BLOG WORD

Jewish artist Yehuda Bacon was born in 1929 in Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia.
He witnessed the Nazi deportation of Jews from his home town, and was himself sent to the

Czech ghetto Theresienstadt in 1942, on the orders of Adolf Eichmann.
A year later, Mr Bacon and his family were transported to Auschwitz concentration camp. The

artist’s account and drawings of his experiences were used in evidence against Eichmann.
In 1959 I gave a testimony to the holocaust museum Yad Vashem. They asked people who had been

in the camps to tell their story.
They recorded me on tape and when they transcribed it, there were about 78 pages.
These pages were in the archive and when they caught Eichmann, they went through the archive

and looked for people who could be useful for the trial.
When they found my account they asked me to be a witness.
I told my story – how I came to Theresienstadt, what happened before, what was the daily

life, what happened to the children and my meetings with Jacob Edelstein [the Jewish elder of

the ghetto].
They were very interested to know at the trial if I knew how Edelstein was later killed.
We came to Auschwitz at the end of 1943 when they created the so-called “family camps”.
Before then there were no children or old people in Auschwitz, and the reason this camp was

created was because the Germans thought the International Red Cross [IRC] would like to see

what happened to all these people who disappeared.

The US has deported to Austria a former Nazi death camp guard, Josias Kumpf. The move sheds

light on the continuing search – in some countries, at least – for World War II war

criminals. Mario Cacciottolo examines a hunt now entering its final phase.
Efforts to bring war criminals to justice faltered as the Cold War set in
“Looking for Nazi war criminals is the ultimate law enforcement race against the clock.”
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the United States,

has a list of thousands of suspects.
But working out whether any of them are alive and in the US is a laborious job.
A full check could take 100 years at current rates, he says – but in 10 years “the World War

II biological clock will come to an end”.
Contrary to popular belief, most former Nazis did not go into hiding after the war. Most did

not even change their name.
There were some – such as Adolf Eichmann, who planned the transport of Jews to death camps,

and Dr Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” – who slipped away amid the post-war

chaos and assumed false identities.
But the majority simply took off their uniforms, went home, and got a job.
And for a crucial period in the 1950s, little was done to track them down, experts say.
“More could have been done, but there was a lack of political will. Not from 1945 to 1948,

but after that,” says Jean-Marc Dreyfus, lecturer in Holocaust studies at the University of

Manchester.
“Around 1953 the Nazi trials stopped, and it’s important to note that the Cold War was the

reason why.
“The West needed a strong West Germany and did not want to spend time hunting for Nazis, many

of which were now part of the society and even the Federal Republic government.

The alleged Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, has been declared fit enough to stand trial in

Germany.
The announcement followed a medical check. Earlier he had been transferred from a Munich

prison to hospital after developing gout, a joint disease.
The 89-year-old was deported from the United States to Germany in May after a long

extradition battle.
He has denied accusations that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp and an accessory to

the murder of 29,000 Jews.
Mr Demjanjuk says he was captured by Germans in his native Ukraine while fighting for the Red

Army and kept as a prisoner of war.
He arrived in the US in 1952 as a refugee, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in

the car industry.
In 1988 he was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity, after Holocaust

survivors identified him as a notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp.
But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction and he returned to the US.
Prosecutors now say they have documents that prove his Nazi background, including an SS

identity card which shows he was posted to the death camp in Sobibor in 1943, and many

witness testimonies.

An 88-year-old former member of the Nazi SS who admitted killing three Dutch civilians is fit

to stand trial, a German court has ruled.
The decision by the appeals court in Cologne reversed a ruling by another German court in

January that Heinrich Boere was too frail to be tried.
The suspect has acknowledged shooting dead three people in 1944, amid reprisals for

resistance attacks.
His case is expected to be among the last of Germany’s Nazi-era trials.
Of German-Dutch origin, Heinrich Boere fled to Germany in 1947, two years before a tribunal

in Amsterdam sentenced him to death – a sentence that was later reduced to life in prison.
A Dutch extradition request was refused in the early 1980s.
Following a request that he serve his sentence in Germany, the Cologne appeals court ruled

two years ago that the 1949 trial was unfair.
He was eventually indicted in April 2008, but a court in Aachen then said he was unfit to

stand trial, largely because of heart problems.
Reversing that decision, the Cologne court on Tuesday said that “his well-being can be

properly taken care of inside and outside the court”.
It said the defendant would be allowed breaks during hearings and would be given medical

supervision.
The court added that the fact that the principal evidence against the suspect was contained

in statements from people who had since died, this would place less of a strain on him than

facing witnesses face-to-face.

A former member of the Nazi SS has gone on trial in Germany charged with the wartime murder

of three civilians in the Netherlands.
Heinrich Boere, 88, has previously acknowledged shooting dead three people in 1944, as

reprisals for attacks by the Dutch resistance.
The trial went ahead after an appeal court ruled he was fit to be tried.
However, the hearing was adjourned when the five-judge panel said it needed time to consider

more legal argument.
The trial is due to resume on Monday, court officials said.
Anti-Nazi protesters had gathered outside the court in Aachen as the trial opened.
Relatives of some of the victims were also in court.
Correspondents said Heinrich Boere entered the courtroom in a wheelchair with a doctor by his

side, but appeared alert and attentive as he answered questions. The hearing was adjourned

shortly afterwards.
The defendent is charged with killing three men: Fritz Bicknese, a chemist and father of 12;

bicycle seller Teun de Groot, who helped Jews go into hiding; and resistance member Frans

Kusters.
He admitted the killings to Dutch authorities while in captivity after the war, but escaped

before he could be brought to trial. He later fled to Germany.
He has also confessed to his role in interviews with the media.
“Yes, I got rid of them,” he told Focus magazine. “It was not difficult. You just had to bend

a finger.”
He told Spiegel magazine that he and his accomplices thought they were killing “terrorists”,

adding: “We thought we were doing the right thing.”
Anti-Nazi protesters displayed banners outside the court
A tribunal in Amsterdam sentenced him to death in absentia in 1949, a sentence later reduced

to life in prison.

The team behind SpaceShipOne has been handed the $10m cheque and trophy it won for claiming

the Ansari X-Prize.
The spoils were accepted at a ceremony in St Louis, US, by the aviation pioneer Burt Rutan,

whose company designed and built the rocket vehicle.
SpaceShipOne broke through the Earth’s atmosphere twice in five days to win the prize which

was set up to galvanise the private spaceflight business.
The UK businessman Sir Richard Branson expects to offer space rides in 2007.
His Virgin company will use a development of the SpaceShipOne craft to carry five fare-paying

passengers to more than 100km.
Sir Richard, who will call his spaceline Virgin Galactic, says 7,000 people have already

shown interest in buying a ticket, which will cost about US$200,000 (more than ￡100,000).
An annual X-Prize Cup will now take place in New Mexico, where private groups will be invited

to demonstrate their space technology.
The X-Prize Foundation is also working with the World Technology Network to create a whole

set of new awards. The so-called WTN X-Prizes will seek scientific or technological

breakthroughs that tackle the most important challenges facing humans today.

Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba 50 years ago after mounting one of the most successful guerrilla campaigns in history.
Operating out of the Sierra Maestra, a densely forested mountain range on the eastern tip of Cuba, his lightly armed rebel fighters defeated a US-equipped standing army complete with aircraft, tanks and artillery.
Yet the revolution was almost stillborn. The initial crossing by Fidel and his fighters from Mexico in 1956 aboard the boat Granma went horribly wrong and just 12 of the original rebels survived an early ambush.
Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, along with the legendary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, took refuge in the mountains.
Eliecer Tejeda was one of their early recruits. At the age of 19 he had left his father’s farm at the base of the mountains to join the rebels’ forces.
“Batista’s troops were harassing all the young people here. I was beaten by the troops so decided to go underground and join the guerrillas,” he says.
Fidel’s former headquarters, La Comandancia de La Plata, is now designated a national monument.
Today there is a paved road which takes you most of the way up into the mountains. But the final 3km (1.9 miles) of steep narrow trails can only be covered on foot or by mule.
A fit 71-year-old, Eliecer Tejeda agreed to accompany me on the mule ride up the steep muddy path strewn with rocks.
It was a journey he had made many times in his youth.
Eliecer had been one of Fidel’s messengers. His role was to guide people in and out of the camp and to take messages and orders to supporters in the towns. He also helped organise the supply of food and weapons.
Fidel Castro’s 26 July movement had a strong urban base and could also count on the support of other anti-Batista groups, one of the critical factors in the revolution’s success.

