ghetto uprising Wednesday April 30, after he expressed doubt that the new Palestinian leadership could end "terrorism."
Katzav made the comments shortly before his home land was rocked by another suicide attack in Tel Aviv in which four people died and dozens were wounded.
"I have faith in the good intentions of the Palestinian prime minister (Mahmud Abbas) when he declares that terrorism is dangerous," he said. "…I am not sure, that he will be firm enough and will have the necessary instruments at his disposal to carry through his good intentions," Katzav was quoted as saying by French News Agency AFP.
The attack also overshadowed the commemoration of the Holocaust an event that is believed to have speed up the creation of the State of Israel.
WARSAW UPRISING
Katzav and his Polish counterpart Alexander Kwasniewski recalled how a few hundred Jewish youngsters began an uprising against the Nazis and the Holocaust on April 19, 1943.
Armed with only home made explosives and other simple weapons, their fighting lasted three weeks and was seen as the first major act of armed civilian resistance in occupied Poland.
Earlier the two presidents led a silent three-kilometer "March of the Living" from the Auschwitz barracks to the remains of the Birkenau crematoria, where more than one million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
GAS CHAMBERS
Birkenau housed three gas chambers and crematoria which the Nazis kept going 24 hours a day as a death factory until they blew them up ahead of the arrival of advancing Soviet troops.
The route to the site is retraced every year by youngsters and elderly survivors to remember all 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, including three million from Poland which had Europe’s largest Jewish community.
Journeying to his native Poland for the first time since emigrating to the United States in 1948 was emotional for 72-year-old Norman Fradman, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
NAKED AND BAREFOOT
At 10, he was sent with his family to the Warsaw ghetto, where they were held until their 1943 transfer to the Majdanek death camp in eastern Poland. His mother and sister died there, he said.
"I am at such a point in my life that the memories are weighing more and more heavily on my mind," Fradman told AP. "Now there is green grass here but there used to be snow and prisoners who were walking naked and barefoot in the snow."
The Nazis also killed millions of people from other groups, including communists, homosexuals and Roma, or gypsies.
Since the collapse of Communism, Poland and other former Soviet satellite states have increasingly tried to end decades of perceived denial and to cope with their controversial war past, at a time when they seek membership of the European Union.
NEVER FORGOTTEN
Polish President Kwasniewski said he agreed with his Israeli counterpart that the Holocaust most never be forgotten. "We know very well how big a duty we are bearing, to pass the knowledge about it as a warning for future generations," he said.
However the President of the European Jewish Congress Michel Friedman suggested in Warsaw the efforts are overshadowed by anti-Jewish sentiment.
He called for renewed vigilance against racism and anti-Semitism in Europe, as he said opinion surveys show up to 20 per cent of Europeans admit to anti-Semitism.
"Auschwitz and the Holocaust were indeed a German invention, but anti-Semitism is a European disease," the German News Agency DPA quoted Friedman as telling a group of journalists in Warsaw on Wednesday April 30.
