The 'Iranian Schindler' who saved Jews from the Nazis

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion's Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint.

"I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary."

Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital.

'Trembling'

When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.

"I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think," recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California.

Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Paris. Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger.

"At the borders, my father was always really trembling," recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a "strong man" who had given the family "great confidence that everything would be OK."
Unlikely hero

The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives.

"I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out. My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren't hurt. The ones that didn't have him, they took them and you never heard about them again."

Of Mr Sardari, she says: "I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris."

Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, Sardari was an unlikely hero.
Nazi propaganda

In his book In the Lion's Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran's legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II. Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers. In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry. He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children.

When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari's humanitarian task become more perilous. Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

Racial purity

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

Lonely death

By December 1942, Sardari's pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari's book, as "the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage". But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps.

The number of blank passports in Sardari's safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people "this could have saved over 2,000 individuals".

Sardari never sought recognition for his work during his lifetime, insisting he had only been doing his duty. He died a lonely death in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981, after losing his ambassador's pension and Tehran properties in the Iranian revolution. He was posthumously recognised for his humanitarian work in 2004 at a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter "popular misconceptions" about Iran and the Iranians.

"Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians," he says. "There is no distinction 'I am Muslim, he is Jew' or whatever."

He believes the story illustrates the "general cultural propensity of Iranians to be tolerant" which is often overlooked in the current political climate.

BBC

Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up

The schoolgirl who survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis

Helga Weiss three days before her family were deported in December 1941

Helga Weiss, now an artist in Prague, escaped death at Auschwitz by lying to Josef Mengele about her age and saying she was fit to work

On an Auschwitz station platform in 1944, Helga Weiss and her mother fooled one of the most reviled men in modern history, Josef Mengele, and managed to save their lives. Not long into her teens, Weiss lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis under Mengele's command that Helga was in fact her daughter's older sister, and she was sent to the forced labour barracks and not the gas chamber.

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia.

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Butterfield, who also publishes Anne Frank's diary, asked to see a sample of the writing in one of Weiss's surviving exercise books. "We had an academic report done, and once it was clear what the diaries were I went to Prague to see her. Accounts of the past are often shaped by the knowledge of what was to happen next. What is so important about the diary is that it is Helga's reality. You are there with her. It is a very different thing from a memoir."

Before Weiss was sent to the Nazi-controlled ghetto of Terezín as a child, she witnessed the insidious progress of the Holocaust in Prague. "One thing after another was forbidden: employees lost their jobs, we were banned from the parks, swimming pools, sports clubs. I was banned from going to school when I was 10," Weiss told the Observer at the time of the London concert. "I was always asking my parents, 'What's happening?', and became angry at them if I thought they were trying to hide something, to protect me."

The Weiss apartment was handed over to Germans and the family were transported to Terezín by rail. Known as Theresienstadt in German, the city on the north-west perimeter of Prague had become a transit hub where Czech Jews were put to work before being sent on to extermination camps. Her diary, which begins in 1939, records noises that still haunt her; the "thunderous steps, the roar of the ghetto guards, the banging of doors and hysterical weeping always sound – and foretell – the same".

"She was obviously very clever and quite mature," said Butterfield. "She was obsessed with school at first, like any child of that age. Then there are terrible goodbyes as her friends begin to be taken off to Terezín. At each point Helga thinks the worst thing has happened to her so you see how people become used to bad things. Eventually, when the family are sent to the camp they take some cake and eat a little every day."

Butterfield points out that memories of Terezín are not all painful. Weiss grew up there, fell in love for the first time, and spent time with both her parents, before her father was killed at Auschwitz. "My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle," Weiss has said. "And I think that the will to create was an expression of the will to live, and survive, as human beings."

On 4 October 1944, Weiss and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz, where they faced Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labour camp. Thanks to her subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to Terezín.

She was then transferred from Auschwitz to a labour camp at Flossenbürg where she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day "death march" to the camp at Mauthausen. She remained there until the end of the war. "I asked Helga whether it had felt wonderful to be liberated," said Butterfield. "She said, no, it was not that special because by that point she was so ill and had seen so many terrible things it was hard to feel anything."

Helga's Diary will be published by Viking on 7 June next year

Observer

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

New BNP? Same old nazis and thugs

The BNP claims it has changed. A quick review of its election candidates shows that they are the same old nazis, thugs and racists that they always were

Tom Gower
Coventry North East

Gower works full-time as the BNP enquiries officer. He is also the Coventry contact for the racist and pagan Woden’s Folk and was involved in the English Heathen Front (EHF), ‘a racist group espousing “blood and soil” ideology. The EHF was the English “chapter” of the Allgermanische Heidnische Front (AHF), an international network of “tribes” that evolved out of the Norsk Hedensk Front, a group founded in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, the Norwegian black metal musician and murderer whose own brand of heathenism included a heavy dose of national socialism, antisemitism, eugenics and racism.

Shelley Rose
Luton North

A rising star in the BNP, Rose is part of a social group of BNP activists in the East Midlands and an antisemite who wrote on her Facebook page, “I would rather put myself out and pay a bit more at a smaller local shop, than line the pockets of the kikes that run Tesco”. She attended the National Front Remembrance Day parade in 2009 with Chris Hurst, the BNP PPC ‘for Twickenham.

Robin Evans
Blackburn

Evans was once a Blackburn BNP councillor but found the council budget too much to cope with. “It’s all mumbo jumbo, I don’t understand a word of it,” he stated. He resigned from the BNP in 2003 after an internal dispute and joined the openly fascist British National Socialist Party, returning to the BNP.

Ken Booth
Newcastle upon Tyne Central

Booth is the former North East National Front organiser who caused widespread disgust in 2007 when he compared the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to Disneyland. He refused to believe the “official figures” of those who died in the Holocaust and did not recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz.

Lynne Mozar
Buckingham

Mozar, who runs the BNP’s Trafalgar Club fundraising group, is notorious for her appearance on the Sky TV documentary BNP Wives in which “in private sometimes” she admitted calling black people “niggers”. ‘She also claimed that “Pakis” was the ‘“legal term for them [Asians]”. While manning a stall opposite a mosque in Fareham, Mozar shouted “fat slag” at a passerby who questioned her views.

Mathew Tait
Milton Keynes South

Tait, the Buckinghamshire BNP organiser, travelled to the cancelled 2010 American Renaissance conference, where he moaned to those who turned up that the Equality and Human Rights Commission court case had forced the BNP to accept “people who we would wish to not have in our country really to be members of our party”.

