Holocaust

Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood, by Ruth Kluger. The Feminist Press of the City of New York. 213 pages. $24.95. This Holocaust memoir is a latecomer to the United States, despite its renown abroad and the prestige of international prizes. Countless other such memoirs, museum exhibitions, ceremonies, and films have preceded its arrival here, yet Still Alive is able to make Hitler's death camps present, as a new and shocking event. The passage of time has paled the atrocities and the young remain in semi-ignorance.

Shanlei Cardwell could not fathom why so many people had wanted to kill the engaging old man standing before her. Meredith O'Connell laughed at his jokes and wondered how he had the spirit to tell them after all he'd endured. Both teenagers sensed that they'd be talking about Leo Bretholz for decades to come, that they would take on a small part of the quest that has driven him for almost 50 years. For all that time, Bretholz has crisscrossed the Baltimore area telling his harrowing tale of eluding capture and death as an Austrian Jew living in Europe through the Holocaust.

TEHRAN, IRAN -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad escalated his anti-Israeli rhetoric yesterday, calling the Holocaust a "myth" used by Europeans to create a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world. Ahmadinejad's latest comments drew swift criticism yesterday in Jerusalem, Washington and Europe, where Britain, Germany and France have taken the lead in pursuing negotiations to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Germany said the remarks would affect the negotiations, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Iranians do not have the president, or the regime, they deserve.

During the past few months, sharp images from the U.S. Holocaust Museum -- the canisters of poisonous Zyklon B, the concentration camp uniforms, the hundreds of pairs of victims' shoes -- have pierced the conscience of the nation, reminding Americans of the potentials of humanity's dark side.But fewer are aware of the lesson which the Washington museum has prepared in commemoration of the 1.5 million children who were killed.The permanent exhibition, "Remembering the Children: Daniel's Story," located apart from the adult exhibitions area, is expected attract tens of thousands of schoolchildren each year.

"Do you know what repressed memory means?" World War II veteran Preston Daisey asked the crowd of about 200 John Carroll School seniors, faculty and guests in the school auditorium Tuesday morning. Before anyone could answer, he said, "There's no repressed memory for me." Daisey, an 82-year-old former U.S. Army soldier from Towson, was one of 12 people asked to speak about their experiences with the Holocaust. The program was part of a 12th-grade project on the Holocaust and genocide organized by John Carroll English teacher Louise Geczy.

WASHINGTON -- Without an intellectual anchor, cultural institutions are carried along by prevailing intellectual winds, which blow from the left. Familiar exhibits of this process are universities, where various subjects are enveloped in fogs of politics and abstractions.But now the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the problematic academic field of "Holocaust studies" are illustrating this process. The Holocaust is being exploited by academic entrepreneurs and factions with political agendas, all working to blur what the museum exists to insist upon -- the distinctiveness of the calamity that befell European Jewry.

Sylvia S. Shoken, a Holocaust survivor who owned several Baltimore neighborhood grocery stores with her husband, died Thursday of complications of a stroke at Milford Manor Nursing Home. She was 73.She was born Sylvia Szmulewicz in Zdunska-Wola, Poland, and was 16 when the Nazis occupied her country. The Nazis marched members of her family, along with others in the Jewish ghetto, to the town's Jewish cemetery, where they were shot."Her mother, brother and younger sister escaped, only to be lost and were probably later gassed," said a son, William R. Shoken of Baltimore.

For Holocaust researcher Robert William Kesting, the victims were more than just names found in old records. Despite the passing of 50 years, he could still feel their spirit and hear their voices.Dr. Kesting, 51, the records manager at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington whose research led to the discovery of 450,000 Holocaust victims, died of a heart attack Aug. 13 at Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, Del., while vacationing.The Silver Spring resident became an archivist at the Holocaust museum in 1988.

Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson Simon & Schuster / 464 pages / $26 The war in Iraq has made many of us painfully aware of the power religion has to wound as well as heal. The internecine religious civil war in Iraq exemplifies just how awry religion can go from its true purpose. The very beliefs that are meant to make us more humane can often have the opposite effect, spurring people to rage, violence, murder. British writer Howard Jacobson journeys into this complex terrain of religious identity in his latest novel, Kalooki Nights.

Abraham Shoken, whose long life was divided between hard times in Poland and better ones in the United States, died at Sinai Hospital early yesterday after a stroke. He was 91.The only member of his family to survive Nazi concentration camps, Mr. Shoken spent most of his new life running neighborhood grocery stores in Baltimore."He lived two different lives in equal portions, from birth to 1945 he experienced the culture of European Jewry. When that culture ended, he came to America and lived roughly another 45 years," said Fred Shoken of Baltimore, one of his three sons.