UN marks 60th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation
 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/530948.html

UN marks 60th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Staff and Agencies



"The brutal extermination of a people began not with guns or tanks but with words systematically portraying the Jews and others as not legitimate, something less than human," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, as the UN member states gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Shalom said one would never know if the United Nations, created after World War Two, could have prevented the Holocaust. But he said the United Nations as well as each individual member state needed "to rededicate ourselves to ensuring that it will never happen again."

Speaking ahead of Shalom, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told those at Monday's session in New York that the UN must not forget that it was created as a result of the evil of Nazism.

"The camps were not mere concentration camps," said Annan as he opened the session. "Let us not use the euphemism of those who built them. Their purpose was not to concentrate a group in one place so as to keep an eye on them, it was to exterminate an entire people."

"Only gradually did the world come to know the full dimension of the evil those camps contained," Annan told the Assembly. "The discovery was fresh in the minds of the delegates in San Fransisco when this organization [the UN] was founded.

"The United Nations must never forget that it was created as a response to the evil of Nazism, or the horror of the Holocaust helped to create its mission. That response is enshrined in...the universal declaration of human rights."

Annan also mentioned gypsies, prisoners of war, mentally and physically handicapped people, homosexuals and artists who were all killed by the Nazis "in cold blood."

"To all these we owe respect, which we can show by making special efforts to protect all communities that are similarly threatened... now and in the future," Annan said.

Annan described the Jews who were killed as a nation who contributed far beyond its numbers to the cultural and intellectual riches of Europe and the world.

He asked how could such evil happen in a cultured and highly sophisticated nation-state in the heart of Europe whose artists and thinkers had given the world so much. "All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing," he said, quoting 18th century English philosopher Edmund Burke.

"The purveyors of hatred, were not always and may not be in the future, only marginalized extremists," Annan said.

The UN chief quoted Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, saying, "Not all victims were Jews but all Jews were victims."

Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, also questioned the actions of the Nazis. "How could intelligent educated men, or simply law-abiding citizens, ordinary men, fire machine guns at hundreds of children every day" and "in the evening" read Schiller and listen to Bach, he said.

Speaking immediately after Annan, Wiesel mourned the loss of life and loss to humanity caused by the Holocaust. Who knows, he asked, whether one of the million and a half Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust could have won a Noble Prize of his own, or discovered a cure for cancer.

"When speaking about that era of darkness, the witness encounters difficulties... for there are no words to describe what the victims felt when death was the norm and life a miracle," he said.

"If the world had listened we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," Wiesel told the assembly.

"We know that for the dead it is too late. For them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory did come much too late," Wiesel said. "But it is not too late for today's children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness."

The author drew attention to the indifference of the West during the war to accept more refugees, allow more Jews to go to Israel, or bomb the railway lines to the large Auschwitz-Birkenau camp site where more than 1 million people - most of them Jews - were gassed to death or died of starvation and disease.

"In those times those who were there felt not only tortured, murdered by the enemy but also by what we considered to be the silence and indifference of the world," Wiesel said. "Now, 60 years later, the world at least tries to listen."

The special all-day session, defined Sunday as an historic event, was attended by the representatives of 30 senior UN member states and leading intellectuals.

The event had been meticulously planned to ensure the international community would rally around it and be fully represented at the session.

Among the participants are the foreign ministers of European countries, including German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn. Luxembourg is now serving as president of the European Union. The foreign ministers of France, Canada, Argentina and others have also announced their participation.

The special session, held in the UN building in New York, was the product of extensive diplomatic efforts on the part of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israel's UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman said Monday that the special session was the most meaningful UN event which involves Israel since the state was founded in 1948.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is representing Israel, while U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz is there on behalf of the United States.

The speakers were also to include U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos, who was saved by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary.

The climax of the session was expected to be a cantor chanting the Hebrew prayer mourning prayer "El Malei Rachamim" - the first time a Jewish prayer has been uttered in the General Assembly. The cantor was also to sing Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah."

In an extraordinary step, Annan called a special press conference together with General Assembly President Jean Ping from Gabon and Gillerman. The press conference is viewed as a special effort on Annan's part to stress the importance of the General Assembly session and the reason for holding it, "since the United Nations was founded as the world was learning the full horror of the camps."

"This solemn and highly significant occasion should be seen as an expression of our commitment to build a United Nations that can respond quickly and effectively to genocide and other serious violations of human rights," Annan said.

Commentators noted the importance of the occasion in spite of its purely symbolic nature. "Let us not forget that this General Assembly hall that will hear 'El Malei Rachamim,' and 'Hatikvah' will be heard is the same hall that the resolution was passed by a large majority that compared Zionism to racism, which was seen as the international community questioning Israel's right to exist," one Jewish leader involved in preparing the program said.

-Rudey

Thanks for posting this, Rudey.

France and Germany vow to 'never forget' Nazi crimes
 

France and Germany vow to 'never forget' Nazi crimes

By News Agencies

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder vowed Tuesday that his country would live up to its "moral obligation" to keep alive the memory of the Nazis' crimes, as he paid tribute Tuesday to the victims of the Auschwitz death camp, liberated 60 years ago this week.

In France, President Jacques Chirac inaugurated an expanded Holocaust Memorial in Paris, promising dozens of Nazi death camp survivors that France would "never forget."

Between one million and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews - perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Overall, six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

The memory of the Nazi genocide "is part of our national identity," Schroeder said. "Remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation - we owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves."