Mike Shore
Broxtowe

Until 2003 Shore was the National Front’s East Midlands organiser and treasurer. He was also Midlands convener of a British incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. His conversion to the BNP came as a surprise to former colleagues.

Richard Hamilton
Milton Keynes North

A former soldier, Hamilton took part in the mock trial and execution of a gollywog at the 2009 BNP Red, White and Blue festival. The News of the World noted that before the trial, “Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking ‘niggers’”. The BNP claimed his membership had been “suspended” as a result of the affair, though evidently not for very long.

Chris Beverley
Morley and Outwood

Beverley is a leading figure in Yorkshire BNP and a key link with the National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany whose leader believes that Hitler was a “great statesman”. Beverley works as PA and constituency office manager for Andrew Brons, the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, and recently refused to condemn Hitler in a radio broadcast saying that he did not hate him.

Ian Meller
Leicestershire North West

Meller, a BNP councillor in North West Leicestershire, is a former National Front activist who took part in a demonstration against a Gay Pride march in Leicester in August 2000. Meller, then 35, was fined £400 and £55 costs for carrying an offensive weapon, believed to have been a chair leg.

Charlotte Lewis
Carshalton and Wallington

Lewis was jailed for six months in 2001 for sending a series of “chilling” death threats to employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) animal research laboratory in Cambridgeshire. She posts racist comments on social networking sites but claims she is ‘not a racist but a “racial survivalist”. ‘In 2009 Croydon Council considered taking action against her after she boasted of participating in a racist hate campaign against her neighbours.

Barry Bennett
Gosport

Bennett was, until recently, a regular user of the American-based nazi Stormfront website, despite being half Jewish, “from ancestry not religion” he is keen to stress. “I believe in National Socialism, WW2 style, it was best, no other power had anything like it,” ‘he wrote. “The ideology was fantastic. The culture, nothing like it. If it was here now, I’d defect to Germany.”

Eddy Butler
Harlow

Butler has been involved with the far right since the early 1980s when he was the Tower Hamlets organiser for the National Front. After he joined the BNP he and a team of thugs laid into a group of anti-fascists with hammers and other weapons in east London in 1992. In 1993 he organised the “Rights for whites” campaign that won the BNP its first councillor, Derek Beackon, in a Tower Hamlets by-election, though he only held the seat for seven months. Until his sudden demotion Butler was the BNP’s national organiser and elections officer. He is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, despite still living in Loughton.

Chris Forster
Hayes and Harlington

A National Front supporter in the 1970s and a former treasurer of the Conservative Monday Club, Forster, who is also standing for Barking and Dagenham council, works as a psychic but failed to foresee Searchlight’s exposé of him in the Evening Standard in 2009. Forster helped compile the BNP’s 2009/10 Barking and Dagenham council budget, which attracted great opprobrium. Hypocritically, he is married to a Chinese woman with whom he has a child.

Tess Culnane
Orpington

Tess Culnane was a BNP member until a row with the party after which she stormed off to join the National Front for which she stood in the 2008 London Assembly election. She also addressed meetings of the openly Nazi British People’s Party. The BNP denounced the NF as “neo-fascist” but this has not proved an impediment to Culnane rejoining the BNP and working for Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member.

Edward Sheppard
Coventry North West

Sheppard stood for the BNP in the 2001 general election in Coventry North East, but could not stand in 2005 as he was jailed for three years in 2002 for shooting a man at point blank range. Mold Crown Court heard how Christopher Willans had mistakenly knocked on Sheppard’s window, believing it to be part of a property owned by a close friend. ‘On discovering his mistake, Willans apologised to Sheppard and left the area. While walking home Willans was confronted by Sheppard who shot him at close range with a .22 calibre pistol through his car window.

Marlene Guest
Rotherham

Guest is the Rotherham BNP organiser. Like Mozar she appeared on the Sky TV BNP Wives documentary in which she claimed that the number of deaths in the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that the Jews were putting Germany on a guilt trip. ‘Asked if any good had come out of ‘the Holocaust, she replied: “Well, apparently, didn’t they get a lot of dentistry and plastic surgery”, referring to the Nazis’ barbaric “medical experiments”.

Jeffrey Marshall
Eastbury ward, Barking and Dagenham Council

Marshall, the central London BNP organiser, displayed the poisonous side of the BNP in February 2009 following the death of the six-year-old son of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader. In a cruel and warped outburst against those who had expressed their condolences at the death of Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, Marshall wrote in an internet politics group: “We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.”

Marshall continued his sick tirade, stating that although it would be “a kindness” to kill children with disabilities, this was not the same as advocating such a measure as compulsory state policy. “But so what if it is,” he declared. “At least we would all know where we stand. There is actually not a great deal of point in keeping these sort of people alive, after all.”

Sharif Abdel Gawad
Bolton and Undercliffe ward, Bradford Council

Abdel Gawad of Bowling, Bradford, was convicted for possession of heroin by Bradford magistrates in December 2007. He first stood for the BNP in Bradford in May 2006, when his candidacy caused uproar in the party because of his less than Aryan credentials. The party insisted that he was of Armenian descent and most certainly “Christian” not a Muslim. Interviewed by The Independent he said he was “concerned about law and order, particularly the drugs epidemic in Bradford”.

Hope not hate

BNP steals anti-BNP war veteran's words

Yesterday, WW2 veteran Kenneth Riley appealed for people to sign up to the Hope Not Hate campaign to fight the BNP. Amazingly, within hours some of his own words were lifted verbatim and put into the mouth of the BNP's own claimed war veteran Bob Head.

Compare and contrast their two letters. It's both galling and depressing:

THE ANTI-BNP APPEAL

When I enlisted in the army 66 years ago, I did it for Britain. Now I need you to do something for me.

The BNP is trying to strangle our great nation with the same extremist and fascist agenda that Hitler's Nazis threatened us with decades ago. Today, the war isn't being fought on the battlefield - but in the ballot box.

Hope Not Hate is on the front lines of our fight. They're organising to make sure modern-day Nazis aren't elected on 6 May and to preserve the Britain for which I fought so hard. If I had my health I would be out there with them. But I can't - so I'm writing to ask you to volunteer for me.

Please join Hope Not Hate's Day of Action this weekend - the campaign has laid on transport to help you get to the areas in which you are needed the most.

