One Minute to Midnight

Dr. Irving Moskowitz

Auschwitz as a

Political Weapon

The Israeli media's newest literary hero is Cordelia Edvardson, author of a new book that the Jerusalem Report calls "a haunting prose-poem memoir of a Holocaust childhood." In a fawning November 13 feature story, the Report describes how Edvardson, the daughter of a German Catholic mother and a German Jewish father, spent more than a year in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, before being rescued, along with a handful of others, by Sweden during the final days of the war.

During the 1970s, Edvardson was sent to Israel as a correspondent for a Swedish newspaper, and decided to remain there, continuing to write for both the Swedish press and other newspapers around the world. The only thing that the Jerusalem Report told its readers about Edvardson's reporting is that "she covers the conflict from the Arab as much as the Jewish side."

While of course Edvardson's suffering in Auschwitz is a horrible tragedy, the reading public is also entitled to know that she has repeatedly used her status as an Auschwitz survivor as a political weapon to bash Israel.

In 1983, Edvardson visited the Ansar detention camp in southern Lebanon, where Israel held Arab terrorists in the aftermath of the Lebanon war. Shedding

any pretense that she is an objective journalist, Edvardson declared, on the op-ed page of the Washington Post (October 17, 1983), that, as an Auschwitz survivor, she saw similarities between her experience in the Holocaust and the experience of the Arab terrorists detained by Israel: "What I did, and still do, feel is some sudden and intense solidarity with those prisoners...I was yesterday's prisoner, they are today's. We have something in common. The watchtowers, the barbed wire, the guards will forever be part of them--and they are part of me. Neither of us is or was 'doing time'--for us time ceased to exist." Lobbying for the release of imprisoned terrorists is not the only way that Edvardson has utilized her status as a Holocaust survivor. Writing on the op-ed page of the Jerusalem Post in 1993 (July 23), Edvardson dismissed the significance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people--and again used Auschwitz as her weapon. Blasting another writer who had stated that "Jews universally accept that Jerusalem lies at the heart of Jewish national self-definition," Edvardson asserted: "I beg to differ. At the heart of my personal Jewish national self-definition lies Auschwitz. Not Jerusalem...If I ever need a reminder of my Jewish national identity, I don't need to visit east Jerusalem. I just look at the number on my left forearm. The Western Wall, or any other place in east Jerusalem, will not save my life, nor the lives of my children or grandchildren."

Arab terrorists in Israeli detention, or Arab propagandists seeking to tear Jerusalem from the Jewish people, can derive comfort from the knowledge that Cordelia Edvardson is on their side, ready and willing t o brandish her suffering in the Holocaust as a weapon to supplement their already-formidable arsenal.