UN marks 60th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

[Rudey]

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

[Senusret I]

Thanks for posting this, Rudey.

[Rudey]

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

[PhiPsiRuss]

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.

[RACooper]

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.

[Rudey]

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

[Rudey]

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

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



-Rudey

[honeychile]

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.

[RUgreek]

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

[RACooper]

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.

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.

[honeychile]

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

[RUgreek]

Originally posted by RACooper
While it's a valid opinion I don't think it's exactly true

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

[Rudey]

Originally posted by RACooper
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.

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

-Rudey

[RACooper]

Originally posted by Rudey
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?

[Rudey]

Originally posted by RACooper
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