I was barely in my twenties when I went to fight for Britain. I left home with friends - all young lads like myself - and many never returned. Today, the BNP salute and say "Heil Hitler" - and they support the same all-white Britain. They're proud of what the Nazis did to my friends, and what they did to millions of innocent people throughout Europe.

We didn't fight with our lives on the line years ago just to be right back here today.

We need to do everything we can to stop the BNP from being elected to local councils and to Parliament. Those boys lost to the war would proudly go door-to-door with Hope Not Hate to fight against the fascist BNP today.

There are no tanks and no guns in this fight - but we still need your courage to speak out.

Kenneth Riley. Normandy Veteran - Tank Division

THE BNP APPEAL

A message from Normandy Veteran Bob Head

Dear Fellow Patriot,

When I enlisted in the army in 1942, aged 18, I did it for Britain. Now I need you to do something for me.

The old-gang parties and their fellow cohorts in the media are dismantling and destroying the Britain we fought so hard to defend and preserve. Today, the war isn't being fought on the battlefield - but in the ballot box.

The British National Party is on the front lines of our fight. Our party and our courageous activists are working around the clock to save the country that our War Heroes fought and died for. If I had my health I would be out there with them. But I can't - so I'm writing to ask you to volunteer for me.

[snip]

There are no tanks and no guns in this fight - but we still need your courage to propel the British National Party to its goals. Get active, leafleting, canvassing, speaking to people, get the word out!

Could you spare £20 towards our election campaign? £20 is not much, but it could be crucial to the BNP's chances of winning...

London Evening Standard

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

Auschwitz asks Britain for help to preserve decaying death camp

'There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself...and that is if the world forgets there was such a place.'

Henry Appel, Auschwitz survivor

The guard towers of Auschwitz are splintering, the barracks are waterlogged: the concentration camp where one million Jews were slaughtered is decaying so fast that conservationists have called on Britain to help to save it. The theft last month of its distinctive, sinister sign, Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) has underlined the vulnerability of the Nazi death camp, stretching over 20 hectares (50 acres) of southern Poland.

“Nobody could have imagined such a horrific act of vandalism,” Jacek Kastelaniec, director-general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, said. “Now try to imagine the public outcry if one of the barracks started to fall down, impossible to restore.”

Auschwitz was built on boggy ground between two rivers; as a result the high groundwater and bad drainage has rotted the foundations. Walls are blistering and starting to lean, roof frames are buckling, plasterwork and wall-paintings are flaking.

Mr Kastelaniec will go to the Cabinet Office tomorrow to press the Government on Gordon Brown’s promise to contribute to a €120million (£110million) endowment fund that will guarantee the preservation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust. Mr Brown visited the camp last April, and, plainly upset by what he had seen, declared: “We will join with other countries in supporting the maintenance and retention of the memorial at Auschwitz.” No figure has been suggested publicly for Britain’s possible contribution, but Polish sources say that the conservationists are hoping for about €10million.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said that her country would put up half of the costs, but the managers of the Auschwitz museum need other commitments. Mr Kastelaniec will also visit France, Belgium and the United States. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has sent an appeal to 40 heads of government.

“The conservationists say we need to start work in the next two years if we are to avert irreparable decay,” Mr Kastelaniec told The Times, “and that will only be possible if the money is paid into the fund now.”

The decay of the camp is politically sensitive. The current trial in Munich of the alleged Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk is being seen by the public as the last for Nazi war crimes — the 89-year-old defendant is wheeled into court on a hospital bed. Holocaust survivors are dwindling. “In ten years there will be no witnesses,” Mr Kastelaniec said, “and it will be easier for the crazy people who say nothing happened in the camps.” Only the buildings will remain.

Auschwitz cannot simply have a makeover because that would undermine its claims to authenticity, and open the way for those on the far Right who try to deny or trivialise the Holocaust. The strategic point of the restoration is to use its almost over-powering sense of menace as a clinching counter-argument against anti-Semitism and racism.

The portfolio to be presented to the British Government underlines the vast scale of the camp. The priority is being set on 45 brick barracks. The managers estimate that it will cost up to €890,000 to restore a single barracks building. On top of that come 22 wooden barrack rooms — where inmates were crowded into bunks up to the ceiling. Each will cost €310,000.

Then there are the remains of 210 barrack buildings. Some sheds have collapsed, but there are concrete outlines where floors and chimneys stood. Without some strengthening, these foundation markings will disappear. Cost: €78,000 per barrack room. The 27 wooden guard towers need to be reinforced at an annual cost, for the next 14 years, of €62,000.

Work is under way on conserving the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoriums, but the managers want to extend this to include a provisional gas chamber-bunker, two other crematoriums and the unloading ramp.

Property taken from prisoners before they were gassed, now exhibited in small piles in the museum, is also showing signs of age: 460 artifical limbs, 40kg (90lb) of discarded spectacles, 260 prayer garments and 3,800 suitcases that belonged to people who ended their journey in Auschwitz.

The sluggish response worldwide to the restoration had been down, in part, to the feeling that the main burden should be on Germany. Mr Kastelaniec said: “The breakthrough came when we convinced not only Germany but also other contributors that this was not a project about guilt, but about the future.”

Times Online

Auschwitz

Donations to Auschwitz

Anne Frank diary guardian Miep Gies dies

Miep Gies (left) with Otto Frank (centre) in October 1945

Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100

She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam. Anne's diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust. It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.

Miep Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.

Speaking last year as she celebrated her 100th birthday, Mrs Gies played down her role, saying others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands. She and her fellow employees kept Anne and the seven others supplied for two years, from 1942 to 1944. When the family were found by the authorities, they were deported, and Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne's papers and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl. In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, who survived the war, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947. It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

Mrs Gies became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery. For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.

In an interview from 1998, published on the annefrank website, Miep Gies says she thought it "perfectly natural" to help Anne and the seven others despite the penalties she could have suffered under the Nazi occupation.

"They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn..." she says. "We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need."

Her role was, she recalls, to fetch vegetables and meat while others supplied bread or books. Her memory of Anne is of having the feeling she was "speaking to an adult".

"I'd say to myself, 'My goodness, child, so young and talking like that already'," she says in the interview. She believes that she once came across Anne writing the diary.

"It was a very uncomfortable situation," she says. "I tried to decide what to do. Should I walk away or go to her? At that moment she glanced at me, with a look that I'll never forget. This wasn't the Anne I knew, that friendly, charming child. She looked at me with anger, rage. Then Anne stood up, slammed her diary shut and glared at me with great condescension. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm writing about you, too.' I didn't know what to say. The only thing I could manage was: 'That ought to be interesting.'"

