repeated, whether in Europe or elsewhere in the world.

Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Lancaster

A candlelight ceremony to remember all those targeted by the Holocaust and a procession to the Town Hall for performances by young people.

Attending this event

Where is the event being held?
The Town Hall, Lancaster

When is the event being held?
Thursday 24th January 2008 starting at 18:30

How can I attend this event?
Turn up on the evening

What will it cost?
Free

Organiser details

Name: Liz Neat NCBI Lancashire
Email: ncbilancs@ncbi.org.uk
Phone: 01524 383899
Web: http://www.ncbi.org.uk

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Pupils get a glimpse into nazi past

Pupils from Woodhouse High School saw history bought to life during a harrowing trip to the former concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Staffordshire County Council issued an open invitation to sixth form students to take part in the Lessons from Auschwitz project, run by the Holocaust Educational Trust charity. A total of 32 pupils from schools across the county took part, flying to Poland for a one-day visit to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Roger Emmett, history adviser for the county council's School Improvement Division, said:

"This was an important opportunity which we felt should not be missed, hence our invitation to schools to participate. Students and staff attended a seminar in London for a talk from a person who survived incarceration at Auschwitz Birkenau. Her story was a powerful one and really brought to life the horrors of the camp."

Tamworth Herald

NUS: Students have a right and responsibility to vote

In the run-up to the elections held across the UK tomorrow, I have been campaigning on the street and on the doorstep to ensure that the votes of students are heard at the polls, says Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students.

Young people and students have a major part to play in these local elections, in spite of those who would curtail their democratic rights.

We heard comments this week from a Liverpool councillor who suggested that students, because they only spend "a bit of time" in Liverpool, should not be allowed a vote in the local elections.

Students walk along the same streets, use the same public transport, and suffer the same exposure to crime as other local people. Many students live and work in the vicinity of their university, and are involved in their local communities through voluntary work and activism. Surely they, just as much as any other resident, are entitled to a say in their local area?

At a time when we should be engaging students in the political process rather than seeking to exclude them, these comments set an awful example. Local politicians' time would surely be better spent urging students to oppose the British National Party's electoral campaign in Liverpool.

The BNP are fielding 750 candidates across the Scottish parliamentary elections, Welsh assembly, English and Scottish local elections. The BNP already hold 49 local council seats in England, and its share of the vote has increased more than 75-fold in the last six years.

This party's past successes have depended on voter apathy, perceived failures in improving local services, poverty, social housing and unemployment. Yet history shows how dangerous it is to underestimate the ability of far-right candidates to prey upon these fears and to blame genuine concerns on immigration and race.

Last week, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the Holocaust Education Trust. Just 60 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps, we risk forgetting the lessons learnt so painfully by so many.

Compared with the scale of that horror it is important to keep a sense of perspective about our local elections, and yet fascism in the 1930s began with small steps.

This week, students along with many other people in the UK will have the chance to make a difference in the local elections and to oppose the extreme right. We can, and we must, use our democratic voice to stop the BNP from poisoning our society.

Guardian