"It is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb to it," the German chancellor promised.

Germany's national Holocaust memorial, sited next to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, is due to open in May, and the chancellor said it would serve as "a signal against forgetting."

He also stressed that German leaders would protect the country's growing Jewish community "with the power of the state against the anti-Semitism of the incorrigible."

"That there is still anti-Semitism cannot be denied," Schroeder said. "Fighting it is the task of all society."

German President Horst Koehler will represent Germany on Thursday when world leaders gather at the death camp site in Poland to mark its January 27, 1945, liberation by the Red Army.

"History haunts our consciences," Chirac said at the Paris memorial housing a crypt with Auschwitz victims' ashes, walls inscribed with the names of France's 76,000 deported Jews and the largest center of Holocaust documentation in Europe.

"It gives us a never-ending duty" to be vigilant, he said. "Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It is a perversion, a perversion that kills."

Chirac was, in 1995, the first French president to acknowledge the French collaborated with their German occupiers between 1940 and 1944. He said on Tuesday that France must pass on the memory of the crimes against the Jews from generation to generation.

"The chain must never be broken," he told a crowd of about 70 survivors and scores of Jewish leaders, representatives of other religions, politicians and celebrities.

The duty to remember Auschwitz committed France to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms and support Israel in its right to exist, and the Jewish state, the Palestinians and all their neighbors in the search for peace, he said.

"I have rarely heard such a perfect speech," enthused Jacques Goldstein, 85, who was sent to Auschwitz with his wife Madeleine, separated from her and reunited in Paris in 1945.

"He said everything that I think as a survivor, a Frenchman and a Jew," he said. "He touched on all the errors of the Vichy government and on the existence of Israel and its neighbors."

"There can be no compensation for the scale of the horror, the torture and the suffering that took place in the concentration camps," Schroeder said at an event at a Berlin theater, organized by the International Auschwitz Committee.

France's Holocaust Memorial, opened as the Memorial for the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1953, was expanded with funds from dormant bank accounts left behind by Holocaust victims.

Located in Paris' old Jewish quarter, it has a permanent exhibition, extensive documents and multimedia facilities. In addition to the new marble walls naming the deportees, it will open another wall with names of non-Jewish French who hid Jews during the war. Three-quarters of France's Jews survived, mostly by hiding in rural areas.

-Rudey

Re: UN marks 60th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation
 

Thanks for posting this. Most people are completely oblivious, or don't want to be upset with the details. Its not pleasant, but the Holocaust has to be remembered.

George Santayana's famous warning that "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" was never more poignant than when discussing the Holocaust.

Up here the CBC covered the whole UN ceremony live... it's too bad other news networks didn't at least do a "segment" of 1/2 hour at least showing the personal accounts of the survivor and the liberator.

Red Army liberators recall shock of Auschwitz

By News Agencies



When Anatoly Shapiro commanded his Red Army troops to secure a concentration camp complex in Auschwitz 60 years ago, he had no idea he was about to discover the biggest Nazi killing machine.

Approximately 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, perished in the Nazi death camp, situated in what is now southern Poland, before the Soviet soldiers arrived on January 27, 1945.

"We came upon groups of people in striped uniforms. They were no more than skeletons. They were unable to talk. They had a blank look in their eyes," the 92-year-old Shapiro told Reuters.

"We told them we were the Red Army and had come to free them. They began to feel our uniforms as if they didn't believe us. We washed and clothed them and began to feed them," said Shapiro, whose speech will be aired in Krakow during Thursday's commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

When the advancing Soviet army reached Auschwitz only about 7,000 prisoners remained in its wooden barracks.

The rest were already marched out or dispatched by train in a desperate attempt by the Nazis to cover up evidence of the mass killings.

"We saw everything. The chambers used to gas the prisoners, ovens where the bodies were burned. We saw the piles of ash. Some of my men approached me and said 'Major, we cannot stand this. Let's move on'," Shapiro said in a phone interview from his New York home.

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, alongside 40 leaders including France's Jacques Chirac and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, take part in ceremonies in Auschwitz.

Ukraine's newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko, son of an Auschwitz prisoner, will also attend.

Koptev Gomolov, who was 18 when his division liberated Auschwitz, recalls that among the "starved and exhausted" prisoners he saw one waving a makeshift red flag.

"First we didn't understand. Later we found out people had sewn it from pieces of red material and cloths they found. When they heard explosions from the cannons they guessed the Red Army is coming," said Gomolov.

At a tragic cost for Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the Holocaust's deadliest death camp, and most of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

With 9 million Red Army soldiers killed in World War Two, Shapiro said history was clear: "I can say with conviction that the Red Army was an army of liberation. No one can deny that or take that distinction away."

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church called Wednesday for remembrance of Jewish and other victims who died at Auschwitz.

Patriarch Alexy II said that not a single family in the countries of the former Soviet Union was left untouched by the World War II. As well as the millions of Soviet soldiers killed during the war, at least 16 million civilians died of starvation and at the hands of Nazi troops occupying Soviet territory - many in Nazi concentration camps.

"Today we also remember the Jewish people whom the Nazis tried to wipe from the face of the earth. Thanks be to God that He halted the hands of the executioners who planned the most monstrous genocide in history," Alexy said in a statement.