Mrs Gies also remembers the day the Franks were taken away and how she went up into the empty annex to find the pages of the diary lying on the floor. Removing the pages, she did not read them immediately, telling herself at the time: "These may belong to a child, but even children have a right to privacy."

BBC

Miep Gies

Anne Frank Museum

Eugene Zinn dies at 85; survivor of Nazi death camps lectured on Holocaust

He was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. Three years later Zinn escaped,
served in the Czech army, then moved to Israel. Later, living in Los Angeles,
he spoke to students about the atrocities he witnessed

Eugene Zinn, who spent three years in Nazi death camps and regularly lectured about the horror of the Holocaust after The Times profiled him in a 2005 front-page story, died of pneumonia Sunday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, his family said. He was 85.

Born in 1924 in the Czechoslovakian village of Huncovce, he was one of four children of Heinrich and Helen Zinn. Sent to Auschwitz with four male cousins in 1942, Eugene was the only one to survive. He soon learned that his parents and two younger sisters had been sent to the gas chamber upon arriving at a Polish death camp, and his older brother had been beaten to death. More than 80 of his close relatives would be killed by the Nazis.

"What I keep asking myself," Zinn told The Times in 2005, "is how come I'm the only one who survived?"

While at Auschwitz, Zinn laid brick to build crematoriums and worked in the stables. "Through luck and cunning," his family said, he dodged three sentences to the gas chamber. In early 1945, he escaped from the Nazis by jumping from a train that was transporting prisoners. He then served in the Czech army and moved to Israel, where he fought for the new state. One cousin, Ernest, had managed to survive, and Zinn eventually followed him to Los Angeles.

He worked as a cabinetmaker and attended Los Angeles City College at night. Over 34 years, he worked his way from junior draftsman to manager of engineering at Everest and Jennings, a wheelchair manufacturer.

Through his cousin, Zinn met his future wife, Sarah Haim, a Greek Jew who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Athens. For decades, they lived in what is now West Hills. She died two months ago at 80. In 1992, Zinn took his wife and two children to visit his birthplace and the remains of Auschwitz. After he videotaped his recollections of the Holocaust for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute archives, Zinn was moved to search for his Auschwitz comrades.

While viewing a PBS Holocaust documentary, he saw Otto Pressburger, his "Soul Mate in Years of Horror," according to the headline on the 2005 Times article. The article led Zinn to connect and reconnect with Holocaust survivors around the world. After decades of near-silence, he also began speaking in classrooms about the Nazi atrocities that he had witnessed.

Zinn is survived by his son, Harry; and daughter, Helene. Services will be held at 11 a.m. today at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles.

LA Times

Polish police find stolen Auschwitz gate sign

The Auschwitz 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign - damaged but back where it belongs

Police said today that they have found the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that was stolen on Friday from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.

Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo told The Associated Press that the sign was found in northern Poland. She said police also detained five men aged between 25 and 39 who are being transported to Krakow for questioning. Another spokesman, Dariusz Nowak, said the sign was cut into three pieces, each containing one of the words. He said the police were planning a news conference in Krakow this Monday.

The police refused to divulge any details of the circumstances in which the sign was found or to speculate on the motive of the perpetrators. Krakow police are in charge of the investigation because they are the regional command for the area including the Auschwitz museum.

The sign that topped a main gate at the Auschwitz memorial site was stolen before dawn on Friday. State authorities made finding it a priority and appealed to all Poles for assistance. More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Gypsies,Poles and others, died in the gas chambers or from starvation and disease while performing forced labor at Auschwitz which Nazi Germany built in occupied Poland during World War II.

The camp, which became the world's largest Jewish cemetery, was liberated by the Soviet troops on Jan.27, 1945. The museum is preparing for solemn observations of the 65th anniversary of liberation.

Independent

We'll set dogs on you: BNP thugs

Two anti-BNP protesters were told they would have their throats ripped out by Rottweilers if they continued to disrupt a fundraising dinner in Ross-on-Wye.

Mother-of-five Antoinette Beizsley, 47, said she was also "pushed hard" by BNP-hired thugs at the town's Chase Hotel when she and members of her family breached a police line to enter the hotel's grounds, before being verbally threatened. Antoinette's aunt Sue Fellows, also received the threat. Sue, who is a youth worker at Cinderford's CANDI drop-in centre, said: "They told us if they saw us again they'd open the back of their van and set their Rottweillers on us. They said the dogs would rip our throats out."

One protester, a 19-year-old from Worcester, was given a fixed penalty notice by police for a minor public order offence.

Up to 100 anti-fascist demonstrators – many from Ross-on-Wye and the Forest of Dean – protested as guests of the BNP's Trafalgar Club arrived for a dinner fundraiser for the extreme right-wing party on Saturday evening. One vehicle was pelted with eggs.

Antoinette, who now lives in Wiltshire, said: "I used to be politically active against fascists a long time ago and Ross is my hometown, so I felt incensed when I discovered BNP members were there. I have always been against bullies, and the BNP are the worst kind. With their racist and discriminatory beliefs, I don't think they should be legal. I was proud to be there demonstrating against neo-Nazis with six members of my family. I was shocked at the behaviour of the security officers."

Her son Adam is now organising an online campaign on Facebook urging businesses and travel websites to boycott the hotel for hosting the annual dinner.

Sue Fellows said: "I live only a few hundred yards from the Chase Hotel and I've used it in the past. It's shameful that the hotel took the booking, and didn't even inform its staff or other guests until the last minute. My grandfather fought against the Nazis and Hitler in the Second World War, and now we have fascists on our doorstep. We had to make a stand against them and their hateful beliefs. Britain has always been a multi-racial society and I see nothing wrong with that."

On Sunday morning BNP leader Nick Griffin was spotted with his entourage taking a pleasure cruise along the Wye at Symonds Yat.

A spokesman for West Mercia police said: "The protest went ahead peacefully and there was no need for any proactive police intervention. Disruption to local residents and visitors was kept to a minimum."

While a recently leaked BNP members' list showed the party has just six members within the Forest of Dean constituency (down from nine in 2007), the Hereford constituency, which includes Ross, has its own branch and membership has risen from 15 to 25 within two years. The Hereford branch was set up by a leading BNP member and convicted terrorist Dr Lambertus Nieuwhof, whose company hosts a number of party websites.

