Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 11, 1994                   TAG: 9404110101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MEMORY OF HOLOCAUST MUST SURVIVE, THEY SAY

Sunday, nearly 100 Roanoke-area residents gathered to read the names of Holocaust victims and to honor those who, as did Schindler, helped save the survivors.

"Schindler's List" depicts on film how Schindler went to Poland to make money off the German army in World War II and ended up saving about 1,000 Jews.

The remembrance service at Roanoke's Temple Emanuel focused on Raoul Wallenberg, whom a local religious scholar called a bigger hero than Schindler.

" `Schindler's List' is very powerful and well-done film, but the fact is that [Schindler] used Jews as slave labor in his factory," said Allie Frazier, professor of religious studies at Hollins College. "Wallenberg did it out of humanitarian reasons, not economic reasons."

Wallenberg, a Swedish ambassador to Hungary, is credited with saving about 35,000 Jews from the concentration camps.

On Sunday, Frazier told the courageous Swede's story.

"With raw nerve, personal magnetism and desperate cunning he literally snatched Jews from the death trains," Frazier said. "His life was under constant threat."

Wallenberg rescued Jews by printing false passports granting them Swedish citizenship, bribing Nazi officials and renting many houses so that Jewish families could find sanctuary under Swedish protection.

When the Russians took control of Budapest, Hungary's capital, Wallenberg was arrested and sent to a prison in Moscow. It is believed that he died there.

Lisa Lipkin, whose mother survived the Wallenberg Holocaust, will conclude a week of activities by speaking Thursday night at the Unitarian-Universalist Church on Grandin Road and Friday morning at Hollins College.

Rabbi Jerome Fox of Beth Israel Synagogue in Roanoke said there is now more urgency to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust: "The surviving generation is dying out," he said. "The eyewitnesses won't be here much longer."

Remembering also is important, Fox said, because the facts are under increasing attack by revisionists who dispute that the Holocaust ever happened.

Outside Temple Emanuel, volunteers read the names of Holocaust victims from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It was part of a worldwide program by B'nai B'rith to read the name of every one of the 6 million Jews who died.

The readers in Roanoke were surrounded by black-and-white photos.

In one, Jews waited for the train to take them to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Another showed Jewish prisoners crammed into a wire-fenced area before their trip to the gas chambers. The most disturbing photo showed dozens of corpses on the ground.

"It's hard to believe it did happen, but there's just so much evidence," Fox said.