In many ways, this communist island in the Caribbean has managed to survive despite the odds.
Since the revolution which climaxed on 1 January 1959, Cuba has seen the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion, repeated assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, the collapse of its main benefactor the Soviet Union, and a decades-long US trade embargo.
One of the effects of the embargo is that the streets of the Cuban capital, Havana, are still filled with many of the same old American cars that were here when Fidel Castro came to power 50 years ago.
Geovani Perez drives a red and cream 1959 Buick convertible. It was built the year that Fidel Castro came to power. Like much of the Cuban economy, it’s still running – if only just.
After years of economic hardship, Cubans have become masters of improvisation.
Geovani’s Buick no longer has its original engine. During the fuel shortages its gas-guzzling V8 was replaced by a home-made mix of a Japanese diesel engine and an old Soviet gearbox.
“It’s really hard to get parts here,” he told me, “We have to machine tool a lot of parts ourselves or make them by hand.”
He would rather have a new car, but he couldn’t even if he could afford one. The only cars that Cubans are legally allowed to buy or sell are those built before the revolution.
It’s the same with housing. Most Cubans have title to their homes and can pass them on to their children but there is no open market to buy or sell land or property.

Hundreds of Cubans packed into Havana’s Museo De Bellas Artes for the launch of the first major US contemporary art exhibition to be shown here for almost a quarter of a century.
It’s part of the island’s biennial art festival, which every two years features hundreds of artists from Cuba and around the world. Until now it has been difficult for Americans to attend.
The exhibition is called Chelsea visits Havana and features about 30 artists from more than two dozen galleries in New York’s arty Chelsea neighbourhood.
The show’s American curator is gallery owner Alberto Magnan, whose parents left Cuba when he was five years old.
“I would love for this show to be a beginning step towards both countries getting a little closer together and starting a dialogue and I think art is a great way to do it,” he said.
Alberto Magnan first approached the Cuban authorities three years ago with the idea of bringing a cross-section of contemporary American art to Havana.
But he had to wait for new presidents in both countries for the idea to come to fruition.
The curator of contemporary art at Havana’s Fine Arts Museum, which is hosting the exhibition, Aberlado Mana, describes the show as “a surprise and a miracle”.
“This is the first exhibition we made after Obama rose to power,” he says. “This is a kind of lighthouse of the next process of the culture and the politics between Cuba and the United States.”

It is just over a month since Asia’s longest civil war in modern times came to an end, with the Sri Lankan government’s declaration that it had finally defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels (LTTE) on the battlefield and killed nearly all their leaders.
Yet the army chief says he wants the army, already 200,000, to increase in size by 50%.
To see what the military means to many Sri Lankans, I visited the peaceful bungalow home of Leelawathi Mahagamaralalage, set among banana trees in a village.
Taking pride of place in her front room are shelves with pictures of her family, but mostly of her second son, Nandana.
When we get out the album, she weeps. It shows his funeral. A Sri Lankan army soldier, he was killed in battle 12 years ago, aged just 20.
She still mourns him and treasures every memento including his final letter.
She has two other sons.
Nandana’s elder brother, Chandana, was 14 years in the navy. But a year ago, in a Tamil Tiger grenade attack, he lost much of his hearing, and needed plastic surgery.
With her third son in the police, Leelawathi, despite her pain cherishes all her sons’ achievements – and cherishes the armed forces.
“I feel so sad – but proud, too,” she says. “I have only the memory of one son. But I am happy because I have two more sons. Even if a family has 10 people, very often, every one of them will join the military, the same as in my family.”
The wounded brother Chandana, now retired, lives next door with his family. He fully supports the government’s plan to expand the armed forces even now the war is over.