Chase Hotel general manager Colin Parcell was unavailable for comment.

This is Gloucestershire

Question Time: The Establishment Mugs Nick Griffin – But Only So They Can Steal His Political Clothes!

What entertainment! What a fascinating and gruesome TV spectacle! Griffin the fool on the box! What a ratings boost for ‘Mentorn’ (the private company that runs question time, that’s been begging the BBC for years to have the Griffo freakshow). Yes it was great to see Nick Griffin look ridiculous on TV. He really is an unctuous buffoon. But it was still a bad idea to give him a platform on Question Time. The only mitigating factor was being able to see a huge, angry demonstration by anti-fascists outside the BBC TV centre to show how we all feel. (The woman seen being dragged along the floor still wagging her finger at a copper is my especial hero).

Firstly, while it was fun to see Griffin exposed and beset by angry questions from all sides, this will just add to the feeling of victimhood and marginalisation by the millions of alienated white and working class people who may be tempted to look to him. Especially as now Griffin has been made into a household name. Notoriety is still celebrity and ‘outsider’ status can be political gold-dust in these cynical and troubled times. For some people it will just be seen as Griffin (and sections of the marginalised white poor) being ganged up upon by the ‘clever-clogs liberal metropolitan elite’.

Secondly, the subsequent discussion on immigration was appalling. After ‘ganging up’ on Griffin, the whole panel and audience then went on to agree that there was ‘too much immigration’! Thus immigrants became the main problem, the scapegoats for the social crisis, while capitalism gets let off the hook (off course!). This was therefore an establishment consensus, designed to shield that very establishment! In this establishment consensus that is simultaneously ‘anti-fascist’ and anti immigrant, there can be no mention of greedy bankers or capitalism’s chaos. No mention of the virtual abolition of council housing and the welfare state. No mention of tax cuts and tax loopholes lining the pockets of the super-rich. i.e no class politics – off course! If we can’t blame the greedy rich and the madness of capitalism, then instead immigrants must get it in the neck – as the sole cause of homelessness, unemployment and poor services – and it seems they are even to blame for the rise of their persecutor, the BNP, all the panel could agree. From victimising Griffin, they all seamlessly morphed into victimising Griffins victims! And this even harder to stomach when coming from a political establishment soaked in the blood of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of our young soldiers, offered as a blood sacrifice to global corporate power. Furthermore, it is this terrible and senseless sacrifice that is now fuelling a tribal and virulent Islamophobia.

This BBC freak-show and media feeding frenzy represents how the establishment is using the BNP. They use them to drag politics to the right, and promote racism and Islamophobia – but then try to make sure that the BNP are not the main beneficiary of this rightward shift. An operation to make sure that that it is the mainstream establishment parties that benefit from racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant feeling, that is stirred up, and then controlled. The BNP are demonised as Nazis (and yes, they are) so vote for the ‘respectable racists’ instead. And all the time the media plays its despicable role, churning out anti-immigrant / Islamophobic propaganda, week after week.

On Question Time we saw Griffin mugged by the establishment, so they can steal his political clothes! (Of course, then they must wash these clothes in bleach, making them a more acceptable and fashionable lighter shade of xenophobia before they will wish to wear them).

Rather than getting hysterical that the BNP are gonna suddenly take over, establish a fascist regime and put us all in the gas chambers, the real worry is that the BNP help push politics to the right. The danger is that by becoming established as a minor ‘anti-establishment’ party they will pollute grassroots dissent within the new epoch of war, unemployment and austerity with racist and Islamophobic poison. This will let capitalism off the hook and cripple working class resistance with a vile game of divide and rule. And of course, this can have tragic consequences at the level of the street and workplace, helping to unleash a wave of discrimination and violence against ethnic, religious, racial and sexual minority groups.

Putting the unctuous Nazi Nick on QT, no matter how ridiculous he looked to the majority, will still have empowered every nasty little racist to come out of the closet. It still gives the BNP more space to organise, more spurious legitimacy to seek a place on political platforms, to try and book rooms previously out of bounds to them in our town halls, colleges and community centres. It may become more of a challenge for anti-fascists to deny the BNP the platform it seeks to poison public debate. But at the same time, the repulsion the BNP provokes in the majority of people, and the huge demonstration witnessed by millions on TV gathered outside the BBC shows the potential for resistance. The more fascism grows, the more resistance to fascism will also grow. We must now find the right strategies to enable the anti-fascist side to win this crucial battle.

What we need is a new working class politics – uniting people of all religions and races against the massive assault on our living standards that is coming. Our pensions schemes will be degraded, so we cant afford to retire when the time comes. The retirement age will be raised, so manual workers (who generally die younger) will be worked until they drop dead. Wages will be cut. Unemployment will rise. And our welfare state will face its final destruction. Meanwhile, this will be accompanied by a still greater shift of wealth and resources from the working class to the super rich. Neither the BNP’s racism, Islamophobia and (now thinly veiled) fascism, nor the bluff and bluster of ‘establishment anti-fascism’ can offer us a way out. Only the rebuilding of a popular, working class and democratic socialism can do that. And the best place to start is getting together to ensure a victory to the current postal workers strike.

Barry Kade

Protests could cost city £800,000

Thank Odin that there were no nazis with the EDL at Manchester!

Erm...

Protests which brought more than 2,000 demonstrators to the streets of Manchester have cost the city as much as £800,000, the M.E.N. can reveal.

Piccadilly Gardens was locked down by police as English Defence League (EDL) protesters faced off against opposing Unite Against Fascism (UAF) demonstrators for five hours on Saturday afternoon. The M.E.N. has learned that town hall and police chiefs, faced with picking up the bill for looking after the demos, plan to ask the home secretary for a change in the law that would ban protests where violence is expected.

Forty-eight men were arrested, most on suspicion of public order offences, and 13 people injured, including one seriously and three suffering dog bites. At its worst, sticks and railings were thrown and police vans battered while officers clashed with troublemakers as they tried to pull them out of the demo.

EDL members, who claim to oppose 'radical Islam', have been responsible for violent protests elsewhere in the country. They made Nazi salutes and sang patriotic songs. UAF supporters, staging a counter protest, maintained a non-stop anti-fascist chant.

