A Hungarian blog noticed this girl wearing a T-shirt,showing the iconic entrance to Auschwitz, captioned "Auschwitz Holiday Camp." Underneath it says "there is a pool, and ovens as well. "

Belgian "justice" minister says its time to forget about the Holocaust

From The Telegraph:

Stefan De Clerck, a Flemish Christian Democrat, has polarised Belgium, fuelling the country's one year political crisis, by supporting a blanket amnesty for the 56,000 Belgians who were convicted of collaborating with the Nazis after the war.

"Perhaps we should be willing to forget, because it is the past. At some point one has to be adult and be willing to talk about. perhaps to forget, because this is the past," he said at the weekend.

The Simon Wiesenthal centre has sent a letter to Yves Leterme, the Belgian Prime Minister, accusing the minister of a "betrayal of history, his obfuscation of its lessons and his contempt for the very concept of justice."

Around 25,000 Belgian Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Mechelen army barracks, north of Brussels, after being rounded up by authorities that often enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis despite strong resistance from Belgium's people.

Only 1,207 survived and in 2007 the Belgian state he Belgian state apologised for "a collaboration unworthy of a democracy with a policy that was disastrous for the Jewish population".

The Flemish minister has insisted that his comments were misinterpreted but the row has further poisoned already tense relations between Dutch and French-speaking politicians.

The sensitive issue has reignited after the Belgian Senate accepted draft legislation from the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang party that would grant amnesty to all those who collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

European Jewish Press adds:

The Belgian Jewish community said it was “scandalized” by De Clerck’s comments.

"We cannot forget that Belgian collaborators have contributed, often with zeal, to the stalking of men, women and children doomed to deportation by the Nazis. It is those non repentant Nazi and Fascist Belgians that the Justice Minister seeks to absolve through amnesty," said CCOJB, the umbrella group of Belgian Jewish organizations, in a joint statement with CCLJ, the Jewish Secular Center in Brussels.

On Monday, the minister issued a statement saying that he "didn’t intend to minimize" the acts of collaboration perpetrated during WWII.

GIYUS has a list of places to write to call for his removal from office.

It is also notable that the Vlaams Belang party is pushing that legislation.

ADL: 'Fun Holocaust Video Game' Horrific And Inappropriate

A video game that depicts an uprising in a Nazi death camp has drawn harsh criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, which told Kotaku that the Holocaust should be off-limits for video games.

Sonderkommando Revolt, a video game set amidst a violent prisoner uprising at the Auschwitz death camp, came to light. The Israeli game maker told Kotaku that the game has no agenda for the game which he and a team have been working on since 2007 and is due out next month. Instead, the developer, who believes that in a past life he was imprisoned as a Jew by Nazis, calls the game “blast the Nazis fun.”

But the advocacy group, founded to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” says the game shouldn’t be released, not even if it is meant to be played as violent revenge fantasy.

“Perhaps well intentioned in its creation, its execution and imagery are horrific and inappropriate,” an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson told Kotaku. “The Holocaust should be off-limits for video games. We hope the developers will reconsider and abandon the game.”

Sonderkommando Revolt is based on the real-world uprising at Auschwitz in October 1944 and built on the foundation of classic shooter Wolfenstein 3D. The actual event in Auschwitz resulted in the deaths of just three German Schutzstaffel soldiers and the murder of 451 Sonderkommandos, a “special unit” of primarily Jewish concentration camp workers who aided in the killing process during the Holocaust.

In the video game version of the uprising, the tables are clearly turned, with protagonist and actual Auschwitz prisoner Zalmen Gradowski tearing through Nazi soldiers with a wide selection of weapons.

“Graphically it’ll feature many themes,” write its creators, “including Crematoriums, Block 11, Gas Chambers, execution, interrogation and torture areas…most of which are ripped/based off real pic from the real site.”

The Anti-Defamation League sees the game as neither harmless fun nor cathartic video game violence.

“This rudimentary video game is an offensive portrayal of the Holocaust,” the spokesperson told Kotaku. “With its unnecessarily gruesome and gratuitous graphics, it is a crude effort to depict Jewish resistance during this painful period which should never be trivialized.”