Auschwitz Poland

Eva Kor was stumped. She didn't know how to thank a Nazi doctor for writing a letter asking her and other Auschwitz survivors for forgiveness for his medical experiments at the camp. "I could not think of anything appropriate," Kor said Saturday as she spoke to about 100 people attending services of a Jewish congregation at an Encino community center.

Pope Benedict XVI stepped past barbed-wire fencing Sunday and entered the Auschwitz death camp founded by his countrymen, making a plea for reconciliation and asking why God allowed such "unprecedented horror" to happen.

THE LITTLE wooden house surrounded by redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains is more than 6,000 miles and 60 years away from the horrors of Auschwitz. But on an easel in the sunny living room is a small portrait that Dina Gottliebova Babbitt recently painted of a fellow prisoner in that Nazi death camp. The picture is a modified copy of one she was forced to paint in 1944 as part of Josef Mengele's murderous theorizing about racial differences.

Thousands of young Jews and elderly Holocaust survivors marched Tuesday at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz to honor those who perished in the Holocaust, while an Israeli official condemned the Iranian president's recent anti-Israel comments. A shofar, or ram's horn, sounded the march's start.

Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers, crematories, delousing facilities and watchtowers drawn to scale. "There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift for Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."

Marian Turski was 18 when he arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau railway platform in the summer of 1944. A member of an illegal political group in the Jewish ghetto of the central Polish city of Lodz, he had heard of the Nazi death camp on clandestine BBC radio broadcasts. But nothing prepared him for what lay ahead. It was before dawn. The chimneys of the crematoriums spewed flames and smoke.

Frail survivors and humbled world leaders mourned the victims of the Holocaust on Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and urged the world to never forget. Candles flickered in the dusk at the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp, which Israeli President Moshe Katsav called "the capital of the kingdom of death." During World War II, 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the site.

Eugene Zinn was about an hour into a PBS Holocaust documentary in January when he heard a familiar voice speaking his native Slovak tongue. Eighty years old with his eyesight nearly gone, Zinn pressed his face closer to the television screen in his West Hills den. There, clad in an argyle sweater and walking around the restored Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, was Otto Pressburger, a man for whom Zinn had been searching for much of his life. Zinn knew he needed to find Pressburger.

Dutch prosecutors said they would investigate a spoof video portraying the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp as a techno party and decide whether to take action against the makers. The video, billed as an ad for a rave called "Housewitz," angered Polish authorities, who asked the Dutch Foreign Ministry to punish the makers and remove the clip from a website. About 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Nazi-run camp in Poland.

Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of Germany's World War II-era genocide of the Jews. The results of the survey conducted by the BBC were released Thursday as Britain's public broadcaster announced that it would show a new series in January to mark the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation.