President Bush visited Israel’s official Holocaust memorial (Yad Vashem) today, placing a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps.
I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it,” he said.
… At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Secretary of State Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site. “We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev. In the memorial’s visitors’ book, the president wrote simply, “God bless Israel, George Bush.”
Bush’s comment about bombing Auschwitz, which those present said appeared to be spontaneous, marked the first time an American president has publicly made such an acknowledgment.