[Peace-discuss] Unintended irony?

[David Green]

These two articles were on page 3 of the Trib on
Tuesday.

UN, survivors remember Holocaust
Special daylong session and exhibit of grim photos and
drawings commemorate the liberation of Nazi death
camps 60 years ago

By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent
Published January 25, 2005

NEW YORK -- The United Nations General Assembly, for
the first time in its history, devoted a daylong
special session Monday solely to the Holocaust and
provided space in its headquarters lobby for an
exhibit commemorating the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

Speaker after speaker, including Nobel laureate and
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, U.S. Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and foreign ministers from
Israel and European countries delivered eloquent
addresses about intolerance and genocide, but all
spoke to a chamber with a notable number of empty
seats. Of the 191 members of the General Assembly, 138
agreed with the proposal by the U.S. to hold the
special day of commemoration.

Wolfowitz, who led the American delegation Monday,
said, "We are here to reflect on the magnitude of the
occasion, how totalitarian evil claimed millions of
precious lives. But just as important, the member
nations attending today are affirming their rejection
of such evil and making a statement of hope for a more
civilized future, a hope that `never again' will the
world look the other way in the face of such evil."

But perhaps the most passionate and persuasive
statement about the horrors of the Holocaust came in
the form of photographs and pencil sketches in the
exhibit, "Auschwitz: The Depth of the Abyss."

The exhibit, mounted by curators at Jerusalem's Yad
Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance
Authority, documents the Auschwitz death camp in
Poland, the Nazis' principal extermination center,
from two very different points of view.

The first half of the exhibit offers photographs from
the "Auschwitz Album," a series of 200 pictures taken
by the Nazis in the death camps and discovered by Lili
Jacob, a camp survivor. Vivid in black and white, they
depict the process undergone by a group of Hungarian
Jews, including Jacob, her family and her neighbors,
from the moment of their arrival at Auschwitz in May
1944 until, for most of them, their last moments
before death.

Equally powerful are the pencil sketches of the dead
and the often skeletal survivors that compose the
second half of the exhibit. Done in the first hours
after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets on
Jan. 27, 1945, the sketches are the work of Zinovii
Tolkatchev. A professor at the Institute of Fine Arts
in Kiev before World War II, Tolkatchev was an
official artist of the Soviet army's political unit.
The unit documented the camps liberated by the
Soviets.

German photos included

What makes the exhibit particularly compelling is that
one half of it was produced by those who killed
1,100,000 Jews, along with 70,000 Poles, 25,000
Gypsies and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war at
Auschwitz, said Yehudit Shendar, the Yad Vashem
curator who prepared the exhibit.

"On the other side are the same scenes, taken by the
savior, who happened to be Jewish," she said,
referring to Tolkatchev, who died in 1977.

Between May and July of 1944, 450,000 Hungarian Jews
died in the crematoriums at Auschwitz, passing beneath
its famous brick arch surmounted by the slogan "Arbeit
Macht Frei," or "Work Brings Freedom."

Jacob, then an 18-year-old from the Hungarian town of
Bilky, was sent to Auschwitz with most of her family
and neighbors on May 26, 1944. It was that group of
people the Nazis photographed. And she was the only
one who survived.

During that period, three trains a day left their
human cargo at the gates of Auschwitz. The photos show
large groups of weary and confused people milling by
the tracks, many wearing the yellow stars that
identified them as Jews.

Women, many holding children, look blankly into the
camera. Among them were Jacob's aunt and her four
small children.

Some of the men seem to scowl at the lens. Although it
was May, most of them look oddly bulky under winter
coats. Having been told they were being resettled but
that they were limited to one suitcase, everyone put
on layer upon layer of clothing, Shendar noted.

Selection process chilling

Among the most chilling photos are those depicting how
the Nazis weeded through their victims, selecting
those who had what they termed "utilizability."
According to the pictures, they were most often strong
men and women, from their teens into their 30s.

Those too young, too old or too infirm, as the photos
show, were doomed to be gassed and burned. Among them
were Jacob's paternal grandfather and grandmother, an
elderly couple seen among those identified as
"non-usable" in a photo where many carried canes. Also
shown is Jacob, her head shaved like all the other
women, who was strong enough to survive.

The crematoriums were so busy that often people had to
wait their turns to be killed, said Shendar. In a
photo titled "Last Moments Before the Gas Chamber" old
men and women and very young children are seen sitting
under the trees in a grove waiting to be ushered into
the "undressing rooms" that preceded the gas chambers.

After such detailed and intimate photographs, the
sketches of "Private Tolkatchev at the Gates of Hell"
draw the same scenes of pain and death in much
broader, bolder strokes.

