Holocaust Victims

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday defended a plan to require 10-year-olds to honor child victims of the Holocaust, saying adults should not hide terrible truths from children. The idea, floated by the president days ago, rankled psychologists worried about traumatizing youth and has teachers reviving debates about how France remembers World War II. But Sarkozy on Friday stood firmly by the plan in meetings with teachers over proposed reforms of France's school system. "We must tell a child the truth," he said.

When Bill Connelly heard that the heirs of a collector of Jewish memorial books were cleaning out the man's library, he rushed to New York and fished dozens of the Yiddish-language volumes out of a municipal trash bin. With their lists of residents from long-vanished European communities -- sometimes recorded street by street -- the books often are all that's left of entire villages or neighborhoods consumed in the Nazi genocide of World War II.

Holocaust survivors from around the world pressed Poland's government to compensate them for property confiscated after World War II. Attempts to resolve the issue have failed, mostly because of concern over the cost. Poland had Europe's biggest Jewish community until World War II, when the Nazis killed nearly 90% of the country's 3.3 million Jews. Postwar communist rulers seized their property.

Twice in his five years of starvation and brutality in four Nazi concentration camps, Lou Dunst was herded along with other prisoners into a gas chamber to be killed. Once there was a malfunction in the gas jets, and the other time a guard decided that he did not want to waste precious coal to burn the bodies, so the execution was called off. More dead than alive, Dunst and other prisoners at the Ebensee camp in Austria were rescued by the U.S. Army in the final days of World War II.

The 191-member U.N. General Assembly established Jan. 27 as an annual day of commemoration for the 6 million Jews and countless other victims killed in the Holocaust. The resolution, agreed to by acclamation, is aimed at making the new International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust a symbol against genocide for future generations. Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, called the measure "a very significant step in the war against anti-Semitism."

Nearly 63 years later, the words still burn forth from the yellowed, fragile scrap of cardboard-like paper on which they were written in the greatest of haste, yet somehow miraculously preserved. "My darlings! I am on a train," Esther Frankel, a Polish Jew who was born Esther Horonchik, wrote to her family in Paris in August 1942 as she was being deported to Auschwitz.

An $18-billion lawsuit was filed against Germany on Wednesday, alleging the country that perpetrated the Holocaust was now retaining stolen artworks from its victims. U.S. lawyer Edward Fagan said he had filed a suit in a New York district court on behalf of the Assn. of Holocaust Victims for Restitution of Artwork and Masterpieces (AHVRAM) against the German Finance Ministry.

In a solemn ceremony at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills on Tuesday, nearly 200 mourners gathered to commemorate Yom Ha' Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Under a tent at the foot of the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Holocaust survivors and their descendants vowed in speeches, songs and poems never to forget Nazi Germany's slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II. "And in the hole, they were thrown, with no headstones engraved....

When Michael Siw's parents returned to war-battered Vienna in 1948, they were relieved to see that their home had survived the city's heavy bombing by the Allies. But after a bruising and failed three-year court battle to recover their apartment and a family inheritance, including a factory, they returned to Israel. Depressed and disgusted by crude anti-Semitism and humiliated by officials and neighbors alike, they never returned.

Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family -- those who stayed behind -- were killed in the concentration camps. My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses.