Tag: Auschwitz

On November 26, 70 years after the rounding up and deportation of over 500 Jewish Norwegians to Auschwitz, the Norwegian Police Service issued an apology for taking part in the murder of Jews.

Google introduced a new online historical collection of digitized material, highlighting several Jewish themes, events and institutional partners in its first wave of exhibits.

An Estonian gas company apologized for using a photo of Auschwitz in its advertising.

The Iran threat does not scare Rabbi Dov Lior. The rabbi of Kiryat Arba/Hebron believes that it is forbidden, and there is actually no...

French Olympic swimmer Fabien Gilot said the Hebrew tattoo on his left arm is a tribute to his late grandmother’s husband, a Jewish survivor...

An adviser to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas visited Auschwitz on Friday. Ziad al-Bandak, a Christian who advises Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Christian affairs,...

Samuel Wurzelbacher aka “Joe the Plumber” is in hot water (which, professionally speaking, he should be able to repair) over his comments blaming the Holocaust on gun control.

Greece's neo-Nazi party Chryssi Avghi (Golden Dawn) won between 6.0 and 7.5% of the vote in Sunday’s elections, according to exit polls, European Jewish...

The players on England's Euro 2012 soccer squad will visit the Auschwitz death camp when they travel to Poland for the European Championship. The final...

We were dismayed by the criticism Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel leveled at Prime Minister Netanyahu following the latter’s speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. Mr. Wiesel took issue with what he said was the prime minister’s likening of the Holocaust to the threat posed to Israel by Iran. Obviously whatever Mr. Wiesel says about the Holocaust is worth listening to. But we are nonetheless puzzled.

According to Reuters, China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who toured the Auschwitz  death camp on Friday, said his visit introduced him to "an unforgettable,...

The Xinhua news agency reports that a concentration camp exhibition Nazi crimes has opened in Shanghai on Thursday. The exhibition concentrates on the Auschwitz death...

Raymond Aubrac, whose parents were sent to Auschwitz, and his wife, were the most celebrated couple of the French resistance, fierce underground fighters against...

Defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust were dealt a blow last week when a study by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum rejected a claim they have made regarding the U.S. failure to bomb Auschwitz.

In an interview for an article published in these pages (Aug. 25, 2004), Jewish Bombay-born painter Siona Benjamin discussed her technique of hiding troubling imagery in the seemingly inviting floral and decorative borders of Indian and Persian miniature-influenced paintings. "Under the beauty of miniatures you can hide danger," she told me of her "Finding Home" series. "The beauty of miniatures draws you in-veiling and revealing."

Daniel Retter's father, Marcus Retter, z"l, escaped from Vienna to England in 1938 on the Kindertransport. His father's parents and sister were deported from Vienna to Riga, where they were murdered by the Germans and Latvians. He says that since his father should have been the one asking some of the following questions, the interview is dedicated to his memory.

As an Israeli psychoanalyst once noted with bitter irony, the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. The corollary to this observation is that Europeans will never forgive the Israelis and the Jews for Auschwitz.

Mirta Kupferminc is an artist who has made her artistic mission a search for meaning in a world profoundly unstable, problematic and filled with the terrors of memory not entirely her own. As the child of Holocaust survivors, uprooted from Europe and transplanted in Argentina, one prevailing motif for her is that of a witness to the Holocaust one generation removed. A prominent text panel quotes Saul Sosnowski: " to be a witness who loves unconditionally; daring to judge G-d over Auschwitz and find him guilty; and pray to him still, even there, even in Auschwitz."

Breckinridge Long, the State Department official in charge of refugee matters in the 1940s, did not think much of Jews. He called them "exponents of Communism and chaos."

Editor's Note: Several years ago, the bestselling novelist Christopher Buckley, accompanied by his late father, the writer and iconic conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., visited Auschwitz. He had never published his haunting account of that experience, but the current furor over Bishop Richard Williamson's claim that the Holocaust is largely a myth and "not one" Jew was gassed at Auschwitz compelled him to do so on The Daily Beast website, where he is a regular contributor.

Since the end of the Shoah there has been a debate of what to do with the various death camps in Poland. Today more then 60 years after the end of the Holocaust the debate continues.

As the immediacy of the Holocaust continues to fade from the collective memory of the world, and even from that of too many Jews, due to the passage of time and the passing of the survivor community, publications of books such as A Rose Among the Thorns by Rochel Schmidt, become seminal events.

Publishers of this book (made into a movie of the same title currently in select theaters) hope that reviewers won't reveal the story's ending.

The museum at the Auschwitz death camp is warning that its historic buildings will collapse without funding from world governments.

The phenomenon of genocide is a uniquely human creation. Since the dawn of history, it has occurred on all the inhabited continents among diverse ethnic, religious, social and geographic groups. It has caused the deaths of more people than all the wars and individual murders combined. It is difficult to predict, to prevent or to limit. Its perpetrators mostly face impunity. In sum, genocide is as pervasive as it is intractable.

The Israel Postal authority and the UN Postal Administration co-issued a Holocaust Remembrance Stamp on January 27, the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. For anyone who can still think clearly, the Annapolis "Peace Conference" in November was merely the latest hallucinatory rendition of a very troubled sleep. It's not that this carefully scripted assembly actually confirmed a catastrophic outcome for Israel. Rather, it underscored America's perilous and persistent preoccupation with a determinably wrongheaded foreign policy.

A Day of Remembrance for the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto was recently held in the city.

With the upcoming anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I thought it would be appropriate to write about Yizkor Books.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened an exhibit last week remembering the children of the Lodz Ghetto.