President Bush Visibly Moved During Visit to Holocaust Memorial

Teresa Neumann : Jan 12, 2008
Staff - AP

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls—young and old—stood strong for what they believe." –Remarks made by President George W. Bush at the Holocaust Museum

(Jerusalem)—The AP reports that President Bush, wearing a yarmulke, toured Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Friday praising victims of the Holocaust for not losing their faith and writing simply in the memorial's visitors' book, "God bless Israel, George Bush."

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls—young and old—stood strong for what they believe," he said. (White House photo by Chris Greenberg)

Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev, said that President Bush was visibly moved during the tour. "Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," he said.

The report also notes that while viewing aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces, the president asked Secretary of State Rice why the American government had decided against bombing the site. "We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

For his part, Shalev presented President Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

Notes the AP report, Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.

"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

Read more about President Bush's tour of Yad Vashem by following the link provided.