Israel will send a government legal expert to serve as an observer at the ongoing trial of Maidanek concentration camp guards in West Germany, it was announced at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. Shlomo Avineri, director general of the Foreign Ministry, said the impression here is that the trial was being drawn out needlessly. It has been in progress for several years.
The prolongation of the Maidanek war crimes trial apparently motivated the seizure of part of the West German Embassy building in Tel Aviv last Thursday by two armed men wearing the yellow Star of David, emblem of concentration camp inmates. They were identified as Henri Toronczik, 34, a Holocaust survivor and Andre Kilczinski, 40, a Polish convert to Judaism.
They used the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day to lock themselves in on the second floor of the Embassy where they remained for 6 1/2 hours. They threatened to use their guns and grenades if police tried to evacuate them. They said they were protesting “because we believe the world is indifferent to what happened to the Jewish people and to what is happening in Germany today.” The men left the Embassy as they had promised when Holocaust Remembrance Day officially ended.
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