From: Rick Halperin <rhalperi@mail.smu.edu>
Dec. 15
POLAND:
Germany givs $80 million to fix Auschwitz memorial
Germany pledged Wednesday to pay euro60 million ($80 million) over the next
year into a fund for Auschwitz-Birkenau to preserve the barracks, gas chambers
and other evidence of Nazi crimes at the former death camp, some of which are
deteriorating to the point of collapse.
Germany is the largest of several countries contributing to the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Fund, which was set up in 2009 to gather money to maintain
the 472-acre expanse made up of the original camp, Auschwitz, the nearby
satellite camp of Birkenau. The camp was operated by Nazi Germany in occupied
Poland during World War II.
More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the camp's gas chambers or
through forced labor, disease or starvation.
"Germany acknowledges its historic responsibility to keep the memory of the
Holocaust alive and to pass it on to future generations," German Foreign
Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement. "Auschwitz-Birkenau is
synonymous with the crimes of the Nazis. Today's memorial recalls these
crimes."
Museum director Piotr Cywinski first issued a worldwide appeal for help in
2008, saying that euro120 million was needed to repair the memorial site, which
stands as one of the most powerful symbols of the Holocaust.
The barracks, gas chambers and other buildings are in need of urgent repair,
having been worn down by the ravages of time and the pressure of more than 1
million visitors a year.
The United States has pledged $15 million and Austria euro6 million, while
smaller amounts have been promised by the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,
Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Estonia and Malta, Auschwitz memorial
spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt said.
Most urgently in need of repair are the 45 brick barracks of the women's camp
in the Birkenau section of the camp, Mensfelt said.
"They are in tragic condition due to the method of their construction and due
to the ground water that is washing away the ground where they were built," he
said.
"They are crumbling away and could collapse at any time," he added.
The barracks were built during the winter of 1941-42 by Soviet inmates,
captured Red Army prisoners who were cruelly treated by the Germans and then
executed, Mensfelt said.
Wooden barracks and the ruins of the gas chambers at Birkenau also need urgent
repair, as they are crumbling because of harsh weather and sinking due to
unstable ground.
The site, set up as a museum in 1947, receives $5 million annually from the
Polish government and earns another $5 million by publishing the accounts of
survivors, screening documentaries to visitors and from guide fees.
The camp was liberated in January 1945 by Soviet troops.
(source: Washington Post)
USA--NEW YORK:
The Holocaust We Don't See: Lanzmann's Shoah Revisited
Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, opening this month in New York twenty-five years after
its original release, is one of the great works of art of the twentieth
century. As it begins, Simon Srebnik, a Polish Jew who was one of two survivors
of Chełmno, returns to the death facility at Lanzmann's request, and sings a
song of his boyhood—about a white house, a house that is no longer—in the
language of a country that was his homeland as it was of millions of Jews for
centuries, a Poland made wretched by war. Mordechai Podchlebnik, the other
survivor of Chełmno, in another conversation with Lanzmann, remembers human
smoke against blue skies. The work of the stationary gas chambers began in
German-occupied Poland on December 8, 1941. Here is the beginning of Lanzmann's
nine-hour reconstruction of the Holocaust, and in commencing with the faces and
voices of Chełmno's survivors, he has chosen well. Using no historical footage,
Lanzmann instead elicits the detailed horror of mass death by asphyxiation at
Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz from his own conversations
with Jewish victims, German perpetrators, and Polish bystanders.
A quarter century ago, the Holocaust was not as widely recognized as it is
today as an unprecedented evil. Lanzmann did much to change that. In his
expansive "fiction of the real," as he calls it, he is like a French realist
novelist of the nineteenth century, addressing an injustice by painstaking
research: a decade of reading; hundreds of risky conversations with victims,
perpetrators, and bystanders; thousands of hours of unused film. This is
"J'accuse" six million times over. Lanzmann is quite visible in the film, and
heroically so. In his conversations with Jews and Germans and Poles, he is the
perfect image of a French intellectual seeker of truth, doing what the
existentialists spoke about but rarely did: imposing his mind and his will on a
great emptiness, forcing it to take shape, and so leaving a trace of himself in
history.
