NEW WAY TO REMEMBER HOAX

Holocaust® memorial
becomes public restroom

The Times, London Tuesday, 30 January 2007
By ROGER BOYES

BERLIN — German authorities were preparing for criticism from the
Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial
in Berlin was being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by
neo-Nazi sympathizers.

The disclosure, in a Berlin newspaper, will trigger a new debate
about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany.

One argument against building the monument — that consists of
2,700 concrete slabs resembling Jewish gravestones — was that it
would become a target of anti-Semitic vandals. The managers of
the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried
to play down the scandal.

“This just belongs to the teething problems of any new monument,”
Uwe Neumaerker, of the Memorial Foundation, said. The German
Government has been aware of the problem since the monument
was completed in May 2005 but has tried to maintain a silence for
fear of encouraging more vandalism.

The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers
of the far Right has become a widespread problem that is
acknowledged rarely.

On the eve of Holocaust Day at the weekend a group of youths set
fire to a restored railway carriage — symbolizing the deportation
of the Jews — in Lower Saxony. In the eastern German port of
Stralsund, concrete was poured over a memorial for a Jewish family,
the Keibel-Cohns.

A court in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, sentenced
three youths to between nine and 14 months jail this month for
urinating on a Jewish memorial.

Let's fight for a world in which
there are better public facilities!