"Thinking of those who died during the years of war hardships, I offer my prayer that the tragedy of world war will not be repeated. For this, it is necessary to learn well the lessons of the past," he said.

-Rudey

This is a picture gallery that I saw on Haaretz News:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/G...tml?groupId=32

http://www.haaretz.com/hasite/images..._240105_ap.jpg

-Rudey

Has anyone else been watching the History Channel's three part series on Auschwitz? There are a lot of survivor interviews, which I find the best part (being into family histories). I applaud them, Steven Speilberg's Shoa, and any other program that gets survivors on tape, putting a real, personal face onto the Holocaust.

I grew up in such a white-bread world, the first time I saw a Holocaust film, it seemed unreal - then I realized that these were real people, not actors, and that they weren't going to get up for the next take. Seeing the survivors in color just makes it more real for others like me, who were so astounded that it just couldn't really be happening.

Sharon: ‘No one cared’ about Holocaust
 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6870869/


Israeli leader says lesson is Jews can only rely on themselves

The Associated Press
Updated: 11:57 a.m. ET Jan. 26, 2005

JERUSALEM - In a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that the world “didn’t lift a finger” to stop the Holocaust.

In unusually harsh remarks to parliament, Sharon noted that when the Nazis began deporting Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in large numbers in 1944, Allied forces did not bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Sharon said that over a period of several weeks, more than 600,000 Jews from Hungary were killed in Auschwitz.

“The sad and terrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being killed,” Sharon said.

“At the time of the most terrible test, friends and benefactors didn’t lift a finger,” he said. “This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust.”

“The state of Israel has learned this lesson, and since its founding, it has defended itself and its residents, and provides safety to Jews everywhere. We know that we can only rely on ourselves,” he said.

For this reason, Israel as the Jewish state must always remain strong, Sharon said.

“We must always remember that this is the only place in the world in which we, the Jews, have the right and the power to defend ourselves with our own strength,” Sharon said. “This we will never surrender.”

Even 60 years after Auschwitz was liberated, anti-Semitism still exists throughout the world, Sharon said.

_______________________________________________

Damn right, I agree...


RUgreek

While it's a valid opinion I don't think it's exactly true - yes the Allies could have bombed the railroad tracks, but that would have entailed the commitment of forces devoted to fighting the Axis.
Further the difficulty that the Allies had even striking at "military" targets within Hungary (or anywhere really in Eastern Europe or the Balkans) was pretty high as well.

The arguement that Churchill used was that destroying the Nazi war machine was the quickest way to save or liberate those being hunted by the Nazis.

Rudey, I think you'll find that a vast majority of evangelical believing Christians pray for the peace of Jerusalem and her people.

It's a fact not opinion that they didn't bomb the tracks, there really isn't much to theorize on that area.

6 million people would beg to differ if they were alive today.

-Rudey

Yes 6 million died... but how many more would have died if the Allies had diverted military assets away from combat missions? How many more would have been killed if the Nazis had remained in power longer?

Who says more people would have died if just a few planed bombed railroad tracks??? Please tell us. Please tell us how many more death camps would have been set up to kill more people had those "Assets" been diverted.

How many more people would have died if the Allied countries had opened their doors to allow those running away from the genocide?

And, really how many more people would have died had the Nazis ever held power?

And how about the actual events of the holocaust being revealed so late to people? Was that a drain on resources??

And when some church and religious leaders accepted the genocide and murder, was that to save assets?

-Rudey

This was a day of rememberance, so let's not make this another hate thread leading to everyone getting up in arms over what the allies could of should of done. The simple fact is that they didn't bomb these areas and many lost their lives as a result. We don't know why they decided this was the right course of action, but it's clear that the death camps were not high on the priority list.

With the growth of anti-semitism, Prince Harry's little joke, and renewed violence in the middle east, there is plenty more to look at today to fix rather than examining who to blame in the past. They should of done something then and I think Sharon is right, the Jewish people need to depend on themselves in order to survive.

Don't forget what hell on earth was for these people in Auschwitz and the other camps.

I wasn't debating the uterlly despicable nature and horror of the Holocaust - nor was I trying to gloss over the actions of those involved - nor was I trying to distract from the callous and anti-Semitic actions taken by nations in turning away refugees... what I was countering was Sharon's claim that because the Allies didn't specifically target the tranportation networking leading to the death camps, that the Allies didn't care - because thats a sad falsehood to spread.

The Allies were bombing railways and railyards - attacking the transportation hubs of the Axis to cripple their suppy and support network - all designed to weaken their military power and industry, thereby (hopefully) hastening the end of the war. Unfortunately, the death camps, by their somewhat secretive nature were located away from major population, transportation, and industrial hubs - so the transportation network supporting the camps was not actively targeted by the Allies. The sad (and disgusting) truth is that the camps and their supply network were most likely seen as a drain on the already stretched Axis supply and tranport network - attacking or halting them would have freed up resources that could have been used on the front... a cold extension of the land-mine pricinple of crippling not wounding, all in a effort to tie up enemy resources and man power.:(

I personally think Sharon is wrong in advocating that Israel and Jews must rely solely on themselves - as a nation and people they are part of the world community, a community that should never forget or forgive what happened, and a community that should work together to ensure this. Sharon's statements smacked of a politically motivated message, a particularlly slanted interpretation of history, to support his policies, in effect using the Holocaust for his own political benifit - and that is why I disagreed with his statment.

you can debate the past until you are blue in the face. the important thing is to not forget....ever.