Lanzmann thereby helped to rescue the central event of the twentieth century
from neglect. Yet his business is not history, or so he has always said. Marc
Bloch, one of the greatest French historians, defined the goal of history as
"understanding"; that historical comprehension of the Holocaust, in the sense
of regarding its participants as human and grasping their constraints and
motives, is just what Lanzmann rejects as impossible. Nevertheless, the film
itself was a turning point in the history of the representation of the
Holocaust, both as a source and as a model. In 1985 many survivors (and
perpetrators, and witnesses) were still with us, despite the assurances to the
contrary of President Reagan before his visit that year to Bitburg. Lanzmann
had to find such people and induce them to speak—cajoling, insisting,
intimidating them to say what they themselves regarded as unsayable. Now they
are gone: Srebnik died in 2006, and we will never hear his song outside of this
film.
Lanzmann's aim was to bring the viewer into contact with the seemingly
impossible, the unqualified nothingness of mass death, which he called, in a
term that is inextricable from Sartre, "le néant." During the last quarter
century, libraries and archives have paid homage to his film by collecting or
recording tens of thousands of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. These
are a precious record of individual lives and a valuable bulwark against
forgetting, but they present difficulties as material for historians. Very few
of them have been transcribed, and watching them all is simply impossible.
The leap to the visual has temporal costs for students of the Holocaust, of
which the nine hours of Shoah are only a small taste; the written word has its
advantages as a medium, and history (and so perhaps memory) depends upon it.
Lanzmann's marvelous work of research and selection leaves us with scenes
around which the memory of the Holocaust has been framed: the former SS-man
Franz Suchomel recalling Treblinka to the hidden camera, the calm mien of
Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar as he describes the death facility, the
Polish railway engineer Henryk Gawkowski's gesture of a finger across the
throat. The hundreds of thousands of hours of Holocaust video testimonies that
we now have, precious though each of them is, are not arranged with such
artistry and will never be edited with such skill. It is to be hoped that a
benefactor will appear who will fund a team of historians, translators, and
lawyers to select, transcribe and annotate some of this priceless material.
This would add much to the value of the indexes and finding aides already
compiled with much labor.
In Shoah, Lanzmann pays tribute to history in his conversations with Raul
Hilberg, the man who wrote the first serious scholarly study of the Holocaust.
We are reminded, watching Hilberg speak, of his heroic empiricism, his ability
to confirm mass killing on the basis (for example) of records of one-way
conveyance by rail. Yet between the scholarship of an extremely cautious
institutional historian such as Hilberg and Lanzmann's visual reconstruction of
the Holocaust lies a world of valuable written material about the lives and
deaths of Jews—much of it, twenty-five years later, still little used. This
owes not least to Hilberg's own skepticism about the reliability of survivor
testimonies. Thanks in part to the powerful intimacy of Shoah, Lanzmann's
assumption is now widespread: we know what we need to know of the Holocaust,
but we need help to "see" or "experience" it, in order to best identify with
its victims. Yet the clearest records of the victims are often written
documents produced by survivors during or after the war, such as those at the
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Viewers' identification with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was not at all
something Lanzmann could take for granted in 1985. Through unbearable
conversations about unthinkable horror, such as his conversations with a Jewish
barber who cut the hair of naked Jewish women just before they were gassed, he
brings the viewer into seemingly unambiguous emotional contact with Jews, in
this way acclimating us to the Holocaust while denying that it can be
understood. The Jews with whom Lanzmann speaks are, sadly, exceptional; the
main victims of the Holocaust were those millions of Jews who were killed. In
the film the small number of tragic survivors help bring us into contact with
the millions of tragic dead, their families and friends. Would the victims have
wanted for us to identify with them? More likely, as Treblinka survivor Filip
Müller suggests, they would have wanted us to help them. Identification and
solidarity are perhaps related, but they are not quite the same thing.
Now that we take for granted that most people feel sympathy with the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust, we might ask how far this truly brings us to some
moral understanding of the tragedy itself. Perhaps it would make more sense, at
least as a thought experiment, for those of us who were not in fact victims to
also try to identify with the bystanders? Bystanding is what people generally
do at times of moral need, and is thus the moral risk that we have confronted
ever since the Holocaust. Lanzmann makes such an alternative experience of the
film impossible: this is its demagogic appeal and substantive weakness. The
chief bystanders in Shoah are toothless, uneducated, anti-Semitic Polish
peasants, names absent or misspelled, impossible objects of identification.
