Topic: Bridging the Gap

News: "AUSCHWITZ, Poland (AFP) - Events to mark the liberation 60 years ago of the Auschwitz death camp began with an ecumenical prayer service in a southern Polish village where the Nazis dumped ashes of many of the victims of the camp's gas chambers and crematoria.

On Wednesday, US Vice President Dick Cheney, who is representing the United States at the ceremonies, told a small gathering of survivors of the death camp that the world must teach its youth tolerance and moral courage to avoid a repetition of the Holocaust.


'We have to remind our youth that these great evils of history were perpetrated not in some remote uncivilised world but in the very heart of civilised Europe,' Cheney said said at a museum in Krakow that recounts the history of Jews in southern Poland.
...
'Although we may have moved into a new century and a new millennium, the world community cannot put the darkest pages of the 20th century behind it for good,' he said.

...
The Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, was a nationwide pogrom launched in November 1938 in Germany, targeting Jews, while the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, brought together high-ranking German leaders to discuss the 'final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.'


'From broken windows we reached the death camps in the blink of an eye. Today, we are standing on pieces of crystal in Europe again,' Kantor said.


As the morning prayer service began, a group of rabbis from Canada and the United States staged a protest outside a church in the village of Brzezinka - Birkenau in German - near the memorial where Thursday's ceremony will be held.

Braving snow and temperatures of minus six degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit), they held placards declaring 'No to a church at the world's biggest Jewish cemetery' and 'The Birkenau church desecrates the memory of one million Jews.'"