Auschwitz Poland

Forty-four years have passed, but for Jannie Brandes, that eerie, dreadful morning of Aug. 8, 1944, often seems like only yesterday. Even now she can see that train, that train waiting for her here at Amsterdam's Central Station. "It was a very still summer morning," she says, "beautiful weather, the sun was shining, dew was still on the leaves, the night cold still hung over the city. We were taken to Amsterdam Central Station. Under guard, of course.

Polish police found the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that was stolen from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz after an intensive three-day hunt and arrested five suspects, police said early today. The sign was found cut into three pieces. Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo told The Associated Press that the sign was found Sunday night in northern Poland, the other end of the country from the southern Polish town where the Auschwitz memorial museum is located and where it disappeared before dawn Friday.

The head of the European Jewish Congress protested delays in moving a Carmelite convent from the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. Lionel Kopelowitz, the group's president, said in a statement that the continued presence of the nuns there past an agreed upon deadline is an affront to Jews. Vatican and Jewish leaders in 1987 agreed that the nuns would leave the site by Feb. 22, 1989.

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."

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.

Carmelite nuns denied a report that they had moved out of a convent at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland. The convent has caused conflict between Roman Catholics and Jews. Catholics have agreed to build a prayer center away from the camps to house the nuns, but a spokeswoman at the convent denied remarks by a World Jewish Congress official in New York on Friday that most of the nuns had already left. "There is no truth in the rumor that some of us have left," she said.

At 85, Dr. Henry Heller of Leisure World is one of the oldest survivors of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp where fewer than 10% of the Jews who entered survived. With attention focused on the 50th anniversary of the war's end, Heller, a Jew, has seized the opportunity to recount the horrors he experienced during his six years of imprisonment so that everyone, especially the young, will know the Holocaust was real.

City officials in Auschwitz, Poland, said Thursday that they have decided to delay for another month plans to sell a mansion that a Los Angeles family is trying to recover. Haberfeld House--Auschwitz's premier property--was taken over by the Nazis, the Russians and then nationalized by the Poles before falling into disrepair.

Dario Gabbai is one of the few who survive, one of those who for 55 years have borne the awful burden of having been what he calls "an eyewitness to the final solution of the European Jews." For nine months in 1944-45, Gabbai was a sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. He was one of hundreds of inmates conscripted by the Nazis to work in the crematories, the final stop in the death factory that was Auschwitz.

It was the most somber of reunions, a commemoration of a long-ago horror, that drew more than 3,000 people Sunday to Israel's first public gathering of Auschwitz survivors. Mingling in the cavernous foyer of this city's largest convention hall, gray-haired men and women searched for long-lost friends or relatives and waited patiently in long lines to record their names and the numbers tattooed on their arms in a memorial book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Helen Rieder of Tujunga, the terrifying flashbacks come when a woman shouts at her. For Paula Lebovics of Encino, it's when she hears the sounds of boots or sees men in uniform. For Vernon Rusheen of Woodland Hills, it's when he takes a train. All three are Jewish survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp liberated 50 years today by Russian troops. A half century later, the most mundane moments in everyday life can still trigger the most terrible memories.

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.

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.