The traditional objection to this portrayal of Jews' Polish neighbors is that
Lanzmann should have included conversations with Polish rescuers or with Polish
Jews who survived the war and remained in Poland. But Lanzmann wanted to make
an important point about the continuity of Christian anti-Semitism after and
despite the Holocaust, and he makes it well: fair enough. There is an
undeniable moral and aesthetic power to the scenes in which Polish peasants
reveal their anti-Semitic understanding of the world in their very descriptions
of the Holocaust: as a catastrophe brought down on Jews by the Jews themselves.
But how does Lanzmann direct this power? He flatters us with it, unmistakably
separating the western allies from a barbarous Polish countryside where such
things as death facilities could be erected (Lanzmann has denied that such a
thing could happen in France). It would perhaps be hard, today, for a French
intellectual to make such a film about the Holocaust without mentioning, for
example, the notorious roundup of Paris Jews by French policemen at the Vel
d'Hiv in 1942.
Lanzmann does speak with one Pole, the famous wartime courier Jan Karski, who
figures as a civilized man of the West. In 1942, Karski slipped into the Warsaw
ghetto, spoke to Jews, and came to understand the Holocaust. But Lanzmann does
not have Karski discuss what happened next. Karski left the ghetto, made his
way (no small undertaking) to London and Washington, and told leaders about the
Holocaust. There was no meaningful reaction, in part because almost no one, in
those anti-Semitic times, was interested in fighting a war for the Jews, or in
being seen to do so. Karski is in the film to introduce the Warsaw ghetto, but
his mission from its Jews to describe their fate to the West is left out. If
Lanzmann had included it, we might then have to see our countries, in some
limited but nevertheless significant measure, as among the bystanders. When we
identify with victims, we believe we see ourselves, but perhaps we are simply
looking away.
Shoah is playing in New York City at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and, beginning on
December 24, at the IFC. It will be screened nationally in 2011.
(source: New York Review of Books)
Dec. 14
ISRAEL:
Yad Vashem struggles to teach Holocaust to Arabs
Six decades after the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, Israel's national
Holocaust memorial has launched a new effort to educate the country's Arab
minority — many of whom either deny the horror or undermine its scope.
Like their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza, many of Israel's 1.2
million Arabs resentfully view the Holocaust as the catalyst of their own
suffering. While studying the Nazi genocide is mandatory in Israeli schools,
there's little empathy among Arabs for its Jewish victims.
In a new project, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial is offering seminars to
Arab teachers, hoping to wrest contemporary Mideast politics from the
historical events of the Holocaust.
Organizers acknowledge it's a tough challenge.
"We have succeeded to have opened a window — not a door," said Dorit Novak,
chief educator at Yad Vashem. "We have to open the door and start this
dialogue."
The Holocaust by the German Nazis and their collaborators planned to wipe out
the European Jewry. Many survivors became refugees and found a home in
pre-state Israel. With the Holocaust fresh in its mind, the international
community laid the foundation for a Jewish state in a 1947 United Nations vote.
The following year, in a war that followed Israel's declaration of
independence, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their
homes in events they call the "Nakba," or catastrophe.
For many Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, the two events are forever linked,
with recognition of the Holocaust widely seen as tantamount to acknowledging
Jewish claims to the land.
A 2009 poll surveying 700 Israeli-Arabs showed some 30 percent didn't believe
the Holocaust occurred. The poll had a margin of error of 3.7 percentage
points.
Poll author Sammy Smooha, a Jewish sociologist who has researched the Arab
sector for decades, said he believes the relatively high number is a reflection
of unhappiness toward Israeli policies, and not overt Holocaust denial.
"They want to protest their treatment in Israel," he said. To Israel's Arabs,
"the Holocaust is a means of legitimacy of the Jewish state."
Israeli Arabs form one-fifth of the country's 7.6 million people. Unlike
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, they are Israeli citizens. They have
experienced decades of discrimination — most recently illustrated by calls from
dozens of rabbis for Jews not to rent property to Arabs.
Arab educators said Yad Vashem's new project is likely to flounder without a
wider effort to heal tensions between Israel's Jews and Arabs.
Many bitterly noted that Israel's education curriculum only briefly mentions
the Nakba. Most teachers in Jewish schools skip it, education advocates said.
"When a student studies his own history and heritage, it makes it easier to
empathize with another's history," said Yousef Jabarin, director of Arab think
tank Dirasat.
Israeli Jews, who attend separate schools from Arabs, study the Holocaust from
an early age.
In contrast, Arab students study it only in a mandatory history class, where
most are just taught the basic facts to pass university acceptance exams.
Yad Vashem began its outreach years ago, and in 2008 launched an Arabic version
of its website. But the memorial says the number of Arab visitors remains low.
Working with Israel's Education Ministry, it began its first-ever training
course for Arab teachers last month. Some 150 educators elected to participate.
To build trust, lecturers break up classes into small groups.
During the 20-hour course, lecturers steer clear of politics. Teachers hear
survivor testimonies and learn about the Holocaust from its beginnings in
Germany.
Some of the Arab teachers try compare the Holocaust to the Israel-Palestinian
conflict, Novak said. But she hoped the course would demonstrate the
Holocaust's unique nature — an attempt to exterminate an entire people, not
painful but less extreme forms of discrimination or mistreatment.
"I am always trying to ask — OK, there are similarities, but there are
differences, too. Can you see the differences? It was the most extreme event of
the modern world," she said. "We have to sensitize people."
Israel's Education Ministry didn't allow reporters to attend seminars or
interview teachers.
Yad Vashem officials involved in the project said they were so far pleased with
the teachers' enthusiasm, but acknowledged they wouldn't have quick success.
Past attempts at outreach had mixed results.
A week after Israel's three-week offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza in
early 2009, Yad Vashem launched an exhibition of Muslim Albanians who saved
thousands of Jews during World War II.
The timing was coincidental, but angered over the killings of Gazans, all but a
few Arab teachers boycotted the exhibit — even though its message was to praise
Muslim honor codes and reach out to the Arab community.
Over the years, some Israel-Arab politicians, community leaders and clerics
visited Nazi death camps to learn more about the genocide and to try heal
bitter relations with Israeli Jews. Those efforts have had little popularity
with the public.
Another attempt at an educational center in Israeli Kibbutz Lohamei HaGhetaot
in northern Israel, founded by Holocaust survivors, has had more success.
There, 300 Jewish and Arab students undertake a yearlong program on the
Holocaust. A separate second-year program involves learning about Israel's Arab
minority.
Deena Hijazi, 20, who finished the two-year program, said it helped her
understand and empathize with her fellow Jewish citizens. "When you know who
you are, it's easier to know the person standing before you," she said.
On the Net:
■Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org
(source: Associated Press)
LATVIA:
Riga Holocaust monument vandalized
A monument honoring a man who saved Jews during the Holocaust was vandalized in
the capital of Latvia.
The monument in Riga honoring the late Zanis Lipke and others who saved Jews
from the Nazis was spattered with paint on Monday.
Latvian President Valdis Zatlers denounced the vandalism, the French news
agency AFP reported.
The vandalism comes a week after large swastikas were found painted on more
than 100 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Riga.
(source: JTA)
Helen Thomas said that she stands by her comments about Israel she made earlier this year that led to her resignation as a national columnist. And she went further, saying that Zionists control U.S. foreign policy and other institutions. ... Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent who grew up in Detroit as the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was in Dearborn for a workshop on anti-Arab bias. ... "Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question, in my opinion," she said. "They put their money where their mouth is. We're being pushed into a wrong direction in every way." 
.. But a careful reading of all the diplomatic cables reporting the views of Saudi and other Gulf Arab regimes on Iran shows that the Times' account seriously distorted the content - and in the case of the Saudis, ignored the context - of the cables released by Wikileaks ... In fact, the cables show that most Gulf Arab regimes - including Saudi Arabia itself - have been seriously concerned about the consequences of a strike against Iran for their own security, in sharp contrast to Israel's open advocacy of such a strike. They also show the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait expressing that concern with greater urgency in the past two years than previously. Those facts were completely ignored, however, in the Times' account. 
