ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has canceled a speaking invitation to a writer who says Jewish concentration camp survivors avenged the Nazis by torturing and killing Germans in postwar prisons.
John Sack, a 66-year-old literary journalist, was supposed to speak Dec.5. That lecture was postponed to Feb. 13. Earlier this week, he learned his speech had been canceled.
Mary Morrison, a spokeswoman for the museum, said an employee at the museum's research institute initially invited Sack, but never cleared the program with museum director Walter Reich.
``This is something that is not an appropriate program for our museum,'' Morrison said. ``After the lecture was rescheduled and the calendar went out again, the director did get a few calls from historians about it.''
But she said the cancellation was not prompted by outside pressure.
``Had there been no calls, the outcome would have been the same,'' she said.
Sack, a Jew from New York City who now lives in the Rockies, said his 45-minute lecture was going to be about Jews who ran concentration camps at the end of World War II and beat, mistreated and killed German inmates.
``Yes, the Holocaust happened, the Germans killed Jews, but a second atrocity happened that the Jews who committed it covered up: one where the Jews killed Germans,'' Sack wrote in his book ``An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945.''
``God knows the Jews were provoked, but in 1945, they killed a great number of Germans - not Nazis, not Hitler's trigger men, but German civilians, German men, woman, children, babies.''
Unable to speak at the museum, Sack has decided to rent a room at the National Press Club here in Washington. That speech is scheduled Feb. 13.
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