Jews Europe

A retired Hungarian translator has told how she was flown to the Soviet Union with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg seven weeks after he disappeared from Budapest in early 1945, according to an interview published Friday. Wallenberg, who would be 76 if still alive, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation by issuing them Swedish papers after Germany took over Hungary in 1944. Though rumors persist that he is still alive in the Soviet Union, the last confirmed sighting of Wallenberg was on Jan. 17, 1945, in Budapest, in the company of a Soviet officer.

Almost 50 years ago in the Nazi "model" concentration camp Terezin in Czechoslovakia, artists and composers were permitted to paint, draw, write and lecture. One of the works created there, Pavel Haas' "Study for String Orchestra," survived, even though its composer did not. Although Haas probably knew he and almost everyone else at the camp were doomed, he wrote a piece that is celebrated today for being full of life.

Historians tracing the origin of gold bars traded by Deutsche Bank during the Nazi era confirmed Friday that the bank profited from gold plundered from Holocaust victims. The historians were unable to determine with certainty whether bank executives knew that some of the gold purchased from the Reichsbank, the Nazi central bank, came directly from Jews sent to concentration camps.

The marker stands, like a gravestone, on the corner of a grimy back street lined with auto repair yards and machine shops. Its inscription says that on this spot, in August, 1944, 150 Poles were killed fighting "soldiers of Hitler's army." The marker is half hidden by the drooping limbs of a maple tree, and weeds tangle along the sidewalk in either direction. It is easy to walk by without noticing.

Korycin. Sidra. Dabrowa. Kuznica. Odelsk. Kolizaka. Krynki. Goniadz. Trzcianne. The list is almost a gazetteer for Poland before World War II. Occasionally, there is a bigger name--Warszawa (Warsaw), Czestochowa, Krakow--but mostly these are the small towns and villages that dotted the map of prewar Central Europe. Together, they were home to 3.5 million Polish Jews, only half a million of whom survived the war and the Nazi death camps.

A Jewish family has settled the first individual lawsuit filed against a European insurer stemming from failure to pay a claim based on a policy issued during the Holocaust era. On Monday night, William Shernoff, a Claremont attorney who represents the heirs of a wealthy Czech winemaker, sent a letter to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge S. James Otero informing him that the Stern family's suit against Assicurazioni Generali of Trieste, Italy, had been resolved.

More than most people, Roman Rakover is aware of the hole, torn by the Nazis, in the fabric of every European Jewish family. A dozen years ago, the Calabasas man sat down to compile a genealogy of the Rakover family and to write its history. It took five years and resulted in a book that traces 13 generations of the family from Rakover's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and two of his brothers, down to 81-year-old Rakover, his many cousins and their children.

About 300 survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in West Germany gathered to remember the joys of liberation by U.S. troops 45 years ago and the horrors that went before. Participants said the gathering at Brive-la-Gaillarde, southwest of Paris, was the largest such reunion ever and the first to which Eastern Europeans were free to attend.

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.

It was May 1939, and the luxury liner St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, with 937 passengers, almost all of them Jews fleeing the Nazis. The ship reached Havana on May 27, but Cuba, already awash in Jewish immigrants from Europe, denied the passengers entry. The ship then headed for the Florida coast--and with the lights of Miami twinkling in the distance--the passengers sent pleas for admission to the United States.