Rwanda remembers the Holocaust
By Robert Walker
BBC correspondent in Kigali

As the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz is being remembered across the world, one place where this is particularly poignant is in Rwanda - a country still coming to terms with its own trauma.

After World War II, when the full horror of the Jewish Holocaust was revealed, the world said: "Never again".

But in 1994 an extremist Hutu government in Rwanda began the systematic slaughter of the minority Tutsis.

It is estimated some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days as the rest of the world stood by.

On a hill in the Rwandan capital Kigali a memorial stands to those killed in the genocide.

Mass graves contain anywhere up to 250,000 people and inside a specially constructed building there are displays teaching a new generation of Rwandans about what happened in 1994.

Systematically eliminated

But it is not only the Rwandan genocide which is remembered here.

There are exhibitions about other mass killings during the past century, of the Namibian Herero people, the Armenians and of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Teddy Mugabo lost her grandparents and many other relatives in 1994. Like other Rwandan students visiting the memorial, she is now also learning about the Holocaust.

"It shows how the Nazis started segregating people and it shows the way they measured the nose and eyes to show that they are different people.

"In Rwanda when they were killing Tutsis they did the same thing. They measured the nose. They were measuring the eyes, heights and it is very similar."

Like the Jews during the Holocaust, Tutsis in Rwanda were systematically eliminated because of their identity.

Blaming ethnic strife

In the aftermath of both genocides, the world said: "Never again".

But many Rwandans who saw UN troops stand aside in 1994 are sceptical that the world would act differently today.

Tom Ndahiro of the Rwandan Human Rights Commission says western countries are still not ready to prevent genocide in African countries - unless their national interests are at stake.

"What Nato did in former Yugoslavia was different from what it did on Darfur or in Rwanda.

"When it happens to Rwanda - [there's a] sense of saying: 'Well it's the Rwandans - savages, tribal warfare, ethnic strife.' And it's nonsense."

But the organisers of Kigali's memorial hope that by teaching new generations the painful history of the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust the promises of "Never again" really will be kept next time.


1994: RWANDA'S GENOCIDE
6 April: Rwandan Hutu President Habyarimana killed when plane shot down
April -July: An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed
July: Tutsi-led rebel movement RPF captures Rwanda's capital Kigali
July: Two million Hutus flee to Zaire, now the DRC
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/image...prwanda203.jpg

The sad thing is that genocide never really ended, despite the lessons of the Holocaust. It will never be known how many were killed under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979--but it's estimated at around 1.4 million dead in a nation of 9 million. There is a former death camp in Phnom Penh where someone started a list of nations that suffered genocides. That list continues to grow.

This is a thread to remember Auschwitz. I'd appreciate it if you took the non-sense elsewhere.

-Rudey

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...nal/27ausc.jpg


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/in...rtner=homepage

Leaders Gather to Mark Liberation of Auschwitz


By CRAIG S. SMITH

Published: January 27, 2005

KRAKOW, Poland, Jan. 27 - The presidents of Russia, Poland, Israel and Ukraine, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and other world leaders, joined about 500 invited guests in a theater here today to commemorate the freeing of thousands of people from the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp 60 years ago.

Each of the leaders spoke in turn, at a forum sponsored by the European Jewish Congress and Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, about the need to keep awareness of the Holocaust alive after the last of its aging survivors have died.

Several also warned against the resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe.

"We call upon the European Union not to allow Nazism to life in the imagination of the youth of Europe like some kind of horror show," President Moshe Katsav of Israel said, adding the allies "did not do enough" to prevent the killing of Jews in World War II.

As many as 1.5 million people, including 1 million Jews, met their death at the Auschwitz complex, which included three main camps and 39 smaller camps 40 miles southwest of Krakow. Most were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the second of the main camps, that has come to symbolize the much broader Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke proudly of the Soviet soldiers who gave themselves for the liberation of Auschwitz.

"They switched off the ovens, they saved Krakow," he said. But he also said there was still much to be ashamed of in the current situation.

"We unfortunately still see signs of anti-Semitism in our country," he said.

A group of Russian nationalist legislators recently called for a ban on Jewish groups in the former communist state.

President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland presented medals to three surviving Red Army soldiers who took part in the liberation of Auschwitz.

Survivors, several wearing the coarse blue and white caps from their prison uniforms, dotted the crowd.

The commemoration, the largest ever, marks the liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

The ceremony this year has an air of urgency as Jewish organizations work to ensure that awareness of the Holocaust persists after living memories of it die. This is likely to be the last major anniversary to be attended by both camp survivors and their liberators, all of whom are now in their 90's.

Leaders at the forum sought commitments from European leaders to institutionalize the teaching of the Holocaust, drawing on educational programs and materials developed by Yad Vashem.

"The numbers of world leaders coming and the readiness of the media to follow the commemoration is greater than before" with "a new anti-Semitism building in Europe," said the head of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, arguing that without a systematic approach to teaching about the Holocaust, its meaning for future generations may fade. "We need a concrete commitment out of this ceremony."

That commitment is all the more critical now because a growing number of Europe's young Muslims are resisting, even rejecting, efforts to teach them about the Holocaust, arguing that there is not enough attention paid to the killing of innocent Muslims by Israel or the United States-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Teachers are reluctant to teach about the Holocaust in some schools, particularly in France, Belgium and Denmark. Mr. Shalev said that most of his organization's educational exchanges with France are now with the country's private Jewish institutions.

A recent string of anti-Semitic attacks across Europe and other unsettling events, such as the widely publicized photograph of Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, wearing a Nazi uniform at a costume party earlier this month and a walkout by far-right German legislators during a minute's silence for Nazi victims on Friday, have raised concerns that the horrors of the Holocaust are being forgotten.

-Rudey

Please pardon the tiny, but related, hijack.

As a sidebar to their coverage, CNN last night played the recording of Edward R. Murrow's broadcast from Buchenwald shortly after its liberation.

Pretty damned dramatic.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...=1008596975996

Auschwitz survivor tells his tale
By SHIRA TEGER

Marvin Mayer, formerly Schmidmayer, does not want the Holocaust forgotten.

Like many survivors, he fears that in 20 – 30 years when he is gone, the Holocaust will be relegated to history books.

So for years, Mayer has been speaking in high schools around the New York area and has accompanied groups to Poland on The March of the Living, telling his personal tale of the horrors of the Holocaust.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Mayer told his story to The Jerusalem Post.

Marvin Mayer was just a teen in 1944 when the Nazis invaded his town of Bistritz, in Romania. The family fled their home in Dumitra in 1940 after pogroms destroyed their windows and tore down their doors. So the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was not a new reality they had to face.

However, the trials the family suffered were entirely new. After a brief stint in a ghetto, the family was shipped off to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mayer's mother was 46 when she was killed that first night in Birkenau, most likely because she wanted to attend to an ailing neighbor that was taken with them.

Mayer spent about seven months in Auschwitz with his father, marching daily to work in a furniture factory right outside of the camp, where the prisoners made beautiful bedroom sets for SS officers. An orchestra accompanied the group as they left.

In January, before the Russians liberated the camp, Mayer and his father were taken out on a death march. They trudged by night through the knee-deep snow for four or five days, resting in forests during the daytime and subsisting off of nearly nothing.

Twenty thousand people died on that march; people were shot every few seconds. Mayer is still shocked by the sheer numbers, calling the murder of 20,000 people in four nights "mind boggling." He attributes his survival to his father: "If not for my father, I would not be here."

While other people would lie down in the snow to sleep, Mayer and his father would sleep hugging each other back-to-back. His father informed him that if they were to lie down in the snow, they would catch pneumonia and die.

On the fifth night, the remaining prisoners arrived at Gros Rosen. They were there for about two weeks, and according to Mayer, "it was just a horror." They were given only coffee for nourishment, and the ground was more like muddy clay than anything else.

There, too, Mayer says his father saved him. They were all crammed into barracks with no room to lie down, but the Mayers got a spot by the window. That way, they could climb out to go to the bathroom and then climb back in.

From Gros Rosen, Mayer and his father were transported by open cattle car to Buchenwald. At the train station in Buchenwald, the prisoners remained in the cattle cars while the guards stood a small distance from them.

Mayer heard loud noises. "I looked up and saw a bunch of planes. They looked like silver birds." The planes began to swoop down and bomb the station. They did not strike the cattle cars, though. One of the bombs ripped open a wagon filled with cabbages. After days of starvation, Mayer wanted to jump down and eat some cabbage. His father held him back, though, telling him that cabbage on such an empty stomach would tear him apart. In fact, many of those who ate the cabbage died a short while later.

Mayer was in Buchenwald for a few days. By the time he arrived, his pants were torn at the knees. His father tied rags around him to keep him from freezing, and when one of the prisoners died in the barracks, Mayer's father traded his ration of one slice of bread and a slab of fat to for the dead man's clothing. "Even there, he bought me a pair of pants."

A few days after the purchase, there was a selection in the camp. Mayer was told to go to the left, his father to the right. That night, they were in separate barracks. Mayer cried to the Jewish guard of his barrack, begging for a chance to go say goodbye to his father. The next morning, the guard managed to get Mayer a pass to go to his father's barrack.

In Mayer's family, they had a custom that the father would bless the children every Yom Kippur. With his pass, Mayer went to his father. "He put his hands on my head. He blessed me," Mayer told The Jerusalem Post, trying to hold back his tears. "He said we'd see each other back at home."

That was the last time Mayer saw his father.

The next camp he was sent to was Bisingen, where he remained for two or three weeks, working in a mine trying to make oil from hot shale rock.

When the order came to evacuate the camp, Mayer had a choice to go by train to Daut Mergen, or to leave on foot. At the advice of some "older guys," Mayer went by foot. All those who had boarded the train were killed by machine gun strafing.

When the marchers reached a meadow, the German soldiers jumped into a truck, fleeing. Mayer could hear the shooting of the French army, not far away.

After that, Mayer spent time in a French displaced persons camp, and then in an American one. In the US camp, Mayer registered to go to America. He arrived in the US in 1947 and met Arlene, an opera singer who later became his wife.

His brother and sister, who also survived the war, live in Florida and Los Angeles, respectively.

After serving in the US Army training new recruits on guns for the Korean War, Mayer married Arlene and began his "43 year honeymoon."

The Mayers lived in New York, where Marvin taught woodworking in high schools. They have four children, three of whom live in the US, and one of whom lives in Modi'in, in Israel.

