Posted: Mon 21 Feb 2005 21:39 Post subject: Europe's Jews Seek Solace on the Right
Quote:
February 20, 2005
New York Times
Europe's Jews Seek Solace on the Right
By CRAIG S. SMITH
ARIS A curious thing is happening in Belgium these days: a small but vocal number of Jews are supporting a far-right party whose founders were Nazi collaborators. The xenophobic party, Vlaams Belang, plays on fears of Arab immigrants and, unlike the prewar parties from which it is descended, courts Jewish votes. Perhaps 5 percent of the city of Antwerp's Jews gave it their votes in the last election.
The Belgian example is extreme, but it represents the sharpest edge of a much broader political shift by European Jews - away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.
This drift from the left has "been going on steadily for the last 20 or 30 years," said Tony Lerman, who runs London's Hanadiv Charitable Foundation, which supports Jewish life in Europe.
Of course, the shift is not monolithic and some of it is also associated with a rise in Jews' social and economic status. In the vast majority of cases it represents a move toward tolerant parties of the center or center-right rather than a leap to the far end of the spectrum - where many xenophobic parties remain unfriendly to Jews as well as to Arabs. So the number of Jews on the far right remains a very slim minority.
But the fact that there are any at all is a measure of the degree to which many of Europe's 2.4 million Jews feel abandoned by the left and are still searching for a comfortable place in European politics.
Meanwhile, they are becoming increasingly active in the mainstream right.
In Britain in the last 60 years, the number of left-of-center Jewish members of Parliament has dropped from more than two dozen to about a dozen, primarily older, members while the number in parties of the center and right has climbed from none to about half a dozen. The Tories' would-be finance minister, Oliver Letwin, is Jewish, as is the party's new leader, Michael Howard. Mr. Lerman says Jews in Britain are now identified in public opinion more with the Conservative Party than the Labor Party.
Much of European Jewry considered the left its natural home in the 19th century and the early 20th century. The left supported Jewish emancipation and more liberal immigration policies in Western Europe, and Social Democrats and Communists opposed Russia's czars, who sponsored anti-Semitic pogroms, and Hitler.
But after World War II, Stalin, too, attacked Jews, and in the 1950's the Soviet Union identified itself with Arab nationalism.
From the 1960's onward, the left in Europe increasingly portrayed Israel not as a land of collective farmers making the desert bloom but as an occupying power. So the disenchantment accelerated, especially in the last few years. "Arafat became the leftist pinup boy following Che Guevara," said Barry Kosmin, head of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.
Jews say the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has often become difficult to see. Swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans have marked pro-Palestinian marches in some Communist-run municipalities in France. In Britain, many Jews who opposed the war in Iraq stayed away from antiwar rallies because of the strong anti-Israeli element.
"Because of the negative stuff coming from the left, many Jews felt that their fates were tied to Israel, so they have to go along with those who support Israel regardless of the past," Mr. Lerman said.
There is particular anxiety among the many European Jews who fled their North African homes after the creation of Israel in 1948 and again after the 1967 Middle East war. "They fear that their destiny is threatened by Islam on both sides of the Mediterranean," said Dominique Moisi, a senior adviser at the French Institute for International Relations.
Those fears shape some of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right. Giselle Littman, who was expelled from Egypt in 1957 and now publishes under the pseudonym Bat Yeor, argues in her latest book, "Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis," that Europe has consciously allied itself with the Arab world at the expense of Jews and the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Not all of what Jews see as a resurgence of European anti-Semitism is coming from Muslims. There is also a virulent neo-Nazi strain. But an essential difference between the anti-Semitism of today and that of the 1930's is that center-right parties tolerated - or encouraged - it then and denounce it today.
Even some elements of Europe's far right have reached out to Jews: Gianfranco Fini, Italy's foreign minister and a former admirer of Mussolini, has become a champion of Israel since apologizing to Jews three years ago for Italy's wartime race laws and deportations. Filip Dewinter, head of Belgium's Vlaams Belang, meets regularly with Jewish leaders and has been photographed with prominent rabbis. Denmark's far-right People's Party had an Israeli theme at a recent convention and served wine from the Golan Heights.
