John Cardinal Krol, of Philadelphia, laid a wreath on a tablet honoring the Jewish dead at Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. The American Cardinal, who was born in Poland and left there on the eve of the Nazi invasion in 1939, visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex yesterday to pay homage to a Polish martyr, Rev. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan who stepped forward one day in 1941 to take the place of a Polish soldier who had been selected at random by a Nazi guard to be executed. A crowd estimated at between 150,000-300,000 gathered at the death camp site on the occasion.
Another Auschwitz martyr has been honored in a different way by the West German Publishers Association which awarded its 1972 Peace Prize to Dr. Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish educator and writer. Dr. Korczak directed an orphanage in Warsaw when the war broke out. When the Nazis seized and deported 162 Jewish children, he voluntarily accompanied his charges to Auschwitz where he met his death.
The German publishers made two awards in Dr. Korczak’s memory. The 10,000 DM Peace Prize assigned to a Warsaw orphanage was protested by some Polish Jewish expatriates because few Jews remain in Poland. A like amount was thereupon allocated to the Korczak Memorial Committee in Israel for a Korczak monument near Tel Aviv.
A committee has been assigned to probe the forced landing of an Arava jet on a test flight Monday morning near Lod Airport. One wing was damaged but the test pilots were unhurt. Arava is Israel’s first locally-made commercial transport.
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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.
