Preserving a symbol of evil [View All]

[Forkboy]

Local Holocaust survivors are heartened by an international effort to restore Auschwitz and maintain it for future generations

NEWTON — Israel Arbeiter doesn’t waste time wondering how he survived the Holocaust, which tore him away from family members he would never see again and swept him from one concentration camp to the next after the Nazis occupied his native Poland in 1939.

Rather than shrink from the memory of its horrors, Arbeiter embraces a chapter in world history that he and others insist must never be allowed to fade.

Now, the 85-year-old Newton resident and other local survivors of Auschwitz are voicing support for international efforts to preserve crumbling barracks, gas chambers, crematoriums, and other evidence of atrocities at the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp where more than 1.1 million people, including at least 960,000 Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

“It’s important that Auschwitz be preserved the way it was so that future generations will go and see what human beings are capable of,’’ said Arbeiter, president of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, who was sent to Auschwitz in 1944.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/01/30/holocaust_survivors_laud_global_effort_to_preserve_auschwitz/