Posted on 05/30/2003 3:27:35 PM PDT by fightinJAG
Bush to Visit Auschwitz Death Camp
Friday May 30, 2003 10:09 PM
By TONY CZUCZKA
Associated Press Writer
KRAKOW, Poland (AP) - President Bush starts his trip to Europe and the Middle East somberly - with a visit to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz meant to drive home the ``dangers of evil unchecked.''
In a rare visit for a U.S. president, Bush is to spend 1 hours Saturday at the vast site in southern Poland where more than 1 million people, 90 percent of them Jews, perished in the Holocaust.
Bush comes to Poland after the U.S.-led war to topple Saddam Hussein and just before his first high-profile foray into Middle East peacemaking.
``This visit is to honor the memory of the innocents lost in the terror of the Third Reich and the Holocaust and to serve to remind all of us of the dangers of evil unchecked,'' Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Wednesday.
Bush, who arrived in Poland Friday accompanied by his wife Laura, drew a parallel to terrorism in remarks before the trip, saying that ``terrorism and killing of innocent people is evil'' and that nations should stand united in fighting for ``peace and freedom.''
Bush will be only the second American president to visit Auschwitz, about 50 miles from the southern Polish city of Krakow, where he will give a foreign policy speech and meet Polish leaders later Saturday. Former President Gerald Ford visited in 1975, while Poland was under communist rule.
Bush is to enter the former death camp - now a museum - through the main gate with the chillingly German inscription ``Arbeit macht frei'' (Work makes you free).
Exhibits inside show heaps of human hair as well as suitcases and other personal items of the victims, who generally were shaved and stripped of their belongings after being brought in by train from all over Europe.
Most were sent directly to the gas chambers; others were pressed into slave labor by the Nazis, who occupied Poland in 1939 at the start of World War II.
Bush is to tour both parts of the camp: the Auschwitz section built by the Nazis in 1940 mainly for Polish prisoners and the Birkenau part opened in 1942 as part of the Nazi drive to exterminate the Jews.
He is expected to lay flowers at a wall where prisoners were shot and at a monument to Holocaust victims from all over the world.
``Mr. Bush will be a very important guest,'' Auschwitz Museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt told The Associated Press by telephone.
``He will spend almost an hour and a half, which is a lot compared to the duration of visits of other presidents and other top international politicians.''
Auschwitz draws some 500,000 visitors a year.
George Bush - the current president's father - visited in 1987 as vice president, while former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her respects in 1996.
Auschwitz, liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945, has repeatedly caused controversy.
A former Carmelite convent nearby was closed in 1993 after protests by Jewish groups, which objected to the presence of Christian religious symbols.
Jews also sought the removal of a large wooden cross used in a 1979 papal Mass at Birkenau that was placed near Auschwitz in 1988 and visible from inside the camp. The cross was put up in memory of 152 Poles executed by the Nazis in 1941.
Conservative Catholics rallied and erected more than 200 smaller crosses. Polish soldiers removed those in 1999, but the larger cross remained.
A now-closed disco in a former tannery where Auschwitz inmates once labored and plans to develop a shopping center near the former death camp site have also sparked protests by Jewish groups and Auschwitz survivors.
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EDITOR'S NOTE - Associated Press writers Monika Scislowska and Beata Pasek contributed to this report.
And your point is....?
I thought that St Petersburg was the next stop.
Right?
Inform me. I may be behind on breaking news.
But, are you saying that our President should refuse to attend the G8 conf, because it is hosted in France?
I think that the visit to Auschwitz is intended to remind the French and the Germans that evil unchecked can result in extermination camps, and that their behavior in Iraq served to promote that sort of behavior on the part of Saddam. I think that Bush intends to make this point prior to attending the G8 conference. I do think he intends to attend it, however attenuated that is by his committments to Middle East negotiations. I think this is good policy and appropriate public relations, and I support both his visit to Aushwitz and to the G8 conference.
Auschwitz was a work camp, not a true death camp. The people were used until they could no longer work (if at all), and then they were killed. The pure death camps, like Sobibor, did almost nothing but take trainloads of people in to slaughter them. It's a small difference, but people should know more about the Holocaust.
People know so much more about Auschwitz because there are so many more survivors--there are almost no survivors from Sobibor. They only escaped when they revolted, killed some Nazi guards, and ran off into the forest.
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