HOLOCAUST DENIAL WREAKED havoc in the early 1980s.
Even from the beginning of this offensive, I found it painful but also useful in the sense that it provoked a more precise, rigorous form of historical research. There were not many works on the Holocaust at the time, and they were often written by amateur historians without the necessary time or documentary resources, not to mention a lack of objectivity: most of them were partisans who exaggerated events and numbers in one way or another. I campaigned passionately for the Holocaust to become a subject of rigorous study in universities, so that the facts—described, analyzed, discussed, accepted—would become undeniable.
In 1978, Beate and I began this process, creating an American foundation whose aim was to “publish indisputable, authenticated documents on the Holocaust.” We published an English-language version of Joseph Billig’s study of the Final Solution, and the works of Georges Wellers on the number of Jewish victims and the existence of the gas chambers. We even went to Germany to question Richard Korherr, the SS’s inspector of statistics, tasked by Himmler with the secret mission of creating two reports on the liquidation of the Jews in Europe in late 1942 and in the spring of 1943. Korherr confirmed the contents of those reports, which we published in German and English in our book The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania.
We also set about publishing a crucial work on the gas chambers written by the onetime Holocaust denier Jean-Claude Pressac.
Pressac had doubted the existence of the gas chambers, but he was a scientist, so he went to Auschwitz to find out the truth for himself. There, after examining the ruins of the buildings where the gas chambers had been located, and inspecting the archived architectural plans, he became convinced that they really had existed. On his return, Le Monde Juif published the important study he presented to us on the gas chambers.
Beate and I paid for the dozen trips he took to Auschwitz, and we worked together on an immense project, written in French and translated into English, which we published in New York in 1989. We gave free copies of this book to about a hundred libraries and archives worldwide. Pressac published an abridged version of the book, which was very successful, and which forced the Holocaust deniers to retreat.
Another book we published, The Auschwitz Album, has an even more remarkable backstory. In the summer of 1979, we sent an eighteen-year-old student, Emmanuel Lulin, to Prague. His mission was to enter the Communist-run State Jewish Museum and to examine its contents. When he returned, Emmanuel handed over a mass of information and a cache of seventy photographs showing the arrival of a convoy at Auschwitz II–Birkenau. All the images seemed to have been taken by the same photographer. Some of the pictures were familiar to me: I had seen them in other works. But now, examining them all together, I had the sense that these photographs all came from the same source—and that there might be others still, never before seen. Emmanuel confirmed this, saying that there were about two hundred photographs in total. They had never been published in their entirety, even though they represented the sole detailed visual testimony of what had happened when a convoy arrived in Birkenau. For the Jewish people, these photographs were incalculably precious.
Emmanuel went back to Prague and obtained all of the photographs. According to the museum, they came from an album that had fallen into the hands of a former deportee. The Czech and Israeli historian Erich Kulka told us that, during the trial of Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, it had been established that the photographs were taken either by Bernhard Walter, the head of the anthropometric authentication department at Auschwitz, or by his assistant Ernst Hoffman. The deportee’s name was Lilli Zelmanovic. She had gone to Frankfurt in December 1964, from her home in Miami, to testify at the trial.
On July 25, 1980, having used a private detective to identify Lilli Zelmanovic, née Lilli Jacob, I met her in Miami. She entrusted me with her album, which a former Life photographer spent the night photographing for me, and the next day, I convinced her to donate it to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. All she asked in return was that I pay for her and her husband to travel to Jerusalem and Auschwitz. Naturally, I agreed, and we published that extraordinary album for the first time in September 1980.
However, this great work of memory did not mean we had forgotten those who were attempting to destroy it.
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AT THE TRIAL of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, I declared:
The fact of having called into question the death of deportees has caused serious moral and personal damage to each and every member of our association; because, for us, it is not a question of defending general ideas, a theoretical question, an ideal or an ideology. It is a question of opposing the denial of the deaths of our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our grandparents, for whom we are not only representatives or spokespeople, but also the material and moral heirs. In affirming what you dared to affirm, you have attacked the dignity and honor of each member of our association. Good news—the gas chambers didn’t exist! But in that case, where are our families? Where are our parents, whose memory has never left us and whom we dream about at night? Those parents who were not there to bring us up: Where are they, Mr. Faurisson? Are they billionaires in the United States, living under false names? Are they hiding somewhere in South America, like Nazi criminals? Or are they in Israel, where we go to visit them on a regular basis while pretending to mourn them between trips? Added to this moral damage is the fact that, by denying the existence of the gas chambers, you are deliberately fomenting anti-Semitic hate, because what you are saying is that the Jews lied. And, of course, our association would be the biggest liars of all. Such an accusation, if believed by some people, would inevitably lead them to hate and despise the Jews. It seems to me that this sly hatred toward the Jews—which can be detected in your writing—has something in common, albeit at a lower level, with the hatred that drove Hitler. Mr. Faurisson: you, who embody, in our eyes, a violent and incomprehensible hatred; you, who are, in our eyes, a sort of desecrator of graves; you should know that we are not prosecuting you out of hate, but for the faithful memories of our parents and all other victims of genocide.
Later, the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson was convicted “of complicity in contesting the existence of a crime against humanity.”
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I SPENT SEVERAL weeks in Israel for the construction of our great Memorial of the Deportation, surrounded by the Forest of Remembrance, but it was not a happy time for me. My mother had died shortly before—on April 20, 1981, the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday—and I was overcome with grief. Of course, death is in the nature of things. The loss of my mother did not outrage me or slow me down. I battled the sadness and depression I felt by trying not to think about it during the daytime and, little by little, I stayed in touch with her at night through my dreams, where she often appeared, as she does to this day.