Free Republic

For 60 years Denis Avey remained too traumatised to talk about the horrors he had witnessed as a prisoner of war at Auschwitz. But when he finally felt able, he revealed an incredible tale of bravery and compassion.

Seven decades have passed since Irene Zisblatt survived the Auschwitz. Just a teenager then, Zisblatt endured daily the horrors of the Nazis. She was the only survivor in her family. She didn’t understand then why there was such brutality. She can’t tell you why she is here today. She can just tell you what happened to her. Zisblatt, a Hungarian Jew, has done that in her book, “The Fifth Diamond,” in Steven Spielberg’s documentary, “The Last Days,” and on the lecture circuit. Starting Feb. 23, Zisblatt will bring her story to the Tri-State in a weeklong series of lectures in...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Acknowledging and remembering the Holocaust is not only a matter of historical honesty; it is a religious obligation, especially for bishops, several Vatican officials said. When Pope Benedict XVI publicly distanced himself from the Holocaust-denying views of traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and the Vatican Secretariat of State called on the bishop Feb. 4 to publicly disavow his views, they were not simply responding to a public uproar. "Denial of the Holocaust by a person who should know better is indistinguishable from an anti-Semitic prejudice," said Bishop Brian Farrell, vice president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious...

KRISTALLNACHT SEVENTY YEARS LATER"Was There No Space in the World for Us?"by Rabbi Marvin Hier, Simon Wiesenthal Center Founder and DeanSeventy years ago, while Jews in America gathered at the Algonquin Hotel and Waldorf Astoria at banquets in support of Jewish causes or in personal celebration of a Simcha, the most notorious pogrom was unleashed by Hitler’s Germany. On this day was born the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht.The Nazis said it was in reaction to the killing of a German official in Paris, but as documents showed, it was a state organized pogrom involving the highest officials of Nazi...

Poland is not Shoah-land From Warsaw Business Journal A recent incident in which 35 Hasidic Jewish tourists forcibly entered the museum of the Majdanek concentration camp after the facility's closing time, removing gates from their hinges and breaking into one of the barracks, has highlighted the misunderstandings so prevalent in the hugely complicated relationship between modern Jews and modern Poland. To be fair, the tourists in this case spoke very little English and no Polish, and were not able to understand what the museum's security guard was telling them. Still, it seems hard to imagine that they didn't understand that...

According to a article in German that was published in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" the ruthless French nazi-collaborator Maurice Papon died in the age of 96 years on February 17, 2007. As secretary general of the prefecture Bordeaux Papon signed orders for the imprisonment and deportation or the jews in that area. Altogether there were 76.000 jews -among them 12.000 kids- arrested in France and displaced into the concentration camps of the nazis. Only 2.500 survived the Holocaust. Papon is definitly responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jewish men, women and children. The majority were sent directly to detention...

40 institutes boycott Iran think tank over Holocaust conference By The Associated Press PARIS - Nearly 40 European and North American research institutes will suspend contacts with a leading Iranian think tank that helped organize last week's conference in Tehran of Holocaust deniers, a Paris-based researcher said Saturday. The institutes, from Warsaw to Washington and beyond, have agreed to suspend ongoing programs with the Iranian Institute for Political and International Studies, or IPIS, according to a statement issued by Francois Heisbourg, who organized the boycott. They have also refused participation in IPIS meetings or invite IPIS staff to their own...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

ermany condemned a planned Iranian conference on the Holocaust and summoned Iran's charge d'affaires to the Foreign Ministry, saying Friday that attempts to question the Nazis' murder of Jews were "shocking and unacceptable." The conference, scheduled for Sunday and Monday, was organized by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the systematic killing of some 6 million Jews a "myth" and "exaggerated." Some 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries are scheduled to attend the two-day meeting. "We condemn all past and future attempts of anyone who gives a platform to those who relativize or question the Holocaust," Foreign Ministry spokesman...

Holocaust survivor leads crusade to track down fugitive Nazis Elliot Welles, a Holocaust survivor who found the officer who ordered his mother's death and turned that personal triumph into a relentless crusade to track down fugitive Nazis, has died. He was 79. Welles died of an apparent heart attack at his Bronx home last Tuesday, his son, Mark Welles, of Roslyn, N.Y. said on Sunday. Welles retired in 2003 after more than 20 years as head of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League's Nazi-hunting operations. Finding ex-Nazis who had eluded post-World War II justice "was an overriding passion in his life,"...

