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These harrowing pictures of a teenage girl awaiting her torture and death at the hands of Nazi torture specialists lay bare the tragic human toll of the Holocaust. The gaunt face of 14-year-old prisoner Czesława Kwoka stares back through time in a haunting Auschwitz mugshot restored this year by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral. Taken just minutes after she was beaten to within an inch of her life, the images give a human face to one of the concentration camp’s 1.1 million victims.

When it comes to Holocaust remembrance, Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz looks like the Anti-Poland. Whereas Poland has hunkered down behind a new Holocaust law saying the country was a victim of the Nazis, not a Holocaust perpetrator, Kurz said in an extraordinary speech on Monday that, yes, Austria was a victim, but it was equally a perpetrator. The speech is also important in light of what is going on in Poland, where Polish legislators enacted a law making it illegal and a punishable crime to say that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. A similar refrain was heard in Austria...

Difficult as it is to fathom, given most people's conception of dictatorship, most Germans appear to have led happy, productive, even normal lives in the Third Reich. This indicates that a dictatorship can enjoy widespread popularity among the majority even while committing unspeakable crimes against minorities and others. The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust still present some of the most disturbing questions in modern history: Why did Hitler’s party appeal to millions of Germans, and how entrenched was anti- Semitism among the population? How could anyone claim, after the war, that the genocide of Europe’s Jews was...

Actor and former Obama staffer Kal Penn (Kumar of Harold and Kumar fame) ripped into Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for his support for the state of Israel. Standing before this week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Schumer not only came out in strong defense of Israel but spoke the truth about Arabs not wanting peace with the Jewish state: Now, let me tell you why – my view – why we don’t have peace, because the fact of the matter is that too many Palestinians and too many Arabs do not want any Jewish state in the Middle East....

Actor and former Obama staffer Kal Penn (Kumar of Harold and Kumar fame) ripped into Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for his support for the state of Israel. Standing before this week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Schumer not only came out in strong defense of Israel but spoke the truth about Arabs not wanting peace with the Jewish state: Now, let me tell you why – my view – why we don’t have peace, because the fact of the matter is that too many Palestinians and too many Arabs do not want any Jewish state in the Middle East....

A group of about eight Montreal residents who attended a city meeting wearing small yellow badges in protest of Jewish school buses faced a wave of accusations of anti-Semitism. But their leader, Ginette Chartre, says they will not back down, the Canadian Press reported. A growing Hasidic community in the Montreal borough of Outremont uses school buses to drop children off around the city, causing tension with neighbors who say the constant bus traffic causes congestion, noise and pollution, reported the Canadian Jewish News. Chartre and other residents showed up at a public meeting to complain on March 5, wearing...

Poland’s leaders will not be allowed to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence until Warsaw repeals its controversial new Holocaust law. Polish web portal Onet.pl (owned by Axel Springer, also a co-owner of POLITICO Europe) on Tuesday reported that it had obtained a memo from Washington dated February 20 about the law, which makes it illegal to suggest that the Polish state or the Polish nation were complicit in Nazi crimes. The information has been confirmed by other Warsaw-based media.

Increasingly, ordinary Poles, caricatured as staunchly Catholic, simple-minded and chauvinistic, are positioned as the quintessential Holocaust perpetrator. That's far more comfortable than blaming 'elite' German NazisTo many observers, not least those who are neither Polish nor Jewish, the highly critical press coverage of Poland's new Holocaust law which seeks to criminalize declaring the complicity of the Polish nation in the murder of Jews in WWII, appears both simple and clear. Poles contributed enthusiastically to the genocide of six million Jews. Poles did so because they are staunchly Catholic, simple-minded and chauvinistic. Right-thinking observers must perpetually goad Poles to drop their...

YERUSHALAYIM - Amid the ongoing row over Poland’s new Holocaust speech law, Warsaw’s embassy in Tel Aviv was painted with swastikas and anti-Polish slogans, according to media reports. The graffiti was found on gates at the entrance to the Polish embassy, according to the police foreign press spokesperson. Police have opened an investigation into the incident. The controversy flared up again over Shabbos as Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sought to downplay his country’s role in the Holocaust, saying that “there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian; not only...

In 1942, a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea torpedoed and sank the Struma, a ship filled with almost 800 Jewish refugees headed from Romania to the Holy Land. David Stoliar, the lone survivor, agreed to share his story with SPIEGEL ONLINE. David Stoliar's neat house sits atop a hill on the edge of Bend, a small city in central Oregon. A few steps lead up to the front door. Stoliar's wife, Marda, opens, followed by a happy beagle. "Come in," she says cheerfully. "Come in." Her husband is waiting in the living room, surrounded by souvenirs and family photos....