A tense atmosphere prevailed as the two factions were separated by a police line with officers on horseback and in riot gear. Both sides - around 500 EDL and 1,500 UAF - traded insults and there were regular surges against the police line. Pockets of trouble broke out but were quickly stopped by police before EDL supporters were moved away from Piccadilly Gardens and escorted to bus and train stations by officers shortly before 5pm - five hours after the protest began.

The police have been praised for the success of a huge operation understood to have involved 500 officers. But it has left the Greater Manchester Police Authority with a bill of over £200,000, in cluding around £21,000 on an extra 300 officers, the M.E.N. has learnt.

Senior insiders in the city estimate that the protest has cost Manchester as a whole up to £800,000 in planning, staffing and community liaison work which included police officers and council staff going into schools and speaking to the leaders of the region's mosques.

The figure also includes substantial losses to businesses around Piccadilly Gardens after many had to close. Others, including Debenhams and Primark, reported a 'considerable' drop in takings. Debenhams said they also had to bring in extra security to keep staff safe.

Both the ambulance service and police had to bring in relief from outside forces, including officers from Lancashire police to staff the rugby league final at Old Trafford which kicked off at 5.30pm.

Manchester council had unsuccessfully applied to get this weekend's demonstration banned after trouble during a previous demo in Birmingham. Legislation currently provides no scope to halt peaceful gath erings in a public place, although the police can step in where demonstrators are suspected of breaking the law.

Manchester's deputy leader Coun Jim Battle praised an 'outstanding' police operation, but said: "The police marshalled this demonstration extremely well, allowing people to go about their business, but the operation was very expensive in terms of resources.

"While we recognise the right to demonstrate, what we saw with the EDL yesterday was, in effect, a gathering of football hooligans who had to be marshalled in that way in order to keep the peace. We will raise this with the home secretary and ask him to explore whether there are ways he can intervene.

"We paid a high price but fortunately we didn't pay the price paid in Birmingham of violence spilling out on to our streets."

Greater Manchester Police Authority chairman Coun Paul Murphy added: "This was a quite brilliantly executed operation but the law needs to be reassessed. I am left with a bill I didn't budget for and the dilemma of whether, if this group ask to protest again, we have to let them.

"There's a difference between peaceful and violent protest and I think that's where the law has lost its way. It is prepared to support people who have a record of violence against the interests of those go ing about their business.

"It's probably the price we pay for democracy but it's a hell of a price when you look at the bill. I want to be able to refuse a group if there is a fair and reasonable assumption of violence."

Chief Supt Gerry Donnellan, in charge of Saturday's operation for GMP, commended the wider community for taking heed of advice to stay away from the protest.

He said: "The day was a culmination of a lot of hard work and detailed planning by a large number of people. It was a tremendous example of police working in partnership with other agencies and event organisers for a successful outcome.

"I've got a responsibility to try and facilitate a peaceful protest and a lot of time and thought went into doing that. There was potential for it to be come more volatile than it did. It presented us with a big challenge and some big decisions were made and we were able to handle it in a controlled manner.

"I think there were some minor issues with the protesters but they were dealt with in a timely and appropriate manner and we were able to remove troublemakers quickly."

Manchester Evening News

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up.

Marek Edelman, Last Leader of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Has Died

SS officers walking through the destroyed Ghetto after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the uprising by Jews incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died in Warsaw. He is thought to have been 87.

Edelman was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, an area walled off by Poland’s Nazi occupiers in 1940 to separate the city’s Jews from the rest of the population. As a member of the Bund labor organization that worked underground to spirit Jews into hiding or out of the country, he was one of the masterminds of the plan to resist the Ghetto’s liquidation.

Edelman, who had suffered from ill health for many years, died in Warsaw late yesterday. His death was confirmed by a friend, Paula Sawicka, whose family he had lived with in recent years.

“He fought for his country more than anyone else,” Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, said in an interview. “He wasn’t fighting for himself, but to show that the Jews in the ghetto weren’t passive, that they wouldn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.”

The Ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover and the day Nazi commanders planned to have the remaining people in the ghetto killed. With few weapons, Edelman and his colleagues forced the Germans to retreat. When the operation’s leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, died during the uprising, Edelman took his place. The fighters kept the occupiers at bay for almost a month in total.

By the end of the uprising on May 16, almost all of the Ghetto’s 50,000 to 60,000 remaining inhabitants had been killed or deported, mainly to the Treblinka extermination camp. About 350,000 people were locked into the Ghetto when it was built; only a few thousand survived its liquidation. Edelman was one of the few fighters who escaped, through underground sewers.

In contrast with many Jewish Poles who survived the war, Edelman decided to stay and settled in the central Polish city of Lodz, where he became a cardiologist. In an interview, he said his work as a doctor enabled him to save lives, which he was unable to do in the ghetto.

“The Lord already wants to blow out the candle, and I have to hide the flame quickly when his attention is distracted for a little while,” he said.

Edelman was probably born on Jan. 1, 1922, in Homel, a city located in present-day Belarus. His birth date and place of birth are disputed, and Edelman refused to confirm his age in interviews.

The family soon moved to Warsaw, where his father died when Edelman was young. He was left an orphan at about the age of 13.

In 1946, a year after the end of the war, Edelman moved to Lodz, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he married Alina Margolis, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. He finished his medical studies there and became a cardiologist, working until an anti-Jewish campaign in 1968 instigated by the communist authorities led to his dismissal.

While his wife emigrated that year to France, taking the couple’s two children with her, Edelman refused to leave Poland. He later explained his decision by saying “someone had to stay here with all those who died.”

In the 1970s, Edelman became involved in the anti-communist Solidarity movement and was interned after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He was released after a few days thanks to protests by Western intellectuals, and continued his resistance until the fall of communism in 1989.

Edelman was a leading member of the Freedom Union, the party of Poland’s first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He reflected on his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto in a book-length interview by the Polish journalist Hanna Krall in the 1970s that has been translated into several languages. In 1998, Edelman was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Praise from Czech Leader

Vaclav Havel, leader of the Czech opposition movement and the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, wrote to Edelman after a biography by Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko was published in 2008.

“I deeply respect everything that you have done in your life, your uprightness, your courage,” Havel wrote. “For me, you are an example of a true Pole, the authentic personification of all that is best in Poland.”

In April 2009, Edelman joined leading Polish filmmakers and writers in a protest to the government after a former neo-Nazi took over the running of the country’s public television network.

“People who publicly support racism and anti-Semitism shouldn’t be allowed to play a role in public life,” he wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “Don’t forget that evil can grow bigger.”

