Do Not Go Gently Into Wiesel's Night

POSEUR: Elie Wiesel, survivor; author of book: "Night", about his horrible sufferings at the hands of the Nazis; speaking fee: $25,000 per lecture plus chauffeur-driven car

February 19, 2001 MINORITY REPORT Wiesel Words by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS IS THERE a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24. As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel's internal debates.... My critics have their conception of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain. Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel's internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim above is only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present because Jerusalem is at stake, and "the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives within me." (Again the modesty.) There are, sad to say, serpents in Wiesel's internal Eden, and they too must be patronized: That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains the first. Not just the first; the only. "Might wish." "Ties." "Understandable." "Third holiest." Even these lordly and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he announces that the city is "mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible," which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab -- these being at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population -- quite a strong claim on the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city is mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even if they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that Jerusalem dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don't think so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home." This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late historian and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as far back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of course the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the entire problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel's negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don't claim to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.) In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel's largest Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not to Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad quest for purity: Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within the bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso to rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it does not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden and put your boots on her dining-room table. Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago "adorned with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif, built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted cypresses and palm trees." He's wasting his time on Wiesel, who says that Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin's thugs, and who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying that they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by disputing their right even to feel nostalgia for it. In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. "I don't think we should even comment," he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt "sadness -- with Israel, and not against Israel." For the victims, not even a perfunctory word. As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will become Israel's prime minister. If you recall, he occupied West Beirut in September 1982, after the assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister Bashir Gemayel, on the announced and highly believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would need protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then sent into their undefended camps the most extreme faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the dirty work of these notorious fascists with flares during the night, and rear-guard cover during the day, for thirty-six hours before having them escorted out in triumph and thanked for their work. In other words, the bulk of US overseas military aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with hands on hip, in belt and boots and steel helmet and binoculars, and saw a mound of human corpses rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome, the soil has been manured by the beautiful thoughts of Elie Wiesel. ------------------------------- SLATE Shoah business The son of an Auschwitz survivor accuses the "Holocaust industry," Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders worldwide of a vast shakedown. Viktor Fralke Aug. 30, 2000 | With his clever, explosive and sometimes even wryly funny little book, "The Holocaust Industry," Norman G. Finkelstein, the 47-year-old enfant terrible of Holocaust studies from Brooklyn, N.Y., hit a nerve. Such a big nerve, in fact, that it caused a blackout of virtually all intellectual circuits -- at least in this country. Finkelstein's main and most devastating charge is that "American Jewish elites" and organizations are extorting billions of dollars from European countries and corporations in the name of "needy Holocaust survivors" in order to fund Holocaust programs, Holocaust memorials, Holocaust studies, Holocaust literature and, in general, "the Jewish community." Together they form not just a cottage industry but a full-fledged "Holocaust industry" sustained by a persistent ideology of "Holocaust correctness" that serves "certain class and political interests." Instead of helping the Jewish