Labor Camp

THIS IS THE time of year when miracles seem possible. For Marjorie Fuller, the 72-year-old woman left a stateless person in a Chinese nursing home, her new U.S. passport is nothing short of a miracle: She is spending these holidays in the land she always called home but had never seen.Mrs. Fuller and her mother were caught up in the epochal events of modern China, deprived of a passport and forced into a labor camp. With the death of her mother three years ago, Ms. Fuller was left alone, the only Westerner in a rural nursing home, with scant knowledge of Chinese and no one who could interpret.

Dr. Eugene J. Schnitzer, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in cellars and attics with his wife in German-occupied Czechoslovakia and later was a general practitioner in South Baltimore, died June 16 at his retirement home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 102. Born in Sabinov, in what is now Slovakia and was then Hungary, he was educated at a Roman Catholic school run by Jesuit fathers and received his medical education in Prague at the Charles University....

BERLIN -- The Nazi hordes, fanatics who believed themselves supermen and spattered World War II Europe with blood like drenching rain, came down once again to a tired and fearful old man, alone in a German court.In what may be the last Nazi trial in Germany, Josef Schwammberger, once an SS-Oberscharfuehrer called "god over life and death" in a forced labor camp, was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing at least 34 people personally and participating in the murder of hundreds more.A bald man with full arching brows and frightened eyes, Schwammberger, 80, sat almost mute at his trial in Stuttgart as survivors of his camps described him as a cruel, strutting, racist killer.

IT IS ALTOGETHER remarkable that in 1990 a Soviet citizen could be convicted and imprisoned for anti-Semitism. It wouldn't have happened in 1989.The other day the leader of an extremist group was sentenced to two years in a labor camp for having interrupted a meeting of the House of Writers in Moscow and shouted, ''Comrade Jews, get out! Your time is up! go to Israel!''For that he became the first Soviet citizen in memory to be tried for, much less convicted of, inciting racial hatred.It is not difficult to recall the pre-perestroika Communist regime.

Zypora Spaisman, 86, who did everything to keep Yiddish theater alive -- from producing plays to selling tickets to sweeping floors to her great love, acting -- died May 18 in New York City. The Yiddish stage was the center of Mrs. Spaisman's life, from her girlhood in Poland to a Soviet labor camp to Paris and Montreal and finally to New York, where she became a principal force in maintaining the United States' only surviving Yiddish theater, the Folksbiene (People's Stage). She seems never to have made a penny for her efforts.

Felix Kestenberg, a survivor of the Maidanek, Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, stood before members of Beth Israel Congregation in Owings Mills yesterday at the dedication of their Holocaust Memorial Garden and eloquently reminded them why they had gathered."

BEIJING -- Chinese enterprises still export prison-made goods to the United States despite continued government denials, an international human rights group alleged yesterday, a day before U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrives to attempt to negotiate an end to them.Asia Watch said in a detailed report that galvanized pipe, diesel engines and tools made in prison labor camps in China's Shandong province are being exhibited or advertised this week at a San Francisco trade fair.

MOSCOW -- In the dank tunnels beneath the KGB headquarters lie the moldering documents, perhaps ruined by seepage or soiled by rat droppings, that could explain to Vladimir Yanin why he was arrested at 16 as "the son of an enemy of the people" and why his stepfather was shot.At least, that is what Yanin dares to hope, now that the KGB files on the millions who fell victim to Josef Stalin's brutal dictatorship are about to be opened."We need the archives to know the truth," the vigorous pensioner with a shock of white hair said yesterday.

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.

Sometimes the only barrier separating a pastoral paradise from hell on earth is a thin line of birch trees. Before she died in 2001 at age 74, Frederick dressmaker Esther Krinitz created 36 oversized fabric panels that provide persuasive proof that both worlds exist - sometimes within the same frame. In scraps of fabric and cheerily colored yarns, the panels tell the story of how young Esther and her sister escaped from the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. The panels went on display this weekend at the American Visionary Art Museum as part of a new exhibit, "The Art of Storytelling: Lies, Enchantment, Humor and Truth.