One of the most gripping is a large sketch depicting
the desolation he saw when he entered Auschwitz, with
its stark walls and railroad tracks dark against the
snow. "A cold winter wind howls over Auschwitz,
surrounded by three rows of barbed-wire fence," he
wrote in his memoir. "It seems that it is not the
barbed-wire that trembles and howls, but the tortured
earth itself, which moans with the voices of the
victims."

The title of the exhibit, which will be in the UN
headquarters lobby until March 11, comes from a
statement by Israel Gutman, a writer on the Holocaust
and adviser to the Yad Vashem.

"Auschwitz is not only the paradigm of the Nazi
concentration camp system, but also represents the
depth of the abyss during the Nazi regime," said
Gutman.

In his address, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
recalled the death camps that claimed two-thirds of
Europe's Jews and said, "Such an evil must never be
allowed to happen again. We must be on the watch for
any revival of anti-Semitism, and ready to act against
the new forms of it that are happening today.

"That obligation binds us not only to the Jewish
people, but to all others that have been, or may be,
threatened with a similar fate," he said, referring to
recent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia, and current bloodshed in Sudan's Darfur
region.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune 
Israel OKs Jerusalem land seizures
Secretly approved move could affect hundreds of Arabs

By Greg Myre
New York Times News Service
Published January 25, 2005

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli government secretly approved
a measure last summer that says it may seize land in
east Jerusalem owned by Palestinians who live
elsewhere, the government and a lawyer for the
Palestinians said Monday.

The lawyer said the decision could affect hundreds of
Palestinian property owners and thousands of acres of
land.

"This is state theft, pure and simple," said Hanna
Nasser, the mayor of neighboring Bethlehem, home to
many of the Palestinians who could lose land they own
in Jerusalem.

The mayor linked the Israeli decision to the West Bank
separation barrier that Israel is building in the same
area. "When Israel started building this wall, they
stopped letting people use this land," he said.

For many years Palestinian landowners living in the
West Bank generally had access to their property
inside the Jerusalem boundaries that Israel
unilaterally established after capturing the eastern
part of the city in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. But
in the last two years, access has become difficult if
not impossible because of Israel's West Bank
separation barrier, which includes walls and fences
separating Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Until recently, the Palestinians still thought they
retained ownership of the property, most of it olive
groves and grape orchards that have been in the
families for generations.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government approved the
confiscation measure in July as a clarification of the
Absentee Property Law, which has been on the books
since 1950.

Israel has invoked the law to seize thousands of homes
and parcels of land that belonged to Palestinians who
fled or were driven out during the 1948 war over the
founding of the state of Israel.

Israel has used the law sporadically in east Jerusalem
since 1967 but now appears ready to invoke it more
widely, according to Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli
lawyer representing many of the Palestinian
landowners.

The government did not announce the move, which
requires no compensation for the land, when it was
made, but it acknowledged the new policy after a
report last week in the daily newspaper Ha'aretz.

"All the government decisions on this issue are made
secretly," Seidemann said. "It is treated like a
security issue, not a property issue." He said he
intends to sue in Israel's High Court of Justice
unless the government rescinds its decision.

An incendiary issue

Jerusalem's fate is one of the most complex and
incendiary issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
and the latest development is certain to add to the
friction.

Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, though
its annexation of east Jerusalem has never been
recognized internationally. The Palestinians seek the
eastern sector for the capital of a future state.

Many Palestinian landowners in the Bethlehem area live
only a short distance from their Jerusalem
property--in some cases right next to it.

Johnny Atik lives in a house next to his 8 acres of
olive trees. His house is in Bethlehem; the olive
grove is on land that is part of Jerusalem, according
to Israel. The Israeli separation barrier runs through
Atik's back yard, separating him from his olive trees,
Seidemann said.

In the last two years, Atik and other landowners have
repeatedly requested permission from the Israeli
military to tend to their land, but it has never been
granted.

In November the military sent a letter telling Atik
that his olive grove now belong to the Custodian of
Absentee Properties in Israel, according to Seidemann.

Israeli officials declined to comment.

In another development Monday, Palestinian leader
Mahmoud Abbas said he was close to arranging a truce
with militant groups. "I hope there will be a final
agreement very soon," Abbas said in the West Bank city
of Ramallah, where he returned after spending nearly a
week in the Gaza Strip.

A largely quiet week

The region has been largely quiet for the past week.
Palestinian groups have pledged to suspend attacks but
want Israel to halt raids into Palestinian areas,
according to Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator
involved in the negotiations.

Despite the relative calm, there was one deadly
confrontation Monday. Israeli soldiers fatally shot a
Palestinian who appeared to be preparing to plant a
bomb near the Karni crossing between Gaza and Israel,
the military and army radio said.

Meanwhile, Israeli bulldozers resumed construction on
one of the most disputed sections of the barrier,
around the West Bank settlement of Ariel, Agence
France-Presse reported, citing Palestinian officials.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune