(BLOG) Auschwitz: Because Hearing Is Not Seeing

"200 London students make a wrenching Auschwitz visit, sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Our reporter went with them.

I am sitting on a plane at Luton Airport, staring at the tarmac.

It’s a cool, crisp autumn morning as the ground crew makes its final preparations, oblivious to the nature of our trip; seemingly it’s a planeload of people heading off on vacation, to be reunited with family or to seal a business deal. In fact, I’m with a group of 200 high school students from across London on a unique visit to the death camps at Auschwitz.

The one-day visit is part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s flagship 'Lessons from Auschwitz' program, now in its 12th year. In all, the London- based trust has taken more than 10,000 students, teachers, parliamentarians and dignitaries from across the UK to Auschwitz. Based on the premise that 'hearing is not like seeing,' the aim is to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, educate and intimate the extent of what can happen if prejudice and racism go unchecked.

The success of the program has led the British government to recognize its impact and huge importance – in 2005 the government pledged £1.5 million for the program and in the last several years, the Scottish government and Welsh Assembly vowed support to allow for the participation of Scottish and Welsh high school students."

(NEWS) Holocaust Survivor Who'll Secure Sign Stays In Auschwitz

"Years after he escaped Nazis, Yossi Gordon returns to Poland as head of former death camp's security.

'Auschwitz is a cemetery, a cursed land', security specialist and Holocaust survivor Yossi Gordon notes, 'and the fact that they invited me to advise them is my victory'.

On December 18, Gordon, 68, was sitting in his home in Raanana watching a news story on the theft of the famous 'Work Sets You Free' sign from the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. 'I was furious', he recalls. 'That sign is a clear symbol of the victory of the human spirit over the monsters'."

(NEWS) 'Hitler Was A Great Man & The Gestapo Were Fabulous Police', Says David Irving

"Controversial British historian David Irving praised Adolf Hitler as 'a great man' and his Gestapo as 'fabulous policeman' on his shocking tour of former Nazi death camps in Poland.

Irving said Hitler was not 'immoral' but was let down by lesser people in the Nazi regime, according to an undercover report by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

'Hitler could be very cruel but he was not immoral. He was just surrounded by 'little' people,' the paper said Irving told those on a £1,500-a-head tour he has been hosting.



Irving, who was once jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust, also told tourists that the German dictator should be compared to Hannibal, the leader of Carthage that fought against and who almost overpowered Rome.

The historian said: 'He was like Hannibal. He held the military forces of the rest of the world for six years. Exactly like Hannibal, but nobody has never denied the greatness of Hannibal.
'Hitler was a great man, one of the greatest Europeans for centuries.'

He added: 'The Gestapo were fabulous policemen. They sent 300,000 to Auschwitz and 800,000 to Treblinka.'

His comments will be studied closely by Polish authorities and are sure to infuriate Holocaust survivors.

Irving led 11 people from Britain, America, Germany, and Australia around Hitler’s Polish Wolf’s Lair headquarters, where he described German officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate the Fuhrer as a 'traitor'.

And the behaviour of Irving’s guests on the tour has raised eyebrows locally, reports the Italian undercover team.

During one private dinner after a visit to the death camps one guest called out to cheers and laughter: 'What a terrible smell. It’s like a gas chamber.'

Critics have slammed the trip around Hitler’s headquarters and the notorious Treblinka death camp referring to it as 'Nazi Travel'." (source)

(NEWS) Auschwitz Memorial Acquires Nazi Medical Devices

"Spokesman says it is 'almost certain' surgical, gynecological instruments were used to experiment with mass sterilization of women.

The Auschwitz memorial in Poland said it has obtained around 150 medical instruments believed to have been used by the Nazis in experiments on the death camp inmates.

Memorial spokesman Bartosz Bartyzel said Thursday the gynecological and surgical instruments were recently offered to the museum by a historian who acquired them from a family that found them shortly after World War II at their house, which was located on the former camp grounds."

(BLOG) Using Auschwitz Against Israel

"A rhetorical ploy that I have found disturbing and disgusting whenever I have come across it are attempts to use Nazi analogies against Israel. It has always seemed such an offensive metaphor to use against the Jewish state that I struggle to see how anyone can even begin to deploy it: indeed, if it comes to seem reasonable, then that in itself is surely evidence that you should re-assess seriously your reasoning and perspectives.

A recent essay by Yoram Hazony Israel Through European Eyes has proved to be greatly enlightening in explaining how the spectre of Auschwitz can be used against the Jewish state: indeed, how a certain conception of what Auschwitz represents fundamentally undermines the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

Not that the essay has changed my mind about how repulsive use of Nazi analogies against the Jewish state is. Hazony, a citizen of Israel, seems to have written the essay to try and understand what seems so self-evidently offensive."

(NEWS) Imam Sheds Tears At Auschwitz

"A group of American Muslim leaders made a first-of-its-kind visit to Nazi concentration camps this week, prompting tears from at least one of them.

Eight imams made a three-day trip Dachau and Auschwitz this week, co-sponsored by a German think tank and the New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, and strongly supported by the United States government.

The trip, as reported in the Jewish Forward, was the brainchild of law professor Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and former senior official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Breger said, 'There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world."



Related Article:

• At the Death Camps, Muslim Leaders Grapple With Jews’ Pain

(NEWS) Facebook Removes 'Auschwitz Spa' Page

"Wiesenthal Center says page advertising death camp, where over 1.3 people were killed, is 'latest shocking example of the trivialization of the Nazi genocide'

A Facebook page called 'Auschwitz Spa', which advertises the death camp where over 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews were killed, as a health spa, was immediately taken down by the social-networking site following protests by the Wiesenthal Center."

(VIDEO) Dancing Auschwitz: I Will Survive

On a recent trip to Europe, a family of three generations (a Holocaust survivor, his daughter and his grandchildren) dance to Gloria Gaynor's pop song - 'I Will Survive' at concentration camps and memorials throughout Europe.

This dance is a tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit and a celebration of life.

Despite the systematic brutality and cruelty endured, we have still survived.



One family member says "In June 2009, I, together with my father, my four children and niece, travelled to Poland to retrace my parents' past. While on a cattle wagon at Radagost Station in Lodz, my father experiences flashbacks. He reenacts the memory of his three-day journey in a similar cattle wagon, heading to Auschwitz, 65 years earlier, and appears to enter a trancelike state. In his native tongue, he carries on a recreated dialogue with the peasants he passed on the way."

For what this old man has been through, he is truly amazing to do this with such enthusiasm...

(NEWS) US To Give $15m. To Preserve Auschwitz

"Clinton says Obama gov't to seek congressional approval for donation.

The US will donate $15 million to preserve the remains of the Auschwitz-Berkenau concentration camp, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Saturday. CNN reported on the speech at the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, Poland.

Clinton said the Obama administration would seek congressional approval of the $15 million donation, which will be distributed over five years. The funding will go to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, an endowment established to preserve and safeguard the remains of the concentration camp. An estimated 1.1 million victims perished at the camp."

(NEWS) Darfur Teen To Visit Auschwitz

"Muhammad, who escaped Sudan genocide and found shelter in Israel, to travel to Nazi concentration camp with his classmates. 'Studying about your Holocaust helps me connect to my own holocaust,' he tells his friends.

Kibbutz Eilot's 11th graders are scheduled to visit Auschwitz this month. They will stand at the former Nazi concentration camp and try to imagine the last moments of the Jewish victims, who saw their loved ones being murdered before their eyes. Unfortunately, one of the journey's participants will not have to use his imagination.

Muhammad and his mother escaped from Darfur, a western Sudan region which has become one of the world's most shocking locations of a humanitarian disaster. Some 700,000 people have been slaughtered there since 2003 by militia groups and rebels, and millions have escaped and turned into refugees."

(BLOG) Europe Will Never Forgive Israel For The Holocaust

"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.

How can one explain the latest outbreak of European loathing for the Jewish state after it intercepted a flotilla heading for Gaza in open violation of a naval blockade? The widespread condemnation Europeans have expressed toward Israel after its commandos boarded the so-called peace flotilla on May 31 – and used force only when threatened with death – signals a desire to turn every Israeli action of self-defense into absolution for the crimes of the Holocaust."

(NEWS) Poles Mark 70th Anniversary Of First-Ever Auschwitz Transport

"Auschwitz survivors and their relatives, and even two survivors of the first-ever German convoy to the dreaded concentration camp, re-enacted the route of that first transport of prisoners Tuesday on its 70th anniversary."

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