Bush: US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz

Bush: US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz
Friday, January 11, 2008 By: Aron Heller

JERUSALEM (AP) — President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."

The memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.

It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors. At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor sing a Jewish prayer for the dead.

Shalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.

The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Bush.

Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.

"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

Later Friday, Bush was to wrap up his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a visit to Christian holy sites in Galilee before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Mideast tour.

"Dark Tourism"

Thursday, Jun. 07, 2007
Vacationing at Auschwitz
By Alex Perry

I don't wanna holiday in the sun
I wanna go to new Belsen
I wanna see some history
'Cause now I got a reasonable economy

Thus the Sex Pistols, on their calculated-to-shock debut album 30 years ago. But today, a holiday stop at the former Nazi concentration camp at Belsen is far from unthinkable; it's a common destination, together with Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka, in the growing travel niche market known as "Dark Tourism."

While many of us will head for the beaches, the mountains and the amusement parks this summer, some will be going to un-amusement parks. Lonely Planet, a leading publisher of travel guides, predicts in its Blue List — a summary of 2007 travel trends — that dark tourism will be one of the major growth areas in the industry. Some people want a holiday experience that others would deem anything but a holiday. "Travel to sites associated with death, disaster + depravity," is how Lonely Planet defines dark tourism. We're talking not only about the concentration camps, but also South Africa's apartheid museum and Robben Island prison; Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh trail; the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian; the old dockside slave dungeons of West Africa; the Tuol Sleng Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh; Rwanda's genocide memorials; even Katrina tours of New Orleans .

New York City's Ground Zero is probably the most famous example of a disaster site that almost immediately became a tourist attraction, and to considerable controversy. But it's not only recent catastrophes that attract: Auschwitz-Birkenau saw a 37% increase in visitors in 2004.

My work has taken me to a fair few of the destinations on the dark-tourism itinerary, but increasingly, I'm visiting them with a brochure. Afghanistan now has boutique hotels and cultural tours. The old stomping grounds of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are overrun with tourists. I had to queue for scuba dives on a bunch of wrecked World War II Japanese ships off a remote island in the western Philippines. And when I embedded with a U.S. military unit for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I had with me a 2002 edition Bradt tourist guide to Iraq.

Is this a good thing? Yes, and no. Professionally, as someone who spends his life attempting to ram the reality of what's going in the darkest corners of the world down the public throat, I'm delighted. A magazine article is one thing. But it's a lot better if people go voluntarily to these places and educate themselves.

But be warned. You are, in the prescient words of the Sex Pistols, taking "a cheap holiday in other people's misery." As any journalist who's ever reported a car wreck will tell you, it's amazing how many people want witnesses to their stories of death and destruction. But remember that these are invitation-only moments that you should never gatecrash. And you should always leave if the victims choose to withdraw the invitation.

Also: most journalists will tell you that exploring other people's horror isn't the healthiest way to spend your day. I was once a rather happy-go-lucky lad. Then I started covering war. Now, I'm a happy-go-lucky-and-sometimes-rather-sad lad. I'm not saying that a day out in the Normandy graveyards is going to alter your view of humanity. But it might. It might also change your view of yourself. Most of the war correspondents I know share not only a profoundly depressing view of humanity, but also an equally cynical idea of themselves. Voyeurism and self-gratification are bad enough, but building a career out of war plumbs whole new depths of poor taste. This what the 9/11 families meant when they called the Ground Zero merchandise sellers "unbelievably sick."

So be warned. There's much to be gained from dark tourism, but also much to be lost. And don't expect much of a break.

* http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1630425,00.html

Copyright � 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about this strange phenomenon:

"Dark tourism or Grief tourism is tourism involving travel to sites associated with death and suffering. Thanatourism,[1] derived from the Ancient Greek word thanatos for the personification of death, is associated with dark tourism but refers more specifically to violent death; it is used in fewer contexts than the terms dark tourism and grief tourism.

This includes sites of pilgrimage such the site of St Peter’s death in Rome; castles and battlefields such as Culloden near Inverness, Scotland; sites of disaster, either natural or man made such as Ground Zero in New York; prisons now open to the public such as Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey, Wales; and purpose built centers such as the London Dungeon.

One of the most notorious destinations for dark tourism is the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz in Poland."

Holocaust Memorial Day

In honor of Yom HaShoah, I am providing you a link to a Jerusalem Post supplement that I put together a few years back after visiting the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland:

http://info.jpost.com/2000/Supplements/Auschwitz/