Auschwitz

Dina Babbitt once made a deal with Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who subjected concentration-camp prisoners to horrendous medical experiments. He needed someone to illustrate his perverse racial theories with portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners, an inferior group according to Nazi ideology. A trained artist, she agreed to do the work as the price of saving her mother, as well as herself, from the concentration camp's gas chamber.

FIRST, a confession. I am not indifferent to Poland. But for the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath, I would have undoubtedly been born a Polish son. Though a citizen of the United States, I consider myself a casualty of Poland -- not one of its ghosts, of which there are millions, but one of its orphans, of which there are a sizable number as well. Bringing these heartfelt feelings of loss and displacement to Jan T.

Rudolf Vrba, one of the few prisoners to escape from Auschwitz during World War II and the coauthor of the first eyewitness report detailing the extent of the atrocities there, has died. He was 81. Vrba, who is was credited with saving the lives of more than 100,000 fellow Jews, most of them Hungarians, died March 27 of cancer at a hospital in Vancouver, Canada.

William Herskovic, an escapee from Auschwitz during World War II whose eyewitness account of the concentration camp horrors is credited with fueling early efforts of the Belgian resistance and saving hundreds of lives, has died. He was 91. Herskovic, who founded Bel Air Camera in Westwood soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1957, died Friday at his home in Encino after a long battle with cancer, said his daughter, Patricia Herskovic.

For years afterward, photographer Wilhelm Brasse saw them in his dreams -- emaciated Jewish girls herded naked in front of his camera at Auschwitz. Eventually, the dreams stopped. But he never took pictures again. "I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said. "Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas."

RE "Now Playing in Israel," by Ken Ellingwood, March 1: "Paradise Now" was an expression of the director's vision, based on the reality of the human condition of a certain group of people living under harsh conditions imposed by an outside military rule. Why is it so important to certain Israelis that no one see Palestinians as human? It's naked racism to deny the humanity of a people, but this isn't simple racism; it's deliberate, organized racism if "powerful Israelis" and the newspaper mentioned in Ellingwood's piece are backing it. LYN MCKUEN Los Angeles KAIS NASHEF, an Arab with Israeli citizenship, has the privilege and freedom to express his artistic and journalistic talent in a democratic nation.

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.

When Antony Sher gets into Primo Levi's skin, it's at a very particular time in the Italian writer's life: 1945, the year Levi was a prisoner at Auschwitz. That experience, graphically depicted in the first volume of Levi's memoirs, is the basis for "Primo," the one-person show Sher wrote and stars in on Broadway after hit productions in London. Levi was 24 when he was captured and shipped to the concentration 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.

Your Jan. 27 editorial, "The Auschwitz Imperative," deplores the fact that memory of the World War II Holocaust of the Jews "has been insufficient to stop other genocides." But how could it? Since the first time the first letter of the word has been capitalized, its self-appointed stewards have turned the Holocaust into a perversely ritualized entity unto itself. For some reason, keeping its memory alive has entailed subordinating all other genocidal outbreaks to the shadowy background.