SPOBTS
Starting Strong
With impressive play on Saturday, speculation has
started over whether freshman I-back Dahrran
Diedrick will start against Colorado. PAGE 9
Putting it Together
Graphic Arts Professor Tom Sullivan combines
text and images to create designs that teach and
inform. PAGE 12
TUESDAY
November lf>, 1999
Edom Toward SweateiWeather
Sunny, high 63. Oearytdljght, low 33.
VOL. 99 COVERING THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN SINCE 1901 NO. 59
Setting shades
Holocaust historian analyzes camps
■ Auschwitz and other
sites are devoid now of
the horrors that happened
inWWII,hesays.
By Jake Bleed
Senior staff writer
Robert Warren is not Jewish or
German, a victim of the Holocaust
or even associated with World War
n.
Bom in 1939, a combat veteran
in Vietnam and a trial lawyer for 23
years, Warren is now a full-time
Holocaust historian.
Warren said his interest in the
Holocaust came from his personal
experiences in Vietnam and partly
after meeting a boy at summer
camp who had survived a death
camp. Those experiences interest
ed him in evil and the politics of
memory.
Warren presented “In Search of
the Holocaust: The Realization of
Remembrance,” in the Burnett
Hall auditorium Monday evening.
Sponsored by the NU College
of Law and the Department of
Judaic Studies, Warren’s lecture
described a journey he and his wife
took through death and slave labor
camps set up by Nazi Germany
during WWII.
Warren said 3.2 million people,
or 17 percent of the population,
died in Poland during die war.
All six of Germany’s principal
extermination camps were in
Poland, Warren said. The largest
Jewish war-time ghettos were in
Warsaw and Lodz.
But as Warren led the crowd
through the journey, slides project
ed on one of the lecture hall’s two
screens contradicted the horror of
the camps. Slides of Auschwitz,
probably the Holocaust’s most
known death camp, showed clean
paths, green grass and leafy trees.
“And yet I stood in a recon
structed gas chamber where
70,000 lives had evaporated amid
the acrid fumes of hydrogen
cyanide, Zyklon B - and felt noth
ing,” Warren said. “It was too sani
tized, too clem”
The death and slave labor camp
was a curated memorial, some
thing Warren said he has very little
time for.
“Auschwitz has been exorcised
of its demons. It is no longer evil,
just a place with a terrifying name.
it
Except for the remains of a recent
campfire, there was no evidence that
anyone had visited the site in months. I
realized that this was the perfect
memorial, precisely because it was not a
memorial at all...” ■
Robert Warren
Holocaust historian
Like catching the bogeyman in
broad daylight, the fear and dread
disappear into sunshine,” Warren
said.
Warren visited Birkenau next,
then Treblinka, Majdanke and
Sobibor, all the tune hoping “to
discover the Holocaust, or at least
an apt monument”
He didn’t find this until he vis
ited a small, 54-acre camp between
the Polish cities of Lvov and
Lublin. Unlike the other camps
visited by Warren, Belzac was vir
tually unmarked.
“Given its bloody history -
roughly one murdered corpse for
each square foot of the camp’s ter
ritory -1 expected something
straight from hell,” Warren said,
“but found nothing.”
An iron gate with the camp’s
name, three worn-down memorial
stones and a weathered sculpture
were all that marked the site as a
death camp.
But Warren said the barren
camp, destroyed by the Germans in
Please see HOLOCAUST on 7
Five fires
ignited
in Selleck
By Jake Bleed
Senior staff writer
No one had been arrested or cited
Monday for five weekend fires set in
Selleck Quadrangle, a fire official said.
Two buildings of the Selleck
Quadrangle were evacuated twice early
Sunday morning after five fires - four in
bathrooms and one on a bulletin board -
were set.
Lancaster County Fire Marshal Ken
Scurto said he and other inspectors inter
viewed a large number of Selleck residents
to identify a suspect for the bathroom fires.
Scurto said he thought the bulletin-board
fire was caused by a different person.
Scurto said a large amount of paper
work must be finished before the Lancaster
h
y
The suspect could be charged with up to
five counts of first-degree arson, a class II
felony, he said.
“Anytime you deal with an occupied
building, that’s a very serious issue,” Scurto
said.
Scurto said four fires were set in the
7000 and 8000 buildings between 2 and 3
a.m. Sunday.
Trash cans in the men’s and women’s
bathrooms on the second floor of the 7000
building were set on fire at about 2 a.m.,
Univeristy Police Sgt. Mylo Bushing said.
About an hour later, bathroom trash
cans in the first and second floors of the
8000 building went up in flames, Bushing
said.
Scurto said the fires were similar to an
arson Nov. 7 when another Selleck bath
room trash can was torched.
Both buildings wgre evacuated because
of the fires. Freshman Ryan Lacsh was
sleeping on the third floor of the 7000
building when the fires started.
Lacsh said the third-floor alarm did not
sound after the first fires started, but his
floor’s residence assistant heard the alarms
going off on the floors below and woke up
the floor’s residents.
Students remained outside the resi
dence hall for between 30 minutes and an
hour before returning to their rooms, Lacsh
said.
The final fire of the night took place
just before 8 a.m., Bushing said, when the
bulletin board in the lobby of the 7000
building was set on fire.
Fire alarms woke students again, Lacsh
said, adding that this time his floor’s alarm
worked.
Scurto said die cost of damages caused
by the fires was still being calculated but
estimated* that each caused less than $100
damage.
The fires in the bathroom trash cans
started when someone used a lighter to
ignite paper inside the cans, Scurto said.
Ceiling tiles from one of the building’s
elevators were also pulled down Saturday
night, Bushing said, causing $100 damage.
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