Edelman is survived by two children, Aleksander and Anna. His wife died in 2008.

Bloomberg

Ukraine scraps hotel plans on Nazi killing field

A man attends a mourning ceremony near Minora Monument on Babi Yar ravine in
Kiev on Sunday, marking the 68th anniversary of the beginning of mass execution of Jews there

Kiev authorities, facing withering criticism, have reversed a decision to build a hotel on a killing field used by Nazis during the infamous 1941 Babi Yar massacre, officials said Monday.

Still, Jewish groups worldwide were bitter that a hotel was even suggested for an area where more than 30,000 Jews were murdered. Rights advocates and scholars praised the decision by Kiev mayor Leonid Chernovetsky to veto the proposal. But they urged Ukrainian authorities to do more to honor the victims of one of the most tragic chapters of the Holocaust.

The massacre began 68 years ago Tuesday [today]. The controversy called into question how fully Ukraine wants to face its past, even after so many years. The plan for the three-star hotel, which would have been called Babi Yar, was approved by the City Council this month. Jewish groups and human-rights groups said the very idea mocked the dead. The hotel would have been built in the middle of the main killing site, said Vitaliy Nakhmanovich, a leading Ukrainian Babi Yar scholar.

Legislators loyal to Chernovetsky said the Ukrainian capital needed more hotels to host the 2012 European soccer championship, and to develop tourism afterward. They said the hotel would not disturb the remains. On Saturday, Chernovetsky reversed the City Council's decision, saying the hotel would not be built. On Monday, his spokeswoman attempted to downplay the significance of the earlier approval.

"It was just a proposal," Marta Hrymska told The Associated Press. "Nobody has allocated any land, there are no investors, no hotel is being built."

More than 33,700 Jews were shot at Babi Yar over 48 hours beginning Sept. 29, 1941. In the ensuing months, the ravine was filled with an estimated 100,000 bodies, among them those of non-Jewish residents of Kiev and Red Army prisoners of the Nazis.

Experts said the proposal demonstrated the need to create a government-sponsored memorial complex to properly honor the tragedy.

Babi Yar today has the air of a forgotten memorial. The killings took place in a huge ravine in central Kiev that stretched for several miles; the area as of now is neither fenced nor properly marked. Seven different monuments are there, but experts say they are not linked into a coherent memorial of remembrance. Children play in a park where one monument stands. Across the street, commuters rush past a busy metro station.

"People don't know how to behave themselves, because they don't understand that they are on the territory of a memorial complex," said Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "Babi Yar is not just Jewish history, it's also the history of Ukraine."

Government plans to create a more comprehensive memorial around Babi Yar are still on the drawing board, experts say. Officials at the State Remembrance Institute, which oversees the planned memorial, were not available for comment Monday.

MSNBC

Jews decry hotel plan for Nazi massacre site

The nazis in action at Babi Yar

Jewish groups have condemned a plan to build a hotel at Babi Yar, the site of the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews, on Kiev's edge.

Lawmakers said Kiev's city council approved a plan last week to build dozens of hotels in the next decade - including a three-star hotel to house visiting football fans for Euro 2012 - on what a Babi Yar scholar said was a killing field.

Babi Yar is one of the most sensitive sites for Ukrainian Jews. More than 33,700 Jews were rounded up and shot at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine over two days in late September 1941. In the ensuing months, the sprawling ravine was filled with an estimated 100,000 bodies, among them those of non-Jewish Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners of the Nazis.

The hotel proposal, discussed at a closed council meeting last week, has been described to Ukrainian and Israeli media by a member of Kiev's council, Serhy Melnik, a political opponent of the city's mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky. Mr Melnik told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that 67 of Kiev's city councillors had approved the hotel plan without knowing what they were voting for.

According to Mr Melnik, the Babi Yar site has been included in a list of dozens of the city's parks and other open spaces earmarked for possible construction of hotels to house the hundreds of thousands of football supporters expected for the competition, to be co-hosted with Poland. The decision has attracted controversy in the Israeli media and angered some members of Kiev's council - not least Mr Melnik, who is using the issue to attack the council leadership.

Jewish women await their turn to be slaughtered at Babi Yar

While the council has admitted that a development plan exists for Euro 2012, it has so far refused to discuss details. The controversy has been clouded by the fact the area already has an underground station and some other buildings - structures that some leaders of the city's Jewish community believe should not have been built.

They said there were two issues at stake. First, the proposed new hotel would probably be built in an area that many have been campaigning for years to have designated as a national memorial to the massacre. The second issue is of consistency. Kiev's chief rabbi, Yakov Bleich, said when Jewish community members proposed building a museum and religious complex in that area in 2006, their plans ran into city opposition.

''What we know,'' Rabbi Bleich said, ''is that a resolution was passed by the city council for a hotel in Babi Yar. There is an underground [station] already there and no one screamed. But perhaps people should have screamed.''

The Soviet Union discouraged any remembrance that singled out the Jewish character of a large part of the atrocity, a fact that inspired Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 dissident poem Babi Yar, and Dmitri Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony No. 13, based on the poem. Only in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a memorial unveiled for the Jewish victims, most of whom perished in two days and nights of killing on September 29 and 30, 1941.

Although Babi Yar is most remembered for that massacre, the Nazis used the ravine for mass murder until they retreated from the Soviet Union. In all, it is estimated that 70,000 to 120,000 people were killed there.

The Age

I'll bring Nazi to justice

The ID card for hell: This document allowed John
Demjanjuk into his training camp in Trawniki in Poland

Kurt Gutmann was only a boy when he was spirited away from the horrors of Sobibor to seek refuge among kind strangers in Scotland. His mother and brother were among those left behind, soon to become victims of an atrocity that would claim tens of thousands of lives.

But more than seven decades after his escape aboard the Kindertransport, Mr Gutmann is to realise his life's ambition by testifying in one of the last Nazi war criminal trials.

The German Jew, who went on to fight alongside the Black Watch in his occupied homeland, has been chosen as one of eight co-plaintiffs who will take the stand against John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. There, it is alleged, Demjanjuk helped to preside over the murders of 27,900 people.

The 89-year-old was extradited from the US earlier this year after a legal battle that lasted decades. He continues to deny the charges, claiming he spent much of the war as a PoW. Prosecutors in Munich, however, say they will present a wealth of evidence at October's trial, placing Ukraine-born Demjanjuk at the camp in occupied Poland.