Arlene passed away in February 1996, and Marvin recently purchased an apartment in Modi'in. When he moves into it at the end of April, he will commence lecturing about the Holocaust in area high schools

-Rudey

Again with the petty dismissals of differing opinions... no matter the fact that I whole-heartedly agree with the rememberance of the Holocaust... an event humanity must never forget. A lesson that the world still has to learn, despite numerous examples of genocide - and the efforts of people to make others remember.

This should be solely about the rememberance of the horror of the Holocaust, and a rememberance of the lives cut short by the terror that man can inflict upon his fellow man - free from political grandstanding.

So as we remember the Holocaust, exemplified by the horror of Auschwitz... let us also remember the other terrible genocides commited by man.

For example this is unfortunately also the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide as well.

'I feel so ashamed for taking part'
Auschwitz survivor, 80-year-old Ima Spanjaard, remembers how her youth was interrupted when she was taken to the concentration camp in 1942, and forced to assist in some horrific experiments on other women prisoners.

The BBC's Vesna Maric spoke to her about her experiences. Some readers may find some of this material shocking.

There are things I will never forget: the soup, that lukewarm water of brownish colour that we had to eat every day at noon.

In the evening you got a piece of bread, just enough to make four very thin slices.

We ate two and saved two for the morning. They gave camphor to the prisoners to suppress their libido, but if you are that hungry you have no libido anyway. The hunger was unbearable.

Auschwitz was an enormous terrain, 40km on the ground, so you had to work there, building roads or barracks.

To do that for 10 hours a day and stand up for an hour in the morning and in the evening, especially with the kind of food we ate, made it impossible to survive for longer than a few weeks.

As I had some experience working as a dentist's assistant, they asked me to work as a nurse.

One day a Gestapo officer came to the camp and wanted to take 40 different women to Heidelberg in Germany.

I had been chosen to go, too, but a woman who liked me and knew what was going to happen to these women, crossed me off the list.

Those 40 women were injected in the heart, killed, and put in formaldehyde. Their bodies were used for medical experiments, for students to study on.

Horrible burns

There was a young Polish man in the camp who tattooed the numbers on our arms. He did it with a pen and some ink, dot after dot, like a child doing his homework.

So when he made a mistake, he would cross it out and start anew. A lot of people had this kind of mess on their arms.

When it was my turn I demanded: "Pay attention and do it as well as possible!" And then I began to laugh at my own absurdity, because when you are being gassed, it doesn't matter if it looks good or not.

My number is still visible, 42646, and beside it, the Star of David.

All experiments conducted on women were about sterilisation. There were beautiful young Greek girls, virgins, whose ovaries were x-rayed.

Ovaries can normally only be exposed to x-rays for a few seconds, but they did it for half a minute or longer.

The girls ended up with horrible burns. I had to look after them, but we had nothing but toilet paper and Hydrogen Peroxide to clean the wounds.

Two of them died, and six of them we managed to save. This went on for half a year.

Then they were operated on by a Polish prisoner, a gynaecologist. Another two girls died because he only used one set of instruments, which he never sterilised.

Fear and shame

Those who survived had their ovaries injected with a white liquid. After two months they came back to have a look again and see if they had completely destroyed the ovaries, as they had intended.


When you are in a situation like that, survival is your only engine, it is the most basic of instincts
They also caused cancer in some of the women by tipping the cervix with iodine. Then they would remove the cervix and the womb. The doctor who did this worked in a cancer institute in Berlin.

Around 80 women were operated on like this. I remember them well because I was told to administer their anaesthetic.

At that moment I was not so afraid to do this, but later on, after the war ended, I thought to myself: "What have I done?"

But there was no choice for me. I knew the moment I refused I would be sent to the gas chambers. And when you are in a situation like that, survival is your only engine, it is the most basic of instincts.

I still feel so very ashamed for taking part, even if it was not my choice.

Freedom

In 1945, the Germans took those who could walk to another camp. The ill were left behind. We walked for days in the coldest of Polish winters, in rugged shoes.

I got hypothermia in my feet and the sores still hurt when it gets cold in the winter. We were taken to three different camps in Germany and I could not walk anymore.

So my five friends and I decided to try to hide and stay behind. We hid in the dormitory beds, at the very back, knowing that the German soldiers never checked these beds.

I was afraid but my feet were so bad I couldn't carry on. They came, looked at the front, and left. And we were finally free.

We were found by some American soldiers near Leipzig. They looked for somewhere for us to live, and we stayed with peasant families, and slept in their room, all six of us.

We did nothing but eat for the first month. I remember my first meal: two hard boiled eggs. Nothing had any taste, the food was bland, but it did not matter to us, we ate relentlessly.

I will never forget the way bed sheets felt on my skin. It was as if I had never slept on sheets before.

I remember seeing the lovely gardens in front of the houses in the village, and how beautiful the roses were.

I love working in my own garden today. Sometimes, when I can't bring myself to do anything else, I dedicate myself to gardening.

It is like a therapy to me. Soon, my garden will be in bloom and my roses will shine with beauty.

From SF Chronicle

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...NG8MB16Q91.DTL

Auschwitz memories haunt survivors -- and a liberator
Freedom arrived 60 years ago today, but time is no salve

Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, January 27, 2005

The most infamous death camp in the history of humanity was liberated 60 years ago today.

It was Jan. 27, 1945. A day of emotion but devoid of joy.

Linda Breder spent three years in Auschwitz. From her home in San Francisco, Breder, 80, said with tears in her eyes, "No matter what I do in my life, no matter how many years go by, I am never far from Auschwitz." Her left arm bears the bluish identification tattoo she was given at the Nazi concentration camp. She was number 1173.