cause, Finkelstein goes on to argue, the Holocaust industry has become "the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe" by spreading an image of greedy Jews. While the book created a firestorm all over Europe, notably in England and Germany, in the U.S. a deafening silence has descended on it. Nobody wants to touch it. Whereas Finkelstein first got mostly negative and later mostly positive reviews in major European newspapers and magazines, and was given various opportunities to debate his adversaries, here he hardly got any reviews (in spite of the 250 review copies he helped his small publisher mail out to critics). Well, the New York Times did one. It reserved a full page in its Sunday Book Review to compare the book to "The Protocol of the Elders of Zion," a notorious anti-Semitic work, and called its author "indecent," "juvenile," "self-righteous," "arrogant" and "stupid." "I've looked it up; this review is worse than the one of 'Mein Kampf,'" says Finkelstein, in his high-pitched voice, full of moral indignation. Finkelstein's theory that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust is being abused for political, moral and financial blackmail could only spring from a deep-rooted anti-Zionism and/or his own personal psychological problems, most American intellectuals silently seem to agree. Not surprisingly, Finkelstein has received death threats from fanatics within the Jewish community and heard Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, say, "Mr. Finkelstein is full of shit" before the nightly television news in Germany. Finkelstein, educated at Princeton and in Paris but now teaching his "comrades-students" about Marxism and Nazism as an adjunct political science professor at Hunter College in New York, is used to being trashed. In his 1998 essay, "A Nation on Trial," he carefully took apart Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners." When New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier heard about it, he advised Finkelstein's publisher, Michael Naumann of Henry Holt, that the author was "poison, a disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock." "I'm thick-skinned; I got that from my parents," Finkelstein says, in his tiny apartment decorated with pictures of his father, who survived Auschwitz, and his mother, who survived Majdanek, on one wall and a poster of Charlie Chaplin on the other. "I try not to lose my sense of humor. When everyone keeps saying you're ugly, first you think they're jealous. But after a while you start thinking that you're really ugly." Usually there are two sides in a controversy. But it seems you are the only one on yours. I'm being censured. This is the Holocaust industry at work. Almost everyone I name is a beneficiary of the Holocaust industry. But I bet they feel like the ground beneath them is trembling. Today I did get some positive feedback, though, from professor Raul Hilberg, an expert on the Holocaust and a conservative Republican at that, so since I am a person of the left, his support cannot be partisan. A Brazilian journalist asked him about my book. Hilberg said Jewish organizations have gone too far with their compensation claims and that they overestimate the number of Holocaust survivors. He calls this form of exploitation obscene. Now, I didn't even use that word. Your "J'Accuse" -- or rant, depending on your viewpoint -- doesn't only target "corrupt" Jewish organizations like the World Jewish Congress and its leaders, such as billionaire Edgar Bronfman and real estate tycoon Israel Singer. You also attack Elie Wiesel. Why?   Elie Wiesel is such a ridiculous character. In private Elie Wiesel is the subject of much ridicule. The expression "There's no business like Shoah-business" is literally coined for him. So it's not as if I'm the first one to call the emperor naked, but in public -- yes. Isn't it a cheap shot to attack him on his lecture fee of "$25,000, plus limousine"? Why is that a cheap shot? He's turned it into a business, where he casts himself as a person who's doing all this from anguish and pain and personal sacrifice, while he has made a fortune out of it. If it were a cheap shot, he wouldn't invest so much in denying it. With a cheap shot he would just have dismissed it. In the U.K. he was asked about it all the time and he was really -- what I would call -- in denial. [Laughs] He always tells people, after referring to his childhood in Buchenwald, that he is living very modestly in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has his books. But of course he forgets to say that such an apartment is costing him thousands of dollars a month. You're calling him a liar because he says he read Immanuel Kant's "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft" ("A Critique of Pure Reason") in Yiddish, while you say there is no Yiddish translation of that book. Wiesel claims to be a Kant scholar. He says that when he was a teenager, girls were running away from him because all he could do was talk about Kant. I suspect they had other motives, but leaving that aside for a moment ... But Wiesel claims that there is a Yiddish translation -- a book called "Kant's Etik," published in 1929 in Warsaw. It's on his bookshelf. Absolutely correct! Now, I don't want to pour cold water on your parade, but what was published in Warsaw in 1929 was Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason." One chapter, 60 pages ... I know that! My sources are: 1) the Widener Library at Harvard, 2) the Yivo Library in New York -- the largest Yiddish library in the world -- and 3) the Hebrew University Library. Everybody agrees on that. There is no