A University of Toronto student who submitted a master's thesis that argues Holocaust education is "racist," is drawing heated criticism against the university for accepting it. In her thesis, Jennifer Peto argues that the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope programs perpetuate "Jewish victimhood" while obscuring "Jewish privilege," denying "Jewish racism," and promoting the "interests of the Israeli nation-state." Her thesis is titled, "The Victimhood of the Powerful White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education." 
... Until now, the historical evidence has suggested that while the Vikings may have reached the Americas, they didn't really engage with the indigenous population. "According to the sagas, the Vikings had troubles with the locals and couldn't settle there, so they returned to Iceland," says Helgason. "But if we're right, it will mean they didn't just sail there and come back. They had real contact with them." For now, the story of the lone American Indian woman taken on a Viking ship to Iceland remains a hypothesis. To prove it will require finding the same genetic sequence in older Amerindian remains elsewhere in the world -- family members, as it were, of that 1,000-year-old woman who ended up so far from home. 
Genetic testing of villagers in a remote part of China has shown that nearly two thirds of their DNA is of Caucasian origin, lending support to the theory that they may be descended from a 'lost legion' of Roman soldiers. Tests found that the DNA of some villagers in Liqian, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in north-western China, was 56 per cent Caucasian in origin. Many of the villagers have blue or green eyes, long noses and even fair hair, prompting speculation that they have European blood. 
Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim says the perception of Richard Wagner is unjustly influenced by the fact he was Hitler's favorite composer, infuriating a Holocaust survivors group which blasted the argument as a "moral failure." "We need one day to liberate Wagner of all this weight," Barenboim told reporters Friday. He is conducting Wagner's "Die Walkuere" for the gala premiere of La Scala's season in Milan next week.
Three dozen top Israeli rabbis threw their support Tuesday behind a religious ruling barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews -- an indication of growing radicalism within the rabbinical community at a time of mounting friction between Israeli Arabs and Jews. The action by the clerics -- chief rabbis in some of Israel's largest cities and influential among the devout -- fueled charges of racism. 
... The pretend patriots who use the national security argument to gut what remains of our most important security asset -- our constitutional guarantees of a truly free press -- are just what President George Washington feared when in his farewell address he warned "against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism. ..." ... It is unconscionable to target Assange for publishing documents on the Internet that mainstream media outlets have attested had legitimate news value. 
... In 1940, an obscure cypher clerk at the American Embassy in London came across documents which, in his judgment and that of many reputable historians subsequently, proved conclusively that Roosevelt both directly and through his agents was engaged in activities designed to foment a war and eventually to compel American participation in it. I was that cypher clerk ... The new basic law of nations requires only one clause, very simply: "It pays to be on the winning side." 
... Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research. Living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries, a study says... "The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a 'respectability basket' of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries," said University of Warwick economist Professor Stephen Broadberry, who led the research. 
... With his decision to abandon efforts to persuade Israel to renew a freeze on illegal settlement building on the occupied West Bank, he [Obama] has proved that the makers of American policy for resolving the conflict are Israel's leaders and their lobby in the U.S. (including its many stooges in Congress and the mainstream media), not the man who occupies the Oval Office in the White House ... As all seriously well informed people know (sadly the very few, not the very many), unconditional American support for the criminal state of Israel is not in America's own interests. 
This winter seems to have unearthed numerous elderly Nazis, and today has proved to be no exception. Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting the finding by an American called Mark Gould of a 97-year-old former SS officer, Bernhard Frank, who, according to the report, "was responsible for signing the first order of the Reich instructing the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews".This claim is pure junk. Although I've no doubt that Frank was in the SS, the significance of his role in the Holocaust has been blown grossly out of proportion. ... Frank himself has been living openly in Germany for years, and there is no evidence to link him to committing any war crimes. 
Israel has reacted angrily to Argentina's recognition of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders. Monday's move by Argentina comes days after a similar step by South American neighbour Brazil. The Argentinian foreign ministry said recognition was in line with the Palestinians' right to build an independent state. More than 100 states around the world recognise Palestine, their mission at the United Nations says. "The time has come to recognise Palestine as a free and independent state," Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said, adding that Argentina was "frustrated" that peace talks had stalled. Brazil recognised Palestine on Friday, and Uruguay said it would do the same next year. Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have already done so. 
