Word: commissioner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
A presidential commission journeys into the nightmare of the past
Fulfilling a pledge made on the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, Jimmy Carter last year appointed a 34-member presidential commission on the Holocaust to develop a memorial in the U.S. to the 6 million victims of the Nazis' "final solution." Last week, as a first step...
Within weeks the nucleus of a presidential commission was formed: Senators Claiborne Pell, Frank Church and Henry M. Jackson signed on; so did Congress men and scholars, fund raisers and survivors of Hitler's death camps. The President named Novelist and Essayist Elie Wiesel chairman of the commission.
But the survivor of Auschwitz could find no consolation. Behind great glass containers the story of the prisoners was presented in mute detail: a room of human hair, to be used by the Reich for textiles; a room of confiscated Jewish prayer shawls. Commission members could see the gas chambers...
One of those children, Elie Wiesel, led the commission on to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, where crematories once burned night and day. Linking arms with four other survivors, Wiesel marched over the tracks that had brought him here a world ago and laid a wreath on a monument to the...