Bergen-belsen Federation Presents Awards to European, American Authors

The World Federation of Bergen Belsen Associations presented its annual “Remembrance Award” here yesterday to two European writers, one of them non-Jewish, whose works are based on their experiences at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. The Association is an organization of concentration camp survivors. The awards went to Prof. Jacob Presser of Amsterdam and Jean Cayrol of Paris. They were presented by Federation president Joseph Rosensaft.

Dr. Presser said in response, “I am grateful that the history of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, written by myself, has merited your recognition and, inconsequence, was published in English and French versions.” Mr. Cayrol said, “I am not a Jew but I know the agonies of the European catastrophe. I was in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I lost my own brother and I saw misery at its most appalling. But life goes on and we should learn to live with our memories and act as normal people.”

Summing up, Mr. Rosensaft said, “We live in a callous world and we cannot afford to relax. We hope that the books recognized here will serve as a reminder and a warning.”

The World Federation also presented annual “Remembrance Awards” Dec. 9 to two authors in New York. The recipients were Arthur D. Morse, author of “While Six Million Died–A Chronicle of American Apathy,” and Chaim Grade, Yiddish poet and novelist who has written poetry and novels inspired by the Holocaust. Mr. Morse’s thesis was that the democracies failed to do everything possible to try to save Jews from Nazi genocide in central Europe. The Federation also paid tribute to Dr. Hendrick Van Dam, a German lawyer, who was counsel for the group in its recent successful effort to prevent the French Government from exhuming unmarked graves in the Bergen-Belsen cemetery so that the bodies of a number of French victims might be removed to France.)