Auschwitz

A friend of mine got a lifetime achievement award recently, and it got me to thinking about the Holocaust again, something that's never been completely out of my mind for the last 22 years. Randolph L. Braham and I are an odd couple to be friends because our families were on different sides of the Holocaust. His emails to me over the last 20 years have always been signed Randy, but I call him Professor Braham out of respect. Braham is distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, director of the Rosenthal Center for Holocaust Studies there, and the author of more than 60 books on the Holocaust.

A friend of mine got a lifetime achievement award recently, and it got me to thinking about the Holocaust again, something that's never been completely out of my mind for the last 22 years. Randolph L. Braham and I are an odd couple to be friends because our families were on different sides of the Holocaust. His emails to me over the last 20 years have always been signed Randy, but I call him Professor Braham out of respect. Braham is distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, director of the Rosenthal Center for Holocaust Studies there, and the author of more than 60 books on the Holocaust.

On Jan. 24, 1943, 230 French women who had been arrested for resistance activities were put on a train at Compiegne, outside Paris, and sent to Auschwitz. The youngest had just celebrated her 17th birthday; the oldest was 67. They were teachers and seamstresses, students and farmers' wives; there was a doctor, a dentist and several editors and chemists. They were to be a lesson to other would-be troublemakers. The women were not Jewish, so they were not sent immediately to be gassed.

In 1944, 14-year-old Lucy Deutsch, a young Czech girl, was rousted from her home with her parents and two siblings and transported to Auschwitz.  Of her family, only she survived. Now in her 80s, Deutsch tells her story in the autobiographical musical "No Time to Weep," a rental production at the Matrix that features a book by Deutsch, lyrics by Deutsch and Deedee O'Malley, and music by O'Malley and Ivor Pyres, who also directs. Reviewing such a heartfelt endeavor feels a bit like correcting the grammar on a lovingly handcrafted Valentine.

"Crosses Moved From Lot Next to Auschwitz" (May 29) is incomplete. It says, "They left behind a large wooden cross placed on the site more than a decade ago to honor 152 Polish Catholics killed there by the Nazis in 1941" and, "The cross insulted the memory of more than 1 million Jews killed at Auschwitz and Birkenau." Omitted was the fact that the cross was placed in memory not only of 152 Poles executed at the site upon the opening of the camp but also in memory of the more than 75,000 Polish Catholics killed at Auschwitz.

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, an artist who had been forced to paint portraits of fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and later sought to recover the artworks from a museum there, died Wednesday in Northern California. Babbitt, 86, died of cancer at her home in Felton, near Santa Cruz, her daughter Michele Kane said.

Deena Metzger certainly misses the point about the controversy over the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. How would she feel, as a Jew, if the Catholic Church put a 23-foot high cross on her grave? I. NELSON ROSE Los Angeles

We, the Council of Post-War Jewish Organizations, Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, representing the vast majority of the survivor community of Southern California, are disturbed and outraged by the news that Cardinal Franciszek Macharski of Kracow intends to renege on the agreement reached between four prominent Catholic cardinals (including himself) and Jewish representatives. This agreement stipulates that the Carmelite convent established at Auschwitz some years ago will be moved to a new place in the vicinity of Auschwitz, which will also serve as a Holocaust study center.

The museum on the site of the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland has appealed to the international community for funding, saying it can't afford to carry out urgent repair work. "It's time for other governments to take their turn, especially Germany," the museum's deputy director, Krystyna Oleksy, said in an interview. "Poland is hardly one of the world's richest countries and it has borne the brunt of the funding for decades now." The museum currently has a budget of about $9.6 million a year.

Dick Kniss Bass player with Peter, Paul and Mary Dick Kniss, 74, who played stand-up bass with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary and co-wrote the John Denver hit "Sunshine on My Shoulders," died Wednesday of pulmonary disease at a hospital near his home in Saugerties, N.Y, said his wife, Diane. Born in 1937 in Portland, Ore., Kniss was playing in a band led by Woody Herman in New York City before joining Peter, Paul and Mary in 1964. He performed with them throughout the 1960s, rejoined them when they reunited in 1978 and continued to give concerts with them until 2009, the year Mary Travers died . Kniss — pronounced k-nish — was "our intrepid bass player for almost as long as we performed together," the trio's Peter Yarrow said in a statement.

Kazimierz Smolen Headed Auschwitz museum at death camp site Kazimierz Smolen, 91, an Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of a memorial museum at the site, died Friday on the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. He died in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum. Soviet troops liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

Retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson, who in 1981 ruled that the Holocaust was "a fact and not reasonably subject to dispute," died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at his Pacific Palisades home, said his son, Will. He was 88. Johnson made the unusual pronouncement in a case brought by Long Beach businessman Mel Mermelstein against the Institute for Historical Review, a Torrance organization that claimed that the planned extermination of Jews by the Nazis was a myth.

On Jan. 24, 1943, 230 French women who had been arrested for resistance activities were put on a train at Compiegne, outside Paris, and sent to Auschwitz. The youngest had just celebrated her 17th birthday; the oldest was 67. They were teachers and seamstresses, students and farmers' wives; there was a doctor, a dentist and several editors and chemists. They were to be a lesson to other would-be troublemakers. The women were not Jewish, so they were not sent immediately to be gassed.

Robert Geminder has told the story so many times, it almost sounds like he's reading a script when he shares his memories with me. I was born in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1935. My father was very wealthy and owned many apartment buildings. Our family of four lived very well and had a very good life. And then, in 1939, the Gestapo came. What happened after that, no amount of rehearsing can soft-pedal or tame. His Holocaust story is not a tale of death chambers and concentration camps.

Despite the anti-Semitic ranting of Mel Gibson, the public gulf between Roman Catholics and Jews has narrowed during recent decades. It started with overtures from Pope John Paul II between 1979 and 2000, during which time he visited Auschwitz and Jerusalem. After following his predecessor to Auschwitz in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI slammed Holocaust deniers in 2009, then set off on an Israel trip. And this year, at Rome's Ardeatine Caves, the pope commemorated the 1944 Nazi reprisal massacre of more than 300 Italians, including several dozen unimplicated Jews.

Renowned acting teacher and director Jack Garfein learned survival instincts as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp. "In my case, one night I lost everybody," says the 80-year-old as the memories of the horrific night are reflected in his eyes. "I was 13. My first love — my mother, my sister, my grandparents and aunts and uncles …. I was the only one who survived. " But he didn't know then what had happened to them. "The people already in the camp said they went to the 'old age home.

The Sonderberg Case A Novel Elie Wiesel, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson Alfred A. Knopf: 178 pp., $25 Elie Wiesel's "Night," a memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald that is a pillar of Holocaust literature, is read by schoolchildren all over the world. In the years since he published it in 1958, Wiesel has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and written some 50 books of fiction and nonfiction. Few would argue that a man who was sent to the extermination camps at 15, who saw his mother and little sister led off to the gas chambers and who watched the Nazis work and starve his father to death shouldn't write about the Holocaust as often as he pleases — especially now, when the witnesses are dying out. A better question to ask is whether Wiesel's new novel, "The Sonderberg Case," adds anything measureable to his body of work.