krakow, poland Spielberg warns of increase in anti-Semitism

Associated Press

KRAKOW, Poland

Film director Steven Spielberg told a group of Holocaust survivors Monday that Jews again are facing the “perennial demons of intolerance” from anti-Semites who are provoking hate crimes and trying to strip survivors of their identity.

His warning came in a speech to dozens of Auschwitz survivors the evening before official commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

About 300 survivors will gather with leaders from around the world today to remember the 1.1 million people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the millions of others killed in the Holocaust. Leaders expected include the presidents of Germany and Austria, and the United States is sending a delegation led by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who is an Orthodox Jew. Lew’s family left Poland before World War II.

Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director of the 1993 Holocaust film “Schindler’s List,” was introduced by an 81-year-old survivor, Paula Lebovics, who praised him as “a man who has given us a voice in history.”

In a short speech, Spielberg spoke of how his own Jewish identity evolved, first as a boy learning to read numbers from the numbers tattooed on the arms of survivors, and as an adult when he filmed “Schindler’s List” in Krakow.

But he warned of “anti-Semites, radical extremists and religious fanatics” who again are provoking hate crimes — a warning that comes after radical Islamists massacred Jews at a kosher supermarket earlier this month in Paris.

Spielberg also noted that there now are Facebook pages that identify Jews and their geographic locations with the intention to attack them, and a growing effort to banish Jews from Europe.

“These people ... want to all over again strip you of your past, of your story and of your identity,” he told them. He stressed the importance of countering that hatred with education and preserving Auschwitz and other historical sites.

Earlier in the day some of the survivors traveled an hour and a half by bus from Krakow to Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is located. There they prayed for their murdered loved ones amid the barracks and barbed wire of the former Nazi death camp, with one survivor crying out in a pained voice: “I don’t want to come here anymore!”

Rose Schindler, 85, who was one of 12 survivors from a family of more than 300 people, returned once 20 years ago but said she wanted a final visit to mourn her parents and four siblings who were killed in the Holocaust.

She was separated from them upon arrival in Auschwitz with no time to say goodbye and survived because she was selected to do slave labor.

“I have no graves for my mother and sisters and brother, my father. So this somehow is a way to say goodbye,” Schindler said.