Ruderman Family Foundation opens online petition, releases video showing people saying 'Polish Holocaust' in defiance of controversial legislation The Ruderman Family Foundation, an American Jewish philanthropic organization, launched a campaign urging the United States to suspend its ties with Poland over that country’s law on rhetoric about the Holocaust. The campaign includes a petition for suspension hosted on the NeverDeny.org website and a professionally produced video message. It shows men, women and children saying “Polish Holocaust,” which is supposed to be in defiance of the law passed by Poland earlier this month. The law criminalizes blaming the Polish nation or...

A senior Russian official finally admitted that Stalin's secret police shot dead Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of central European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. For decades the Soviet authorities insisted that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Soviet prison, but speculation about his fate grew into a full-blown mystery as gulag inmates surfaced to report sightings of the Swede in Siberia into the 1950s.

A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor had thought his entire family had been killed during World War II until he met he recently meet his nephew. Eliahu Pietruszka had fled to the Soviet Union from Warsaw, Poland in 1939 as the war erupted. He was 24 at the time and left behind his parents and twin brothers Volf and Zelig, who were 15. His parents and Zelig were later deported from the Warsaw Ghetto by Adolph Hiter's SS units and were murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Somehow Volf managed to escape and stayed in touch with Eliahu before he was sent...

Contrary to other European countries, such as France or Norway, Poland was directly controlled by Nazi Germany. There was no puppet regime in Poland to assist the Germans, like the Vichy or Quisling governments, and the Nazis annexed parts of the country, while putting the rest under the control of a German governor, Hans Frank. Frank subjected Poland to a terror "much fiercer and more protracted [...] than anywhere in Europe," scholar Norman Davies says, as cited by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This terror included capital punishment for offering any help to Jews. While it’s true that Poles aided,...

On a reporting trip to Gaza, Amman, and Damascus in 1994, I made a habit of asking Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders whom I met the following question: Did they think the Jews had a plan to dominate the world? I’ll never forget the enthusiastic answer of a pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader, whom I met in his doctor’s office in Gaza. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have a copy right here.” And he pulled down from a shelf an Arabic-language copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a response I heard again and...

How tolerating Students for Justice in Palestine ignores the lessons of the Holocaust. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.“‘I would have killed all the jews in the world,But I kept some to show the world why I killed them’ -Hitler- #PrayForGaza #PrayForPalestina." --SJP UWM Activist International Holocaust Remembrance Day is that time of the year when politicians, pundits and university presidents pretend to care about the mass murder of six million Jews. And then they spend the other 364 days palling around...

Israel’s education minister said on Monday he was “honoured” Poland had canceled his visit to Warsaw this week because he refused to back down from condemnation of a bill that would outlaw suggesting Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. Earlier on Monday, Naftali Bennett said he would travel to Poland to discuss the bill, which Israeli officials have said amounts to Holocaust denial. However Poland’s government spokeswoman said there would be no such visit. “The blood of Polish Jews cries from the ground, and no law will silence it,” Bennett later said in a statement. “The government of Poland cancelled...

In today’s Russia it is not fashionable to delve too deeply into Gulag history, and 60-year-old Panikarov’s collection is one of just two museums devoted entirely to the Gulag in the whole country. Indeed, even Panikarov himself has a somewhat surprising view: “We should not have one-sided evaluations... “It was fashionable to say bad things about the USSR. Now it is again fashionable to insult Russia. We have sanctions against us. The west looks for negative things.” Panikarov’s views on the Gulag are part of a larger trend. With the Soviet victory in the second world war elevated to a...

"It is the greatest success in the history of American foreign policy," Mark Stoler, editor of the George C. Marshall Papers in Lexington, Va. "And it plays to the best American instincts — helping those in need. "In the process, it clearly turned America into the world's superpower. It was the key component of American Cold War strategy. And it was an immediate psychological booster shot to Europe. Marshall's message was: 'Here is a lifeline that you can take advantage of. America is going to be the leader here and accept that mantel of leadership.'" Georges Bidault, France's prime minister...

Arthur Jones — an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist — is poised to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs. “Well first of all, I’m running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany. All right. To me the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket,” Jones told the Chicago Sun-Times. Indeed, Jones’ website for his latest congressional run includes a section titled “The ‘Holocaust Racket’” where he calls the genocide carried out by the German Nazi regime and collaborators in other nations “the...