For Mr Gutmann, the trial presents a final opportunity to find justice for those loved ones he parted from long ago.

"It is the last thing I wish for," said the 82-year-old, who has had three heart bypass operations. "Perhaps I don't have much more time. But I still want to experience one more thing – just punishment for John Demjanjuk. He and his cohorts killed my family. I despise the man because he was a willing accomplice to murder and later dreamed up all sorts of excuses about what he did. I want to look into those eyes and tell him what he took from me."

The former translator was not yet a teenager when he stood on the platform of Mühlheim railway station in Germany's industrial Ruhr on 23 June, 1939. It was the scene of his last farewell to mother, Jeanette, and elder brother Hans, 21. His father had died when he was just one.

Mr Gutmann said: "I remember my mother kissing me, wrapping me in her arms and then saying, 'Look after yourself, my son, and please try to get us over there'. They were the last words I ever heard from her. She got me away because I was under 16. The Nazis wouldn't let Hans go."

With no choice, the 12-year-old embarked on a journey made by about 10,000 Jewish children between 1938 and 1939. His other brother, Fritz, had travelled the same route and was by then at the Getrude Jacobson Orphanage in Scotland's largest city.

He recalls: "The Scottish people were so lovely to me. I had come from a country where I was a fifth-class citizen, kicked out of grammar school because I was a Jew, unable to sit on park benches, spat at in the street. These strangers took me to their hearts. I will forever be in their debt."

The teenager spent a year at the orphanage before moving to Annan in Dumfriesshire and then on to Skelmorlie in Ayrshire, where he lived for two years at a Jewish hostel, before returning to Glasgow. Around the same time, in 1942, it later emerged, Jeanette and Hans were transported from Germany to a labour camp called Izbica, near Lublin, Poland. Some time before the end of the year, both were murdered there.

Back in Scotland, Mr Gutmann, now 17, had volunteered as an infantryman with the Black Watch. He was based in Lockerbie, before going to Germany in 1945 as a member of the British forces. He later settled in Berlin.

Mr Gutmann, who this week visits Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen on holiday, acknowledges that this autumn's trial will be a test.

"It won't be easy," he said. "My wife thinks it might be too much. But I have to do this. I am doing it for my mother and brother. I want to see the last great criminal of that war get what he deserves."

Scotsman

Four nazis arrested at anti-BNP protest

The image is blurry but you can still see these nazi twats sieg-heiling

North West UAF held a vibrant and noisy protest outside the BNP's 'Victory Rally' today. Exactly how many of their party attended the rally is unclear. But it is interesting that there was no sign of them at the hotel windows, no display of numbers or any celebration.

Just over 100 people from around the region took part in the protest; which was great, given that there were only a few days in which to organise and publicise it. Banners included those from Blackpool Trades Council; Blackpool and Fylde College UCU; Greater Manchester UAF and the local PCS.

Several speakers addressed the crowd and onlookers on the promenade. Points made included: why we say 'no platform for Nazis'; the fact that they are virulently homophobic as well as racist; the level of misogyny within the party and ended with a promise to Griffin that wherever he tries to appear publicly in the North West, we will be there too. Speakers talked about the fact that anti-fascists represent the majority and that UAF will organise protests to outnumber and oppose the Nazi BNP wherever they try to organise.

Andrew Wheatley, from Blackpool Trades Council, emphasised that, despite Griffin winning the North West seat, the BNP do not represent the majority of people in the area. Pete Marsden, of Blackpool UNISON, speaking in a personal capacity, criticised the “British Jobs for British Workers” slogan which had benefited the BNP.

Jain Gawn, of Blackpool and Fleetwood Unite Against Fascism, talked of the legacy of fighting Fascism in Britain, including the Battle of Cable Street and the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Jain also cited the recent attacks in Belfast as an example of where racism leads. Other speakers included Dione Bough of UNISON, Independent Socialist Councillor Michael Lavalette, and others.

Weyman Bennett, joint-national secretary of UAF, called for people to attend the demonstration against the Nazis’ “Red, White and Blue” event in August, while Dave Sewell of Manchester University Students Union spoke about the need to continue a No Platform position against the BNP.

Off to the clink we go...

There was anti-nazi representation from across the North-West, with protestors from Blackpool and Fleetwood, Lancaster, Wigan, Preston, Liverpool, Kendal, Manchester, Barrow, and elsewhere, and representation from the North West’s LGBT community.

A letter was read out from the two Blackpool MP’s, Joan Humble and Gordon Marsden, which had been sent to the New Kimberley Hotel, opposing the Hotel’s hosting of BNP events, stating “The Nazis too deceived, frightened and scapegoated people – just the same as the BNP try to do. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that many BNP activists try to deny the Holocaust.”

Unfortunately, the rally was not entirely free from Nazis. Several of them came out of the hotel to harass people. This is a new development for BNP gatherings in Blackpool and was obviously born out of a new confidence they've gained since the elections. We will have to make sure that that confidence is short lived. While many of their thugs lolling around in gangs were dressed in suits, a small group of skins sauntered over in ‘nationalist’ t-shirts and started sieg-heiling at the crowd (with a wall and cops in between, to protect themselves, obviously). Whilst this was met with fury and much shouting, no on attempted to physically attack them. Instead we slowly moved them on along the prom.

It was quite obvious that the episode was orchestrated purely to provoke us into a violent response. When the old Nazi salute didn't cause anyone to loose control and attack them, they started chanting the names of concentration camps, as a taunt. As they descended into a tirade of racial abuse the police intervened and four of them were arrested. It would be hard to find a clearer example of the fact that the BNP is a haven for hardcore, unreconstructed, Nazis.

Some of the crowd at the demo

As time went on we noticed small groups of thugs strategically positioned down the promenade. Like vultures they were gathering in order to pick people off as they left the protest. It was agreed that the best way to avoid anyone getting hurt was to leave the area outside the hotel together as a group. With the numbers involved, this became a demonstration in its own right. We marched down the prom singing and chanting.

While it was depressing to see them so confident and closer to our demo than in other years it is important to bear the following in mind: anti-fascists are by far the majority; it looks like we had far more people outside that hotel than they had inside it and while we can march through the streets, they can't. It is going to be a long, hard summer making sure that this remains the case. They've got their seats in Europe, but that does not mean we have to allow them the chance to take over our public places. As their 'Victory Rally' was such a flop, they’re likely to try again at the Red, White and Blue gathering. We need to make sure they have nothing to celebrate when they get there!