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January 28, 2005/Shevat 18 5765, Vol. 57, No. 22
German leader expresses shame for Holocaust
TOBY AXELROD
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BERLIN - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder spoke of his shame about the Holocaust - and survivor Kurt Julius Goldstein spoke of his anger.
Before a crowd that included elderly survivors as well as German high school students, Schroeder declared his "shame before those who were murdered - and to you, who survived the hell of the concentration camps," adding, "We carry this burden in mourning, but also with a serious sense of responsibility."
The Jan. 25 event, a Holocaust remembrance program attended by several hundred guests at the Deutsches Theater, was one of several programs across Germany marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet soldiers.
Goldstein, who was deported to Auschwitz as a teenager and returned to live in Berlin, said he was shocked that Germany's highest courts continue to protect the rights of neo-Nazis to demonstrate publicly - and, he said, to spread Holocaust denial.
"It is inhumane, and we suffer under it," Goldstein told the audience at the memorial, organized by the Berlin-based International Auschwitz Committee. Goldstein is the committee's honorary president.
His remarks came days after members of the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany used their parliamentary seats in the state of Saxony to belittle the Holocaust and declare their intention to reveal "the truth" about Germany history. The remarks drew outrage, and renewed calls for banning the party.
"I am worried about the growth of neo-Nazism," Petra Rosenberg, representing Roma in Germany, told the audience. Rosenberg, whose late father, Otto, survived Auschwitz, said it troubled her deeply to see the National Democratic Party "marching, getting into Parliament and threatening democracy."
Though Schroeder did not directly address the issue, he said "right-wing extremist forces, their dumb slogans and graffiti, are certainly getting the attention of the police and the department for constitutional protection."
He added, "But we ourselves have to take the political lead in confronting neo-Nazis and old Nazis."
German politicians, Jewish groups and individuals are involved in a flurry of activity to mark Auschwitz's liberation.
Among those at the Jan. 25 event was Werner Krisch, 85, who was a prisoner for two years in Birkenau and has lived in Germany since the end of World War II. Most of the survivors he knew in Berlin have died, he said.
Krisch, whose family was deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1940, stayed in Communist East Germany after the war. Today, he said, "the Nazi brutes are coming out again."
"Anti-Semitism, racism of whatever kind, it is socially acceptable. We didn't ever dream it could occur," Krisch told JTA. "When you see that right-wing groups are attacking or killing defenseless people, and that most judges give them mild sentences, it is a very bad tendency. A shoplifter gets worse punishment than they do."
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