SIMON WIESENTHAL, HUNTING NAZI WAR CRIMINALS

Today, The Grandma has decided to read about Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer, who died on a day like today in 2005.

Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 1908–20 September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II.

He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (February to 5 May 1945).

After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial.

In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives.

He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals.

He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a Jewish fascist, likened his organization to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis.

More information: Wiesenthal

Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered much negative publicity as a result of this event.

With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs containing tales that are only loosely based on actual events. In particular, he exaggerated his role in the capture of Eichmann in 1960.

Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on 20 September 2005 and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.

Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908, in Buczacz (Buchach), Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine. His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews.

In Europe, World War II began in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a result of the partitioning of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the city of Lwów was annexed by the Soviets and became known as Lvov in Russian or Lviv in Ukrainian.

Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in Dolyna, was arrested as a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison. Wiesenthal's mother moved to Lvov to live with Wiesenthal and Cyla.

Wiesenthal bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres of the city, which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.

In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works.

Every few weeks, the Nazis staged a round-up in the Lvov ghetto of people unable to work. These round ups typically took place while the able-bodied were absent doing forced labour. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly Jewish women were transported by freight train to Belzec extermination camp and killed in August 1942.

Around the same time, a Ukrainian policeman shot Cyla's mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while she was being evicted. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.

More information: Jewish Virtual Library

Within three weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal had prepared a list of around a hundred names of suspected Nazi war criminals -mostly guards, camp commandants, and members of the Gestapo- and presented it to a War Crimes office of the American Counter-intelligence Corps at Mauthausen. He worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who were carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail.

When Austria was partitioned in July 1945, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so the American War Crimes Office was moved to Linz. Wiesenthal went with them, and was housed in a displaced persons camp. He served as vice-chairman of the area's Jewish Central Committee, an organization that attempted to arrange basic care for Jewish refugees and tried to help people gather information about their missing family members.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles was founded in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who paid Wiesenthal an honorarium for the right to use his name.

The centre helped with the campaign to remove the statute of limitations on Nazi crimes and continues the hunt for suspected Nazi war criminals, but today its primary activities include Holocaust remembrance, education, and fighting antisemitism.

Wiesenthal was not always happy with the way the centre was run. He thought the centre's Holocaust museum was not dignified enough and that he should have a larger say in the overall operations. He even wrote to the Board of Directors requesting Hier's removal, but in the end had to be content with being a figurehead.

More information: Museum of Tolerance

 Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

Simon Wiesenthal

ROBERTO BENIGNI, THE HOLOCAUST IN 'LA VITA È BELLA'

La Vita è Bella / Life is Beautiful

Today, The Grandma wants to talk about Mauthausen, one of the first massive concentration camp complexes in Nazi Germany, and the last to be liberated by a squad of US Army Soldiers of the 41st Reconnaissance Squadron of the US 11th Armoured Division, 3rd US Army on a day like today in 1945.

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews, around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, between 1941 and 1945.

Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs (chiefly ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet citizens), the Roma, the incurably sick, political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men. 

Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to 17 million.

More information: BBC

Nowadays, we can see astonished how the right-wing is rising unstoppably in Europe and economic, social and moral crisis seem to help in this increasing. We must learn from our recent past to not do the same mistakes.

The Grandma and her friends are in Tuscany and they want to talk, in a special day like today, about Roberto Benigni, the great Tuscan artist well-known by his role in the film La vita è bella, a film that talks about fascism and WWII in Italy.

Roberto Remigio Benigni, born 27 October 1952, is a Tuscan actor, comedian, screenwriter and director. He co-wrote, directed and acted in the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 71st Oscars Ceremony.

He also portrayed Inspector Clouseau's son in Son of the Pink Panther (1993) and has collaborated with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in three of his films: Down by Law (1986), Night on Earth (1991) and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003).

Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) in La Vita è Bella

Benigni was born in Manciano La Misericordia, Castiglion Fiorentino, a small, walled city in eastern Tuscany, in the province of Arezzo, between the cities of Arezzo and Cortona. The son of Isolina Papini, a fabric maker, and Luigi Benigni, a bricklayer, carpenter, and farmer. 

His first experiences as a theatre actor took place in 1971, in Prato. During that autumn he moved to Rome where he took part in some experimental theatre shows, some of which he also directed. In 1975, Benigni had his first theatrical success with Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia, written by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

Benigni became famous in Italy in the 1970s for a television series called Onda Libera, on RAI2, produced by Renzo Arbore, in which he interpreted the satirical piece The L'inno del corpo sciolto, a scatological song about the joys of defecation. A great scandal for the time, the series was suspended due to censorship. His first film was 1977's Berlinguer, Ti voglio bene, also by Bertolucci.

More information: Life is Beautiful

His popularity increased with L'altra domenica (1976-1979), another TV show of Arbore's in which Benigni portrayed a lazy film critic who never watches the films he's asked to review.

In 1980 he met Cesenate actress Nicoletta Braschi, who was to become his wife and who has starred in most of the films he has directed.

