West Germany’s president, Richard von Weizsacker, journeyed back to his country’s darkest past Thursday to pay tribute to the millions of Jews slain by the Nazis in Poland during World War II.
The German chief of state, on an official visit to Poland, laid a wreath at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and conversed with Polish Jews, including Chief Rabbi Menachem Joskowicz and survivors of the death camps.
At a visit to the former Treblinka death camp, where more than 800,000 Jews perished, the president wrote in the visitor’s book: “He opens the dark abyss and brings from it the dark into the light,” a quotation from the Book of Job.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
