JewishMinnesota.orgGermans recognized for work remembering JewsBy MATT SURMAN BERLIN (AP) - Simone Veil, a former president of the European parliament and Nazi death camp survivor, warned Germans Tuesday that resurgent anti-Semitism in western Europe and the failure of former communist countries in the east to reckon with their pasts threatens Europe's future. Veil told German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and other national leaders gathered in the German parliament for Holocaust Remembrance Day that flare-ups of anti-Semitism represent ``a crisis of democratic vitality.'' Tuesday marks the 59th year since the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex - where more than 1.5 million people perished, 90 percent of them Jewish - was liberated by advancing Soviet troops on January 27, 1949. Since 1996, the day has been set aside for Germans to remember the crimes committed in their names. Germany marks the day with speeches, visits to cemeteries, class lessons, and tours through former concentration camps. Veil's visit showed the continuing strength of the relationship between Germany and France, said German parliament President Wolfgang Thierse, who called the Holocaust ``a European catastrophe, conjured up and released by Germans.'' In Berlin, Arthur Obermayer, a Jewish-American philanthropist from Boston, honored six Germans who had preserved Jewish history in their own communities. In her town of 13,000, Breisach am Rhein near the French border, Christian Walesch-Schneller spearheaded an effort to save a historic Jewish school from destruction and plans to create an educational center on Jews and other minorities. ``You're always confronted with this discussion in Germany, with the ongoing anti-Semitism, which you can sense in our town. It made me decide to get involved,'' she told The Associated Press. ``I thought it would be worthwhile to try in such a small town to reach out to people, to bring back the stories of the 250 Jews who lived there in 1933.'' Copyright 2004 Associated Press. |