In June 1983 he appeared during a public political demonstration by the Italian Communist Party, with which he was a sympathiser, and on this occasion he lifted and cradled the party's national leader Enrico Berlinguer. It was an unprecedented act, given that until that moment Italian politicians were proverbially serious and formal. 

Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) in La Vita è Bella

Benigni was censored again in the 1980s for calling Pope John Paul II something impolite during an important live TV show Wojtylaccio, meaning Bad Wojtyla in Italian, but with a friendly meaning in Tuscan dialect.

Benigni's first film as director was Tu mi turbi in 1983.

In 1984, he played in Non ci resta che piangere with comic actor Massimo Troisi. Beginning in 1986, Benigni starred in three films by American director Jim Jarmusch. 

In 1993, he starred in Son of the Pink Panther, directed by veteran Blake Edwards. Benigni played Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau's illegitimate son who is assigned to save the Princess of Lugash.

Benigni is perhaps best known outside Italy for his 1997 tragicomedy La vita è bella, filmed in Arezzo, also written by Cerami. The film is about an Italian Jewish man who tries to protect his son's innocence during his internment at a Nazi concentration camp, by telling him that the Holocaust is an elaborate game and he must adhere very carefully to the rules to win.

More information: The Guardian

Benigni's father had spent three years in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, and La vita è bella is based in part on his father's experiences. Benigni was also inspired by the story of Holocaust survivor Rubino Romeo Salmonì.

More favourable critics praised Benigni's artistic daring and skill to create a sensitive comedy involving the tragedy, a challenge that Charlie Chaplin confessed he would not have done with The Great Dictator had he been aware of the horrors of the Holocaust.

'Forbidden access to Jews and dogs'

In 1998, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

At the 1999 ceremony, the film was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which Benigni accepted as the film's director, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Benigni received the award for Best Actor, the first for a male performer in a non-English-speaking role, and only the third overall acting Oscar for non-English-speaking roles.

Famously, giddy with delight after Life Is Beautiful was announced as the Best Foreign Language Film, Benigni climbed over and then stood on the backs of the seats in front of him and applauded the audience before proceeding to the stage.

After winning his Best Actor Oscar later in the evening, he said in his acceptance speech, This is a terrible mistake because I used up all my English! To close his speech, Benigni quoted the closing lines of Dante's Divine Comedy, referencing the love that moves the sun and all the stars.

More information: Oscars

Benigni is an improvisatory poet. Poesia estemporanea is a form of art popularly followed and practiced in Tuscany, appreciated for his explanation and recitations of Dante's Divina Commedia from memory.

During 2006 and 2007, Benigni had a lot of success touring Italy with his 90-minute one man show TuttoDante. Combining current events and memories of his past narrated with an ironic tone, Benigni then begins a journey of poetry and passion through the world of the Divina Commedia.

Roberto Benigni is also a singer-songwriter. Among his recorded performances are versions of Paolo Conte's songs.

More information: The New York Times

In Italy, the country where fascism was born, 

we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, 

but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. 

It is a part of humanity.

Roberto Benigni

ANNE MARIE FRANK IS DEPORTED TO BERGEN-BELSEN

Anne Frank

Some days ago, a horrible anti-Semitic attack happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 11 worshippers were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue. The Grandma was shocked thinking about how is possible to happen something like this in the 21th century.

Lately, terrible things like antisemitism, homophobia, and xenophobia are rising up without control. They are clear symptoms of an emergent fascism that is growing more and more taking advantage of the economic crisis, the globalization, the intolerance, the ignorance and the corruption of the political class. Hungary, Poland, The USA, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia... the list of emergent fascism seems to not finish and this is a terrible problem that we must fight against, control and erase before it was too late.

We must learn from our History and we have recent events to remember, to never forget and, the most import, to not repeat again, like the WWII, a terrible moment in our history that left sad stories to read, reread and explain to all the present and future generations, stories like Anne Frank's life.

More information: Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank (12 June 1929-February or March 1945) was a German-born diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, The Secret Annex in English, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Anne Frank

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, Netherlands, having moved there with her family at the age of four and a half when the Nazis gained control over Germany. Born a German national, she lost her citizenship in 1941 and thus became stateless.

The Franks were liberal Jews, and did not observe all of the customs and traditions of Judaism. They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions.

Edith was the more devout parent, while Otto was interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to read.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election, Edith Frank and the children went to stay with Edith's mother Rosa in Aachen. Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the business and to arrange accommodations for his family. He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold the fruit extract pectin, and found an apartment on the Merwedeplein in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood of Amsterdam.

More information: History Hit

By February 1934, Edith and the children had joined him in Amsterdam. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.

After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot Frank were enrolled in school, Margot in public school and Anne in a Montessori school. Margot demonstrated ability in arithmetic, and Anne showed aptitude for reading and writing. Anne's friend, Hanneli Goslar, later recalled that from early childhood, Frank frequently wrote, although she shielded her work with her hands and refused to discuss the content of her writing.

