HOLOCAUST Archaeologists unearth items buried in death camp

About 235,000 people were murdered at the German concentration camp.
LUBLIN, Poland (AP) -- A child's ring. Twisted reading glasses. A few gold coins. All are scraps of personal dignity, hurriedly buried in a last act of defiance to keep them from falling into Nazi hands.
Israeli archaeologists helped by survivors are writing a new chapter in the terrible history of the German death camp at Majdanek, Poland, by excavating grounds long thought to be empty.
Their findings show how the doomed Jews furiously dug into the grassy ground with their hands to bury what personal possessions they had with them before they were murdered in the camp's gas chambers.
The objects aren't worth much financially, but "the value as a human story is immeasurable," said Yaron Svoray, an Israeli journalist who made his name infiltrating neo-Nazi groups some 10 years ago.
'Crime scene'
"This is where the testimony led us," said Matt Mazer, the American who organized the project and produced a documentary film about it. "We get to reconstruct a crime scene of one of the greatest crimes of humanity."
Barbed-wire fences now surround empty fields and the few barracks still standing at the camp. Here some 235,000 people died, according to the camp museum. The crematorium's brick smokestack stands on a small hill. People occasionally cross the camp on their way to the adjacent Roman Catholic cemetery, unaware of what the ground still holds.
For two years, Svoray collected survivor testimony and researched the site. He then teamed up with Mazer to form Historical Media Associates and with private financial backing from America, came to the camp this fall to dig. Four Majdanek survivors now living in Australia accompanied them.
The team of amateur archaeologists, led by an Israeli, Yoseph Palath, carved out a checkerboard grid on a small portion of the field, then started sifting through the soil.
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