An initiative to refurbish the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has sparked a storm among Holocaust survivors in Israel. The initiative was announced last month by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum's new director, who claimed that the current exhibits were outdated and insufficiently attractive to visitors. A detailed refurbishing plan has yet to be drawn up, but participants at a recent meeting of Holocaust survivors' organizations warned against moves to "beautify" the site, as has been done with other Nazi concentration camps. "Dachau and Sachsenhausen have already become well-kept gardens; we won't allow the same to happen to Auschwitz," they said....

THE scale of the Holocaust has been "greatly exaggerated", Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said today, adding he had visited several former concentration camps in eastern Europe. “When I was ambassador I saw several of these camps in (the former) East Germany and Poland. In my opinion it has been greatly exaggerated. It is far from what is being publicised,” Hamid Reza Asefi said. His comments come ahead of a conference to be held on December 11 in Iran which the Islamic republic hopes will present “hidden aspects” of the slaughter of Jews under Nazi Germany. “Different opinions which affirm and...

Bialystok Jewish ghetto uprising anniversary 16.08.2006 Events marking the 63rd anniversary of the uprising in the Bialystok Jewish ghetto in eastern Poland are being held in the city today. It was the second biggest Jewish armed rising against Nazi Germans during World War II, after the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising. Over 40,000 people lived in the ghetto, which the Nazis began to liquidate in 1943. Some 800 people were killed on the spot and the rest started to be transported to death camps. The uprising lasted for almost a week. Some 300 to 400 insurgents had only 25 guns and...

On 13 July, the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated the first regional Shoah memorial in France in the Hauts-de-Seine subdivision. The memorial was placed in a glade of the prestigious park of Sceaux, located south of Paris. New memorials are to be built throughout France to increase awareness of the genocide. Paris consitoire chairman Joel Mergui said the aim was to commemorate the Shoah on a regional level in the places where the victims lived before they were deported to Nazi death camps. Sarkozy, who is also the head of the local council of Hauts-de-Seine, agreed two years ago...

A few months ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a posthumous award for "constructive dissent" to Hiram (or Harry) Bingham, IV. For over fifty years, the State Department resisted any attempt to honor Bingham. For them he was an insubordinate member of the US diplomatic service, a dangerous maverick who was eventually demoted. Now, after his death, he has been officially recognized as a hero. Bingham came from an illustrious family. His father (on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based) was the archeologist who unearthed the Inca City of Machu Picchu, Peru, in 1911. Harry entered the...

Polish Jewish Museum A Tough Sell Here Some philanthropists dismissive of historical institution on site of Warsaw Ghetto. Steve Lipman - Staff Writer Victor Markowicz, a Siberian-born philanthropist who grew up in Poland and later moved to the United States, spends much of his time these days asking fellow Jewish philanthropists in the U.S. to contribute to a Jewish museum to be built in Warsaw in the next few years. Markowicz’s friends, in turn, ask him something: “Why in Warsaw? Why in Poland?” Many American Jews — born here or in the Old Country — support the idea of a...

Apr. 25, 2006 2:55 | Updated Apr. 25, 2006 19:43 Never Again As the nation marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember history's greatest crime against humanity, the industrialization of murder that took the lives of six million Jews and millions of other people in Nazi concentration camps. We note the unfinished business relating directly to the Holocaust, including the failure of several countries - including Austria, Norway, Sweden, Syria and Ukraine - to prosecute still-living Nazi war criminals. However what is striking about this day in 2006 is not so much that anti-Semitic violence and neo-Nazi movements persist in the...

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 On Holocaust Remembrance Day: Calls For A New Holocaust The enemies of Israel and the Jewish people picked Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) to call for a new Holocaust, one that would destroy Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahemdinejad, renewing his calls for Israel to be destroyed, said:We say that this fake regime cannot not logically continue to live and addedOpen the doors [of Europe] and let the Jews go back to their own countries conveniently ignoring the fact that a majority of Israel's Jewish population didn't come from Europe and has no ties to that continent....

Jews in Poland Speak of Shoah Remembrance as a Curse. by Jane Ulman, Contributing Writer This tale is about two visions of Poland. In one, Poland is about pain and loss. It’s the place where 3 million of a total population of 3.3 million Polish Jews perished in the Shoah, where Jews have nothing left, where indeed there are almost no Jews other than a few languishing, aged survivors who can’t even scrape together a Shabbat morning minyan. Poland is Auschwitz; it’s Never Again. Defining this Poland is the March of the Living, an annual event that lays bare Poland’s...

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 19 April 1943 63 years ago today was the eve of Passover and the 50,000 - 60,000 (out of more than half a million who had been forced into the narrow streets of this confined space) suriving Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto were slated to be finally and completely annihilated. When the SS troops entered the ghetto to renew the deportations to the death camps, however, they met with unexpected resistance. Fewer than 500 young fighters, girls and boys --the youngest aged 12 but most in their late teens and...