Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 27, 1995 TAG: 9501270057
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: OSWIECIM, POLAND LENGTH: Long
A half century later, it was as if the unburied dead of Auschwitz-Birkenau were talking back to the living through Moshe Stern.
His voice soaring in unbridled anger, the Israeli cantor's prayer for the dead recalled the boys and girls ``killed, destroyed, expunged by the Nazis and their helpers.''
They were the aunts and uncles that Rivkah Young never met. They were the 33 members of Blanche Major's family taken away July 7, 1944, and sent to the cyanide showers. They were, by the time the Nazis were done, 1.5 million brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers.
Fifty years after Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, the world Jewish community was holding a ceremony of its own at the world's biggest Jewish graveyard, a place where human ashes still linger in fields and ponds.
The main commemorations are planned for today. But they were organized chiefly by President Lech Walesa's office, and many Jews thought they did not adequately reflect Auschwitz's symbolism as the Holocaust's chief charnel house.
About 300 people attended Thursday's separate ceremony: mostly Jews, but also Gypsy survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. People who were tortured, starved, humiliated and still feel fear.
German President Roman Herzog, a boy during World War II, was the only head of state. He wore the same dark suit and fedora as the German Jewish leaders he accompanied. He barely spoke, pain etched on his face.
Walesa spoke earlier Thursday in Krakow at Jagiellonian University, where 184 professors were seized by the Nazis in November 1939 and deported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin.
Some Jewish leaders ignored the university ceremony, including the president of the European Jewish Congress, Jean Kahn, and Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who headed the U.S. delegation.
Likewise, no official Polish representative attended the Jewish observance, where Kahn accused Walesa's office of organizing ``a nationalist celebration'' that diminished the Holocaust's Jewish dimension.
But prominent Jews including Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, were determined to mend relations with Poles and none suggested a boycott of today's main ceremony.
Wiesel and Israeli Knesset Speaker Shevach Weiss said they met with Walesa and agreed that a peace declaration to be released at the main ceremony would acknowledge Jews were the main target of the Nazi genocide plan symbolized by Auschwitz.
Nine in 10 of the 1.5 million people killed at the largest Nazi camp complex - people gassed, starved, clubbed, hung, shot, worked to death in outlying armaments and chemical plants - were Jews.
But half of them were Polish Jews, and Auschwitz was initially built for Polish opponents of the Nazis - who were intent on eradicating Poland as a state and settling it with the Aryan race.
After the war, Communist authorities in Poland understated the extent of Jewish suffering under the Nazis. Bad feelings and misunderstanding still linger between many Polish Catholics and Jews.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau on Thursday, wrinkled survivors leaned on canes or sat down on mounds of earth and tried to steel themselves against horrific memories.
Where the crematoria once churned, they heard speeches in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and English.
Rabbis wore richly embroidered prayer shawls just like the ones wrenched from their fathers and grandfathers by sadistic SS guards who marched the holy men to their deaths.
``I feel the fear and astonishment as I walk here 50 years later,'' said Wiesel, walking beside the train tracks where cattle cars full of Jews from all corners of Nazi-occupied Europe arrived for slaughter.
``You cannot imagine what it was for them to arrive here at night and to see the immensity, the infinity of this place. Dogs barking, shots being fired, people falling to the ground, walking, walking.''
Up to 8,000 people could be killed in 24 hours at the Birkenau camp's four gas chambers and attached crematoria.
People like Wiesel lucky enough to be selected for work - or for Dr. Josef Mengele's scientific experiments on twins - had a chance at survival.
Wiesel insisted, like many speakers Thursday, on the importance of preserving the memory and damning the murderers.
``Do not have mercy on those who created this place,'' he said in a prayer. ``Do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.''
The German president stood silently as one Jewish survivor, Arieh Hassenberg, told him he cannot forgive the Germans for what they did but believes in cooperating with the new generation.
Herzog answered gravely, ``I am of the same opinion.''
by CNB