Coming to terms with Nazi past in Germany

MAINZ, Germany - Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's most notorious death camp that became a symbol for Adolf Hitler's apparatus of mass murder, commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Holocaust are being held across the globe this week.

Several world leaders, including German president Horst Koehler, gathered at the main commemoration event in Oswiecim, Poland, on Thursday while in Berlin, the German government hosted a ceremony in the city that served as the headquarters for Nazi leaders between 1933 and 1945.

At the historic Reichstag building — today home to the Bundestag, Germany's democratic parliament — Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder welcomed the head of the World Jewish Congress, Israel Singer, and several Holocaust survivors.

Among them was Arno Lustiger, a Jewish history professor and author who survived imprisonment in several Nazi concentration camps. At age 20, Lustiger was deported to Blechhammer, a so-called "labor camp,” which was located not too far from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.

Surviving the camps
"The conditions in the camp were extremely bad, but still, we were very lucky, as Blechhammer was not a death camp in the first place," Lustiger said in an interview ahead of Thursday's commemoration.

"Instead, the aim was to exploit us as a workforce,” Lustiger said. Yet, once the prisoners grew too weak or sick for active labor, they were deported to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chambers.

"Only two weeks before my arrival at Blechhammer, my father was murdered at Auschwitz," Lustiger said.

As a survivor of the Holocaust, Lustiger welcomed the opportunity to speak at the  commemoration ceremony in Berlin.

"I think it is a very good opportunity for me to address some historic aspects and unanswered questions, roughly 60 years after the end of World War II," he said.

Auschwitz revisited
Siegmund Kalinski, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1945, has been living in Germany as a German citizen for almost 40 years. All his adult life, he has been trying to forget his terrible experience, but he is now determined to return to the place of his torture.

Kalinski is among a small group of survivors who traveled to Poland to join the 60th anniversary commemoration, which also was attended by world leaders including President Vladimir Putin of Russia, France's Jacques Chirac and Vice President Dick Cheney.

"First and foremost, I am going to Oswiecim because I am one of the few Holocaust survivors that are still alive, and secondly, I think I owe attendance and commemoration to all my comrades who did not survive," Kalinski said.

Even though Kalinski, who is married to a German woman, feels very comfortable in Germany, he remains worried about lingering anti-Semitism.

"In my opinion, about 20 percent of all Germans feel an aversion toward Jews and that is far too many," he said. "Therefore, we have to be careful that ideologies, like that of Adolf Hitler, do not take root in Germany again. It would be poison, not only for Germany, but for the whole world."

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