Since 1996, Jewish groups and their lawyers have gone to the mat with the likes of the Germans, the Swiss and the French, extracting $9 billion in restitution for the evil wrought in Europe by Nazi forces and their collaborators.
The hiding places in the title of Daniel Asa Rose\’s new memoir refer to the haylofts and cellars where his relatives hid from the Nazis during the war years, and also to the suburban tool sheds and coat closets where the author crawled into during his childhood in a mostly gentile Connecticut town. The title also alludes to the author\’s efforts to avoid his Judaism. Traveling to Europe to find his family\’s hiding places in Belgium and France with his two young sons, Rose comes to see that hiding places are \”not merely dark holes of concealment\” but also \”places of revelation.\” The trip leads him to understand the links between present and past, his own connections to his family\’s past and to the Jewish future.
Until last year, I held firm to that tribalist impulse familiar to many American Jews and refused to visit Germany (or fly Lufthansa or buy German products, etc.). Although no members of my immediate family had fallen victim to the Nazi terror, the resistance to things German was passed on from my parents\’ generation, which shared in the belated outrage (and desire to expunge feelings of inadequacy) of postwar American Jewry.
Standing alone next to a yellow sign with black letters warning, \”Buchanan is the Fourth Reich,\” Bob Kunst, president of the Shalom International, became a magnet for heated emotions on the sidewalk outside Long Beach\’s Convention Center last Friday afternoon.
This Sunday marks the eighth year that the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park will serve as the local centerpiece of the annual Worldwide Holocaust Memorial Day, in memory of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in Europe at the hands of the Nazi regime. Hosted this year by the Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial Monument Fund, The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and Second Generation, the Yom HaShoah gathering is expected to attract more than 2,500 people.
Some five miles outside of Amsterdam, there is a site where a miracle took place during the Holocaust.
Here, in this tiny town with quaint, pretty houses and narrow streets, the Nazis allowed Jewish history to survive. At a time when they were desecrating Jewish burial places all over Europe, they left this one alone.
Emerging from the Royal Courts of Justice here on the evening of March 15 was like leaving a musty 17th-century ecclesiastical battle for the fresh air of the 21st century.
A far-right party has forged an agreement to share power in Austria\’s government in defiance of an unprecedented European Union threat to penalize the country.
There was something haunting about taking the train. The aged boxcars on a parallel track seemed frozen in time. I quieted my thoughts. After all, the train was a necessary evil. This bitter irony was not lost on me as the train sped from Munich to Dachau on probably the very same tracks that led thousands of innocent people to their deaths more than a half-century ago.
Jews who worked as slave laborers during the Nazi era are one step closer to receiving some measure of compensation for their ordeal.
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