Aron Heller

JERUSALEM (AP) — A Gestapo officer forced Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz to paint fairy tale characters on the walls of a nursery in an occupied Polish village in 1941. A Nazi sergeant shot and killed Schulz a year later, and his colorful murals were forgotten for decades. Israel’s Holocaust museum presented Schulz’s paintings on Friday, eight years after … Read More

ASHKELON, Israel (AP) — Bettina Goering ran away from home at 13, lived on a promiscuous commune in India and later fled to the U.S. and had herself sterilized. It was all part of an attempt to escape the legacy of her last name. Her great-uncle was the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering. Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, he headed the vaunted … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP) – They used to paint swastika graffiti, get into street fights with immigrants and distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. But after studying the cases of a few of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, some former Swedish neo-Nazi teenagers came to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial with new attitudes. The teens, some of whom were … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP)- Israel’s Holocaust memorial launched an Arabic version of its Web site Thursday, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivors’ testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world. Among those featured on the Yad Vashem site is Dina Beitler, a survivor of the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews in World War … Read More

JERUSALEM — A teary-eyed President Bush stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday at Israel’s Holocaust memorial and said the U.S. should have sent bombers to prevent the extermination of Jews there. Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, quoted Bush as saying the U.S. should have “bombed it.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Bush referred to … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP) — In 1939, 5-year-old Erna Blitzer left France with her parents and older sister for a vacation to visit relatives in Poland. They never made it home. She was on the run from the Nazis for the next five years. During that time, she watched her mother die. Her father was forced to witness the execution of his wife’s … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP) – Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum has unveiled the private archives of one of the most contentious Jewish figures from the Holocaust era in an attempt to exonerate the man’s tarnished legacy. Yad Vashem officials said the material released Sunday should finally put an end to what it said was an unjustified smear campaign against Rudolf (Israel) … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP) — The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl, dubbed the “Polish Anne Frank,” was unveiled Monday by Israel’s Holocaust museum more than 60 years after the teenager vividly described the world crumbling around her as she came of age in a Jewish ghetto. “The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter,” Rutka Laskier wrote in 1943, shortly … Read More

JERUSALEM (AP) — An 86-year-old former teacher who risked her life to save more than 300 Jewish children from the Nazis in Belgium was granted honorary Israeli citizenship Wednesday at an emotional ceremony in which she was reunited with dozens of the people she rescued. “What I did was merely my duty. Disobeying the laws of the time was just the … Read More