"We have a common enemy, a common struggle," said Mr. Dewinter. He called Israel "the forward post of the free West fighting radical Islam" and said Jewish culture is "one of the main cultures of European civilization, but we can't say the same of Islam."
But Elie Wiesel, the American author, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor, warns that while the center-right has become a more comfortable place for European Jews, Jews have no place in the xenophobic parties. "Whatever crisis we're enduring, no Jew should go to the extreme right," he said. "A Jew should never be an ally of racism because we know what it is."
In Antwerp, according to one study, at least 65 percent of those who were registered as Jews during World War II died during the Holocaust. According to another study, based on exit polls, at least 5 percent of the Jewish population there voted for Vlaams Belang last June, in the most recent elections.
Henri Rosenberg, an Orthodox Jew whose Polish parents survived Hitler's camps, is unapologetic about his support. "Orthodox Jews are thinking in the same ways that non-Jews are thinking, that Vlaams Belang can protect them," he said. "Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had to compromise with the societies in which they lived and this made it much easier for Orthodox Jews to go with the standard, 'Is it good for Jews or bad for Jews?' " he said. "Today, it seems it is good for Jews."
Posted: Mon 21 Feb 2005 21:42 Post subject: Reliving the Holocaust in a Soldier's Snapshots
Quote:
February 20, 2005
Reliving the Holocaust in a Soldier's Snapshots
By JODI WILGOREN
IOUX CITY, Iowa, Feb. 19 - The two old men stared into a 60-year-old snapshot, searching for the truth that tied them together across time.
"This face I remember," Lucjan Barr, 76, said of the sullen, scared teenager. "I don't know to who it belongs, but I remember. It could be me."
A minute passed, the men talked of the past, then Vernon Tott, 80, picked up the picture again. "That's you there," he said, hope breeding confidence. "I can see by the way your ear is shaped. To me, that could be you."
Mr. Barr, an electrical engineer in Tel Aviv, survived the Holocaust at the tiny Ahlem labor camp near Hannover, Germany. Mr. Tott, a retired meatpacking foreman here in Sioux City, was an Army radio operator who pulled out his vest-pocket camera to document the horror he saw while helping liberate Ahlem.
Their reunion here on Thursday capped Mr. Tott's decade-long quest to find the few dozen men in the 19 photographs he took that day and compile their stories into an inch-thick homemade book. With Mr. Barr and Henry Shery of Manchester, N.J., who joined the picture party here, Mr. Tott has located 30 Ahlem survivors, 13 of whom have found their faces in his frames.
After forgetting about the pictures, stored in a shoebox in his basement, for half a century, Mr. Tott has traveled to Germany and Poland in recent years on his search for survivors. He was scheduled to go to Israel this summer and to be honored in May at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, but the cancer in his stomach now prevents him from traveling. So the survivors came here to present Mr. Tott with a silver kiddush cup at a candle-lighting ceremony on Friday at a local synagogue.
"You brought us back to the human race," Mr. Shery, a retired medical supply salesman who learned about Mr. Tott only 10 days before, said as they held hands.
What makes this Holocaust story stand out is the photographs, stark black-and-whites showing the frightened, famished faces of the few who survived months of forced labor at Ahlem and were too weak to join the death march the Germans had ordered days before liberation.
The pictures, online at www.jou.ufl.edu/documentary/prod/Ahlem/album, show piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned. There are living skeletons slurping thin soup. Boys in too-big wool caps and coats dropped off by the Red Cross. Men scratching lice from their heads in front of the infirmary, which Mr. Barr recalled as "a one-way street: you walk in and don't walk out."
For the survivors, the pictures are the proof to illustrate the stories they struggle to share with grandchildren. For Mr. Tott, they are a symbol of his service, a way to bear witness. For historians, they are rare artifacts of a little-known labor camp, and an unusual opportunity to complete a circle between victims and saviors.
"There are plenty of photographs of the concentration camps," said Churchill Roberts, director of the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida, who is making a film, titled "Angel of Ahlem," about Mr. Tott. "There are not many where you can pair the photograph with the actual person today. The power of this photograph, to see yourself, 50 or 60 years later, and the flood of memories it brings back, it's really quite something for us just to watch."
Mr. Tott, whose great-grandfather, coincidentally, was born in Hannover, bought a Kodak pocket camera for a dollar at a New Orleans pawn shop while training with the 84th Infantry Division in 1942. He pulled it out whenever he saw a bombed-out bridge or an airplane aflame, sending the film home to his mother. In the hour he spent at Ahlem on April 10, 1945, he shot two rolls.
Fifty years later, Mr. Tott was reading The Railsplitter, the 84th Infantry's newsletter, in his fading recliner in his small ranch home here, when he came upon a letter from Benjamin Sieradzki, a retired engineer in Berkeley, Calif., wondering about the young, tall, blond soldier with the camera.
"I always remembered him; he was clicking away by himself, I thought it was very unusual," Mr. Sieradzki, now 78, recalled in a telephone interview. "In a way, I needed them," he said of the pictures. "I needed to have some kind of legitimacy to what I was telling people about what happened there."
Mr. Sieradzki is the young man on the far left in picture No. 9, the one with the pile of bodies in the background. When Mr. Tott first sent him copies of the pictures, he blew them up big as could be to see the sorrow in his eyes. Now, he keeps them in a drawer. But barely a week passes that he does not speak with Mr. Tott; in the documentary, they walk arm in arm through a field that once was the labor camp.
"That's a horrible way we met, Ben," Mr. Tott says, "but now we're good friends."
A few years ago, the survivors sent Mr. Tott a new Pentax camera. One man, a shoe salesman, sends four or five pairs every year to Mr. Tott and his wife, Betty. Another, Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore computers, gave $100,000 to the Holocaust museum in Washington in Mr. Tott's name.
The pictures were included in a German textbook published last year about Ahlem, which housed about 1,000 Jewish prisoners from the Lodz ghetto in Poland, most of whom did not survive the war. And Mr. Tott has made some 400 photocopies of his own archive, a ragtag mix of survivors' memoirs, handwritten letters, German newspaper articles and other memorabilia, for survivors' families, students and his neighbors.
Lina McMillan, one of perhaps 300 Jews in Sioux City - counting babies, people in nursing homes, and students away at college - came to the service Friday to thank Mr. Tott on behalf of herself, her son and her daughter. "I know had it not been for people like Vernon Tott, we wouldn't be here," said Ms. McMillan, 48, whose father, Abraham Izbicki, survived five years in Auschwitz.
The night before, Mr. Barr and Mr. Shery flanked Mr. Tott at his Formica table, stories spilling out as they searched for themselves in the photographs. "One skeleton looked like the other," Mr. Shery said.
Mr. Barr told of his first night of freedom, having to sleep on the floor because the bed was too soft. Mr. Tott remembered tossing cigarettes and food rations to men who had nothing. Mr. Shery recalled being beaten while working in the mines.
Mr. Barr picked up a particularly horrific image, of a man barely more than bones lying in a bunk, then pushed it away in disgust. He paused at another, showing four young men crowded into the triple-bunks.
"You know him?" Mr. Tott asked.
"I believe it is me," Mr. Barr said quietly.
In the end, neither man who made the pilgrimage to Mr. Tott's home in what his family thinks may be his finals days recognized himself in the photos. The scared teenager in that first photo was still in his prison uniform, and Mr. Barr remembers changing into civilian clothes the Red Cross brought. The one lying in the triple-bunk could not be him, he said, "because I was on the move."
But "it's the same as if it was me," Mr. Barr said. "I was one of the guys he made believe he was a human being."
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