In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government began to persecute Jews by the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws; mandatory registration and segregation soon followed. Otto Frank tried to arrange for the family to emigrate to the United States, the only destination that seemed to him to be viable, but Frank's application for a visa was never processed, due to circumstances such as the closing of the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam and the loss of all the paperwork there, including the visa application. 

More information: Vintag

Even if it had been processed, the U.S. government at the time was concerned that people with close relatives still in Germany could be blackmailed into becoming Nazi spies.

Anne Frank

By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the Franks went into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked.

From then until the family's arrest by the Gestapo in August 1944, she kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and wrote in it regularly. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. 

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Frank received a book she had shown her father in a shop window a few days earlier. Although it was an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front, Frank decided she would use it as a diary, and she began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.

More information: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On 3 September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a three-day journey. 

On 28 October, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen. More than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transported. Edith Frank was left behind and died from starvation. Tents were erected at Bergen-Belsen to accommodate the influx of prisoners, and as the population rose, the death toll due to disease increased rapidly. 

October, 30 1944. Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died, probably of typhus, a few months later. They were originally estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as their official date of death, but research by the Anne Frank House in 2015 suggests they more likely died in February.

More information:  BBC

Otto, the only survivor of the Franks, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by his secretary, Miep Gies, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947.

Anne Frank

It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 60 languages.

In July 1945, after the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of the Frank sisters, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank the diary and a bundle of loose notes that she had saved in the hope of returning them to Anne. Otto Frank later commented that he had not realized Anne had kept such an accurate and well-written record of their time in hiding.

In his memoir, he described the painful process of reading the diary, recognizing the events described and recalling that he had already heard some of the more amusing episodes read aloud by his daughter.

More information: Anne Frank

He saw for the first time the more private side of his daughter and those sections of the diary she had not discussed with anyone, noting, For me it was a revelation ... I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings ... She had kept all these feelings to herself. Moved by her repeated wish to be an author, he began to consider having it published.

Frank's diary began as a private expression of her thoughts; she wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions, and their situation, while beginning to recognize her ambition to write fiction for publication.

In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, based in London, who said that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under German occupation. He mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, and Frank decided to submit her work when the time came.

More information: The Guardian I & II

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait 

a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Anne Frank

MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, also known as the Holocaust Memorial or Holocaust-Mahnmal, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 m2  site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 m. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. 

More information: Stiftung-Denkmal

An attached underground Place of Information, Ort der Information, holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem. Building began on April 1, 2003, and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public two days later. 

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

It is located in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood in Berlin, a city that had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe before World War 2. 

Nestled next to the Tiergarten, it has a central location in the Friedrichstadt district of Berlin. The memorial is close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate. The monument is located on the former location of the Berlin Wall, where the death strip once divided the city.

More information: Berlin.de

It acts as a focal point, connecting the various holocaust monuments spread across the city and the country; the monument provides a central reference point for visitors. The center represents a central focus on the diverse memorial sites across Germany which stress the living memory aspect of remembrance. In Berlin an example of this is the Stolpersteine, tripping stones, initiative plaques on street pavements, usually outside the house's main entrance, commemorating deported Jewish residents. 

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The monument is composed of 2711 rectangular concrete blocks, laid out in agrid formation, the monument is organized into a rectangle-like array covering 4.7 acres. This lets for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates. The installation is a living experiment in montage, a Kuleshov of the juxtaposition of image and text. 

People have applauded the location of the memorial. During the war, the area acted as the administrative center of Hitler's killing machine. His chancellery building, designed by Albert Speer and since demolished, was a few hundred yards away just to the south; his bunker lies beneath a nearby parking lot. The memorial is also located near Berlin’s foreign embassies. Allowing political diplomats and leaders from around the world to observe how Germany acknowledges its past while continuing to move forward.

More information: History.com

The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, 

racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us to examine 

the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction. 

Tim Holden

WORLD WAR II: BARBARY & EXILE

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland under the false pretext that the Poles had carried out a series of sabotage operations against German targets near the border. Two days later, on 3 September, after a British ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations was ignored, Britain and France, followed by the fully independent Dominions of the British Commonwealth—Australia (3 September), Canada (10 September), New Zealand (3 September), and South Africa (6 September)—declared war on Germany. However, initially the alliance provided limited direct military support to Poland, consisting of a cautious, half-hearted French probe into the Saarland. The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort. Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which was to later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic.

More information: WW2 People's War

The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million Jews, as well as 2.7 million ethnic Poles, and 4 million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Romani) as part of a programme of deliberate extermination. About 12 million, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced labourers.

More information: Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Catalan-French border was witness of the Jewish exile. Thanks to the citizens of la Val d’Aran, els Pallars, l'Alt Urgell, la Cerdanya, el Ripollès, l'Alt Empordà and Andorra, thousands of people could save their lives and started new ones in other countries.

It wasn’t an exceptional case. This border was a route of exit during other conflicts: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Cathar exile in the 13th century.

More information: Persecuted and Saved

 The adjustment of reality to the masses
and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope,
as much for thinking as for perception. 

Walter Benjamin