JERUSALEM -- Concentration camp survivors buried bags of ashes from Birkenau Sunday in memory of Holocaust victims and urged others to remember Nazi atrocities, especially those carried out by 'Angel of Death' Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz.
'I have testified once before, but I feel I have to testify once again because I have to get it out of my system,' said Vera Kriegel, who attended the Second World Conference of Auschwitz Twins at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
'This is very important because half the world is saying that there was no Auschwitz, no Zyklon B (gas), nothing,' Kriegel said. 'We have to go on and go on and go on. Even if we have to testify each and every day, we have to do it. This is our holy obligation.'
Kriegel, who now lives in Israel, and her twin sister, Olga, were 5 when they reached Birkenau with their mother and father. Kriegel's father was killed, but Mengele kept the two girls and their mother from the the gas chambers.
Mengele, who carried out brutal experiments on twins, dwarfs and others at Auschwitz and Birkenau, kept the three alive because he wanted to find out why the children' eyes were brown while their mother's were blue, according to Martin Gilbert's 'The Holocaust.' Kriegel's story is one of hundreds recounted in Gilbert's comprehensive account of the Holocaust.
Mengele earned the moniker 'Angel of Death' as the official who decided which prisoners at the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland were sent to the gas chamber and which he would use in his experiments. He was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 Jews at Auschwitz. He fled to South America after the war and died of drowning in 1979.
At Sunday's opening ceremony for the three-day World Conference of Auschwitz Twins, five Christians were given the honorary title of 'righteous gentile' for saving the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, political opponents and others the Nazis deemed undesirable or dangerous.
Among those honored for their help Sunday were a Lithuanian couple who sheltered two Jewish children in an attic and a Dutch officer who provided Jews with forged documents. Officials said 8,000 people have received the honorary title, with about 6,000 of them from Poland and Holland.
The conference also included a ceremony in which bags of ashes from Birkenau, adjacent to Auschwitz, were lowered into an underground burial chamber for a symbolic burial place for those killed. Members of Israel's Parliament, 'Mengele twins' and relatives visited Auschwitz and Birkenau last week.
Several members of the group demonstrated outside the Carmelite convent and demanded its removal from a building just outside the barbed-wire perimeter of Auschwitz that onced housed canisters of the deadly Zyklon B gas.
Under a February 1987 agreement, the Carmelite nuns were to have moved to another facility farther from Auschwitz by February 1989. The delay has sparked a series of Jewish protests as well as a Polish cardinal's comments to indefinitely suspend plans to construct the new center because of an 'atmosphere of aggressive demands.'
'But we have to make demands because there is absolutely no right for this convent to be there,' Kriegel said.
'It's a graveyard. We don't have to practice any religion in such a place. No religion should be practiced in a graveyard -- No convent, no synagogue. It's a huge graveyard and such it should remain.'
