To say that the late Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is a divisive and polarizing figure in contemporary Ukraine would be to understate the case. More than five decades after his assassination in West Germany, allegedly at the hands of KGB agents, he inspires both adulation and loathing. Bandera’s ambivalent legacy was on martial display a few […]
They died in 2013, leaving a lasting legacy… Saul Kagan, 91, was the founding director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was established in 1951 by major Jewish organizations to seek reparations from Germany for the Nazi genocide during World War II. Thanks to Kagan, born in Lithuania, 600,000 Holocaust survivors […]
Udo Klausa regarded himself as a “decent” Nazi. From 1940 to 1942, he was the principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, a mid-sized town in Poland that, in September 1939, was the scene of one of the very first Nazi atrocities against Jews. Klausa was not at his post in Bedzin when these crimes were committed, but […]
On my last visit to Egypt 14 years ago, I could sense that the Jewish community was already a relic of history. Doomed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Egypt was deeply enmeshed by virtue of its pan-Arab foreign policy and its four wars with Israel, Egyptian Jews became the scapegoats of regional politics. The […]
Six years before South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was released from imprisonment on Robben Island, launching his career as South Africa’s future first Black president and starting the historic process of phasing in Black majority rule, I visited South Africa in my capacity as a journalist. It was 1984 and South Africa, a pariah […]
The far-right National Democratic Party, known in German as the NPD, is an ugly, festering sore on Germany’s body politic. The NPD is shamelessly xenophobic, jingoistic, racist and, worst of all, antisemitic. Given Germany’s central role in the Holocaust, it beggars the imagination that there are still German politicians, even on the fringes of society, who […]
I had the privilege of knowing Joseph Baruch (J.B.) Salsberg, who was already a legendary figure when I met him in the autumn of 1974. I was a reporter on The Canadian Jewish News and he was one of its freelance columnists. Salsberg, tall, irrepressible, witty and always nattily dressed, would usually arrive at the […]
The Holocaust in the Baltic nation of Lithuania exacted a greater toll on Jews than in nearly any other Nazi-occupied country, with more than 90 percent of its Jewish citizens having been murdered by Lithuanian antisemites and German forces. Out of a pre-war Jewish population of about 208,000, upwards of 195,000 Litvaks, or Lithuania Jews, […]
Poland’s Jewish community, the biggest in Europe before World War II, was virtually obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. As if to rub salt into the wound, the Communist government, in 1967, launched an antisemitic campaign under the thinly-veiled guise of anti-Zionism, prompting many of the remaining Jews to emigrate. Since the advent of […]
During the Nazi era in Germany, Jews were robbed of their valuable art collections or forced to sell them at ridiculously deflated prices. Paintings by such masters as Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall were shamelessly expropriated by Nazi officials like Hermann Goering, a self-styled art connoisseur, and by fellow travellers. In one of the most notorious […]