Israel remembers the Holocaust
By Tamar Hausman

(May 3) - All traffic and work came to a standstill yesterday across the country at 10 a.m. as sirens wailed for two minutes, marking Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.

Radio and television stations hosted programs and talk shows about the Holocaust throughout the day and evening, and radio stations played somber music. Places of entertainment were shut in respect for the solemn day of memory for the six million who perished.

There were memorial ceremonies across the country. At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, thousands gathered for a wreath-laying ceremony in Warsaw Ghetto Square with the participation of Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his wife Nava, Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, and Chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz. Also laying wreaths were Jewish Agency Chairman Sallai Meridor, Police Insp.-Gen Yehuda Wilk, and Likud leader Ariel Sharon.

Barak later attended a ceremony yesterday evening which closed Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot marking the 57th anniversary of the revolt in the ghettos.

At Yad Vashem, films about the Holocaust were screened continuously throughout the day, and hundreds gathered for memorial ceremonies for members of the Organization for Hungarian Immigrants and former members of the Jewish resistance in France.

For members of the Gutwirth family - most of which perished in the Holocaust - it was an emotional day as about two dozen family members from around the world attended yesterday's ceremony and received a special tour of Yad Vashem.

One branch of the Gutwirth family was deported from France to Auschwitz on Convoy #64 on December 7, 1943 along with 997 other Jews. Most of them - 675 - were gassed upon arrival, and only 50 among the group survived Auschwitz and the war. That entire Gutwith family was murdered in Auschwitz, but several cousins survived the war elsewhere. Among them was Natan Gurwith, whose daughter Fagie told the family story in an interview yesterday.

Natan Gurwith was able to leave his native Holland for Japan and then Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, and later went to the US. Andrew Stolz, who lives in Los Angeles and whose mother Margarite was a Gutwirth, said that, "what strikes me the most at Yad Vashem is the emphasis on education and that it is trying to re-establish the identities of people who lost their identities."

Yad Vashem renewed a campaign to collect "Pages of Testimony," or forms to be filled out for each victim by his or her relatives. Some 350,000 pages have already been collected since the campaign began last year.

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