Holocaust

A far-right senator in Belgium has stepped down as his party's leader after a video of him singing a song poking fun at the Holocaust was broadcast on national television. The Senate called the actions by National Front Sen. Michel Delacroix "beyond the pale," and began an investigation. The video showed him singing an insulting song about a Jewish girl perishing at the Dachau concentration camp. The Brussels prosecutor's office also opened an investigation and will consider whether to strip Delacroix of parliamentary immunity.

Re "The sins of the father," Opinion, May 6 What a courageous man Les Gapay is to delve into his father's past in Hungary as a Holocaust perpetrator and share such heartbreaking revelations. I have been completing a birthday album for my 87-year-old mother of the nightmare events she endured as a Protestant girl in Berlin during World War II. I just located and added to her album the orders by two German generals who sentenced my mother to death by hanging in March 1945.

Presenting, "Anne Frank, the Musical." Now, before you start humming "Springtime for Hitler," the producers of a new Anne Frank musical here want you to know that they are serious. They are offering a rendition of the popular, tragic story of a Jewish girl and her diary during the Holocaust that they say is respectful, inspirational and educational. And -- surprise! -- controversial. Even before the premiere last week, uneasy voices were raised about whether committing such a heart-wrenching tale to music was a good idea.

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.

Two Holocaust researchers, who have traveled the world to uncover the fate of 937 Jews who tried to flee the Nazis in 1939 aboard an ocean liner that was later turned away by Cuba and the United States, will bring their project to the West Coast this month for the first time. They are still trying to track down 11 passengers who remain unaccounted for.

The details of the mural that helped save Bill Salamon's life escape him now. * It took up one wall in the cafeteria where his Nazi captors would enjoy their meals. A picture of a German soldier sitting on a bench, his arm casually draped around a young girl's shoulder, he recalls. He was 16 when he painted it. "I probably survived the concentration camp because I knew how to paint and draw," says Salamon.

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

The office pools have closed, let the drama begin: Silent film or 3-D talkie, Streep's Thatcher or Williams' Marilyn or maybe Viola Davis? Scorsese again? For me, the most fascinating question is which of the five foreign-film nominees will win. If you picked Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" — a visceral chamber drama exposing all manner of class, religious and gender fissures in contemporary Iran — you went for the favorite, winner of numerous critics' awards, "a movie you'll love from a country you hate," as the late Bingham Ray jokingly promoted "The White Balloon.

Over the last few years, U.S. political discourse has been saturated with opponents accusing each other of Nazi-like policies or behavior. Most recently, it was California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown who likened the attack ads of Meg Whitman, his Republican opponent in the race for governor, to the tactics employed by Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Brown later called me to say he regretted citing Goebbels. But most of the comparisons are made without apology. Last week, Sarah Palin criticized President Obama's handling of the BP crisis in a tweet to followers recommending they read an article by Thomas Sowell that compared Adolph Hitler's use of a financial crisis to give himself dictatorial powers to Obama's role in creating the BP escrow fund.

The Vatican stood firm Tuesday on a decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying bishop, even as Jewish leaders warned that the move will set back decades of Roman Catholic overtures to mend strained relations between the two faiths. The Vatican joined Jews and fellow Catholics in condemning the British bishop's assertions that no Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.

Jack Tramiel, the tough and aggressive Commodore International founder who brought millions of people into the world of personal computers in the late 1970s and early '80s with his low-cost PCs, has died. He was 83. Tramiel, who lived in Monte Sereno, Calif., died Sunday at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto , said his son, Leonard. He had been suffering from congestive heart failure for many years. A Polish-born survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp who began his business career with a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx in the early 1950s, Tramiel (pronounced tra-MELL)

The son of Holocaust survivors, Elan Steinberg preferred to keep his family history private. But the fierce strategist and former leader of the World Jewish Congress was clearly motivated by it, according to observers, as he relentlessly pushed to obtain restitution for Holocaust survivors and strove to expose the Nazi past of former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Steinberg, 59, died Friday in New York after a brief struggle with cancer, said Menachem Rosensaft, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

In a March 5 editorial , The Times opposed a bill in the French parliament that would have made it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. The bill was proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, then struck down byFrance's Constitutional Council. Now Sarkozy says he wants to revive it. Reader Berj Proodian wrote suggesting that The Times may have been hypocritical on the subject: "In the past year, the L.A. Times has printed [several] editorials condemning France's law against denying the Armenian genocide.

At a reception last month in New York, I introduced myself to the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland. "Ah," she said, extending her hand. "I am sorry that I did not include your mother in the movie. " She was referring to "In Darkness," a nominee for best foreign language film at this year's Academy Awards. We'd had friendly correspondence over the last two years. So why did she feel the need to apologize before another word was spoken? Because her film is a fictionalized interpretation of the central episode in my mother's life.

The office pools have closed, let the drama begin: Silent film or 3-D talkie, Streep's Thatcher or Williams' Marilyn or maybe Viola Davis? Scorsese again? For me, the most fascinating question is which of the five foreign-film nominees will win. If you picked Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" — a visceral chamber drama exposing all manner of class, religious and gender fissures in contemporary Iran — you went for the favorite, winner of numerous critics' awards, "a movie you'll love from a country you hate," as the late Bingham Ray jokingly promoted "The White Balloon.

The Mormon Church apologized Tuesday for a "serious breach of protocol" after it was discovered that the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized as Mormons. The church also acknowledged that one of its members tried to baptize posthumously three relatives of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The efforts, at least in Wiesenthal's case, violated the terms of an agreement that the church signed in 1995, in which it agreed to stop baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Michael Berenbaum had been a top executive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for about a decade when the burden of helping to run the place got to him. It was not the time he spent among images and artifacts from this darkest period of human history, or the challenge of finding ways to explain unimaginable horrors to new generations. That was what provided the intellectual stimulation of the job. No, it was the spending of days on end in budget meetings.

In the article "The Art of Remembering" (Feb. 4), Sidonia Lax states that the powerful piece "Schlafwagen: Who Will Say Kaddish for Them?" evokes "horrible memories . . . [of] babies speared on the swords of German soldiers, thrown through windows and tossed onto trucks like trash." That is an apt description of the continuing Holocaust--that of the spearing of babies on curets, and tossing them away after an abortion. Don't think the Holocaust mentality could not happen again. It pervades our society.

Newt Gingrich denied any knowledge Tuesday of a robocall hitting Florida households that accuses rival Mitt Romney of forcing Holocaust survivors to eat non-kosher food -- though his campaign later acknowledged it was behind the attack. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said three times, speaking to reporters as he left Fred's Southern Kitchen. "Can't comment on something I don't know about. " Then he added, "You might check and see whether the accusation is true.

His hands. I won't forget them, the way they wrapped tightly around mine last summer, the first time we met. I remember thinking: " These are the hands of a man who has lived longer than a century?" They were old hands, but also firm, sure, strong hands. The hands of a man who endured the very worst a human being can endure and then lived on ... and on ... and on, making the most of every decade, every day. Until last week. On Dec. 28, in the early morning, Leon Weinstein died.