She was not there the day the camp was liberated. Instead, she was enduring yet another fight for her life: the forced march of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners rounded up by the retreating Germans the week before.

Naum Reznik, now 88 and living in Los Angeles, commanded one of the Soviet army units that liberated Auschwitz. Reznik spoke last week of the day he entered Auschwitz. He was a hardened veteran of four years of battle. But when he walked into Auschwitz, he thought he was entering the gates of hell.

Acrid ashes of human flesh floated in the air like waxy snowflakes. Skeletal prisoners greeted him with hollow stares. Signs of degradation were everywhere: in the piles of human bones, of hair, of eyeglasses, of clothing.

Liberator and liberated have never met. Reznik and Breder are connected by the place called Auschwitz, where more than 1.2 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other victims lost their lives. Today, political leaders from around the globe will gather at the site in Poland to remember what Italian writer and camp survivor Primo Levi called the "demolition of a man."

The story of liberation touches on both the deepest sufferings of man and the resiliency of the human spirit.

"The guards told us that we will only leave Auschwitz through the chimney, " said Breder, speaking slowly and deliberately in a Slavic accent. "I was determined to live because I wanted the world to know this story. While we were in the camp, the world was silent."

Breder feels the heaviness of unanswered questions. Where was God during the Holocaust? Why was the world quiet as Jews were exterminated by Germans? Why are humans capable of genocide?

In all, an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. In addition, about 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Gypsies and tens of thousands of political and religious dissidents, homosexuals and disabled people lost their lives to the Nazis. By the end of World War II, close to two out of every three European Jews had been killed as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution." The word Holocaust, Greek in origin, means "sacrifice by fire."

Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps. It has come to represent gruesome suffering, gratuitous cruelty and the systematic reduction of human beings to numbers. A sign on the gate of the camp -- today a museum -- is profane, ironic. It reads "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- work makes you free.

In the final months of the war, German concentration camps across Europe were liberated by Allied forces from the west and the Red Army from the east. Liberation brought an end to the daily degradation but not to the sights, sounds and smells of the war.

Auschwitz comes to Breder in unexpected moments. Riding Muni, her left arm clutching a handrail, she sees a man studying, without understanding, her tattoo. Hearing a certain musical score, she flashes to the sadistic marches in the snow, paced to the sound of German songs. Smelling barbecue, she cries.

Reznik carries a different set of memories. He did not live through Auschwitz but instead glimpsed the horrors like a witness to the detritus of a deadly pileup.

He has two small photos of Auschwitz, taken at liberation. One is of a crematory blown up by German soldiers as they fled the camp. The other is of the railway where Jews and other prisoners were unloaded like cattle to the slaughter. A line at the left would be for those who would die in the gas chamber. A line to the right was for those who would work.

On the back of one photo, Reznik wrote a note to his parents: "In this picture are the remains of a huge oven where the Germans burned the people in this camp of death. Here you can see huge piles of bones of those people. Among the bones were many burned Jewish prayer books." The back of the photo, in faded words written in Cyrillic Russian, is dated January 1945.

"The Germans tried to wipe out all of the signs that they had collected these people and killed them," Reznik said of actions taken in the weeks leading up to liberation.

"We believed the Germans were an educated nation," Reznik said. "We couldn't believe they were capable of bringing about this suffering."

Reznik was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and grew up in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia. After graduating from college, he entered the army at age 24. Reznik served for four years in World War II and engaged in some of the fiercest battles, including in Kursk and Stalingrad. Two of his three brothers were killed fighting the Germans. By war's end, Reznik had not only survived but had risen to the rank of commander of an artillery brigade.

In his small apartment in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, Reznik bears the wounds and the medals of the war. Still tall and formidable, he sat on a sofa in the living room recently, keeping a watchful gaze. His speaks little English, so his wife of 57 years, Sophia Reznik -- a former English teacher in Russia -- served as translator.

The two live in a Russian neighborhood near West Hollywood in an apartment complex inhabited mostly by Russians. They watch Russian television and read Russian newspapers.

Reznik said that when his unit arrived in Krakow, a city near Auschwitz, he began to hear from Poles of the suffering of Jews at the camp.

"When I heard about it, I wanted to go there," said Reznik, who is Jewish. "When we entered, we were just shocked. We saw people on the verge of dying. Some tried to raise a hand but didn't have any strength."

Prisoners told Reznik stories about the camp. They spoke in Polish and Hungarian and repeatedly asked: "What will happen to us? Where will we go? Where will we find refuge?"

Reznik said that an old man, dressed only in thin, striped pajamas, had taken him on a tour of the camp. The man said he would not leave the camp. He wanted to die where his wife and daughter had perished.

"This old man was our guide," Reznik said. "We saw barns that were the crematoriums. The Polish man wouldn't walk in there, but we did. There were slats on the floor where gas came out. We went to other barns and saw awful things, hair of all colors, blond, brown, red, black, piled to the ceiling. The hair was made into these perfect braids. We saw all kinds of shoes. The small shoes belonging to children. We saw piles of eyeglasses."

An estimated 7,000 inmates inhabited Auschwitz at the time of liberation. Tens of thousands of others had been forced out of the camp on death marches through the snow toward Berlin.

Reznik said his unit had come across hundreds of dead bodies along the roads leading in and out of camp. They were prisoners who apparently succumbed to the march, he said. The ones who remained in Auschwitz were too sick to leave or had chosen to stay.

Reznik was overcome with a deep sense of shame.

"We had a depressing feeling, a feeling of guilt due to our unforgivable slowness for liberating them," Reznik said. "Had we been there faster, we could have saved many lives."

After the war, Reznik moved to Moscow and resumed his studies. He became a professor of mechanical and agricultural engineering and taught at a scientific institute of agricultural machinery in Moscow. He has written four textbooks. The Rezniks moved to the United States in 1986 to provide a better life for their children.

They have three sons: a cardiologist, a computer engineer and a stem-cell researcher. Naum Reznik is head of a local association of Russian engineers and scientists, which meets every Friday near his home. He and his wife founded a Russian language library that bears his name and contains about 25, 000 titles. The library includes articles Reznik has written about the war and liberation.

In one article, Reznik wrote, "Our nation must mark the triumphs of the war as well as the bitter traumas of the Holocaust. To not know about this or to forget what happened is a crime, a sin for all humanity."

Walking through the small Russian library, Reznik said he considered it his duty to keep the "crimes of Germans" alive.

There is no forgetting for Linda Breder, who was the 173rd Jewish woman to enter Auschwitz. In 1939, all Jews living in Slovakia were forced from their homes and into a camp on the outskirts of town. On March 24, 1942, Breder was taken from her family. She was told she would go to Germany to work and earn money to send back home. Instead, she was sent to Auschwitz.

She never saw her father, stepmother, stepsister, three brothers and aunts and uncles again. Her sister survived in Hungary by carrying the fake papers of a Catholic.

Linda Breder doesn't know how she survived. She first worked in the fields around Auschwitz, spreading manure for fertilizer with her hands. She then worked in the cavernous room next to the crematorium, sorting through the belongings of those who were gassed.

She learned things no one should learn: that Greek prisoners hid jewelry and money in halva, a traditional sweet confection; that Jews sewed coins in clothing; that Eastern Europeans pushed valuables into lard.

She said there were 40 barracks full of the clothing of Jews and other inmates who had been put to death. Belongings were sent to the families of German soldiers. In a small act of rebellion, and one that surely would have gotten her killed had she been caught, Breder sewed the words, "Attention, you are wearing the clothes of a Jew" deep inside the fabric.

From her home in San Francisco's Sunset District, Breder talked of her experiences with harrowing detail and visible pain. Her husband of 58 years, Fridrich Breder, 86, also survived Auschwitz. As Fridrich Breder spoke, Linda Breder reached over and gently rolled back his left sleeve. It was a simple gesture of a wife caring for a husband. But with it came tears. On his forearm was the number given to him by the Nazis: 33034.

At Auschwitz, he was put to work as a bricklayer, building barracks and crematoriums. He grew so thin and weak that he planned suicide. He would throw himself against the high-voltage barbed-wire fence rather than be killed by the Germans. His body would join others on the fence, as it was a not an uncommon practice.

"I was a Musulmann," said Fridrich Breder, referring to the term used in the camps to describe men and women who were reduced to bones, many weighing less than 50 pounds. "I was so hungry I could only think of food." His suicide was averted when he was moved to another unit to work inside. He began to regain his strength.

Despite the horrors, Fridrich Breder has an easy, relaxed smile. He looks at his wife with a deep love.

The two met after the war, standing in a bread line in their native Slovakia. Linda Breder -- then Libusha Reich -- turned around and saw "a good-looking man." She laughed as she said this. She asked him where he was during the war, and he responded Auschwitz. She asked if he had any family left. He said no. Everyone had gone to the gas chambers.

The two began dating. He had a job as a baker and gave her warm, freshly baked bread. She said she didn't know if she was falling in love with the bread or the handsome Slovakian. They married six months later and now have two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Like Sophia and Naum Reznik, Linda and Fridrich Breder immigrated to the United States for their children. They came straight to San Francisco. Fridrich Breder found work at a Russian bakery. She got a job as a cleaning lady at a retirement home. Through saving and skimping, she eventually became the owner of the retirement center in San Francisco.

"I cherish that we had a chance to come to America and start a new life," she said, looking around her lovely home. Her husband spent 15 years working on the terraced backyard. It is his pride and joy.

But the bright sunlight filling the morning room was muted by memories that refuse to fade. As she thinks of liberation from camp, she remembers too much: the child who screamed for water and was executed by the German soldier; the freezing marches done in precise rows of five; the soldier who held target practice by having Jews stand with cans on their heads.

She holds her head in her hands and cries as she remembers the crematory. "It was burning day and night. The flames were so high. Fat-ashes fell on the camp. We were always smeared ... our faces ..." She cannot finish her sentence.

She instead asks a question that has haunted others. She went into the camp as an Orthodox Jew. For the first three months, she prayed for help, for survival, for a miracle. She eventually stopped praying. She hasn't prayed since.

She attends temple for the community and to meditate. She goes to whisper the names of loved ones who died at Auschwitz.

"The only grave they have is in my memory," she said. "I feel I lived to tell the story."

E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/01...itz2_169pc.jpg Linda Breder says a German photographer ordered prisoners to smile while their photos were taken. Breder is in the foreground. Photo courtesy of Linda Breder

AUSCHWITZ - 60 YEARS SINCE LIBERATION - Picture Gallery

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