dispute. The "Etik" comes from Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason." Confusing the two Kant books is like a Tolstoy scholar having read one chapter of "Anna Karenina" and confusing it with the whole of "War and Peace." That's ridiculous! On a more relevant note, Wiesel defenders argue that thanks to people like him, we understand more about genocides around the world. Thanks to Elie Wiesel we have a distorted and disfigured and frankly meaningless version of the Nazi Holocaust and we only know about those genocides that serve the interest of the U.S. and Israel, and we forget the ones that don't. Don't you think these personal attacks spoil your main argument? Obviously, there is no accounting for taste. I think I lay out my argument really simply, in three parts. The first concerns the question of why the Holocaust came to the U.S. only after the Six Day War in 1967. If you agree that the Holocaust served as an ideological weapon in the Palestinian conflict, the next question is how. I mean, the Holocaust could also be used for other reasons. For instance, my parents used it to defend certain Palestinian rights. The second part deals with how the Nazi Holocaust is ideologically recast to serve certain political ends. Which is new, because I'm the first one, I think, to have established what I call a "Holocaust framework" -- a distinction between Holocaust scholarship and Holocaust literature. This latter literature, to which Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" also belongs, has two dogmas at its core: the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the gentiles' eternal irrational hatred of the Jews. It's a small step from "Holocaust framework" to "Holocaust conspiracy." Why? If you come across a body of literature with no historical merit, the question arises, Cui bono? Who benefits from it? For example, if you look at 19th century literature on race, eugenics and so forth, once you've demonstrated that it has no scientific, historical or artistic value, you realize that it only exists to serve certain political and ideological goals. These are such obvious questions in any other context. It's called the sociology of ideas. Could the success of Goldhagen's book also be at least partly due to an almost masochistic feeling of guilt in certain parts of Europe? It could, but it's not probable. And besides, the book was a bestseller in the U.S. too, and America had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Let me give you a mental game. A large number of individuals claim that the success of Goldhagen's book was due to the simplicity of its thesis: All Germans were anti-Semitic monsters waiting for Hitler to give them the green light to start killing Jews. Now let's argue for the sake of argument that Goldhagen had said exactly the opposite: that the Holocaust was the work of Hitler and his henchmen, and that the whole nation was coerced into going along. Now the title of his book would have then been "Hitler's Unwilling Executioners." Would the book have achieved the same success? No. Why? Because it was something about the way in which he carved out a simple thesis that made it so compelling. Even though reading the book feels like chewing on tinfoil, its thesis turned out to be ideologically very convenient. It is the same thing Cynthia Ozick said after the 1973 war [when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel]: Why does everybody hate Israel? Simple answer: All the world wants to wipe out the Jews. If you see hidden motives everywhere, a conspiracy theory is around the corner. The mechanisms of ideological control are very complex. This is what a close friend of mine, professor Noam Chomsky, calls the manufacture of consent. I'm not dealing with that. I ask myself: If this is an ideology, whose interest does it serve? The problem with a conspiracy theory is that it can't be falsified. Everything, or nothing, supports it. I'm not sure why you're invoking the conspiracy theory. Look, whenever you show patterns, whenever you go beyond the spontaneous actions of people, you hear conspiracy theory! I think that there's more to history than just the spontaneous actions of people. If you're a historian, why didn't you write a serious study about the subject? Why didn't you do research yourself? Interview people, etc.? Why should I interview people? To find the truth. Elan Steinberg was enraged that I didn't interview him. Why would I? I call him a master of disinformation- his work is out in the public and speaks for intself. He has nothing interesting to tell me. I can easily do without him. So what made you write this book? This book is a result of 15 years of reflection. While I was working to get financial compensation for my mother, I listed on a piece of paper around 60 things that really bothered me about the Holocaust business. One of these was the whole notion of "survivors." In the early days, I knew that a lot of Jews were stretching it a bit in order to be considered as "survivors" under the German reparation laws. If you were in the Soviet Union during the war, you weren't eligible. So I knew people had falsified their papers -- which was fairly easy because there was no way to prove it. The only numbers there were were from Auschwitz. So for a piece I did about the reparations issue, I looked in the old agreements, from the '50s, the Luxembourg Agreements. The German government paid in all about $50 billion. And in addition it gave $10 million a year between 1953 and 1965 to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany -- a billion dollars in current values. The Germans said that only 15 percent of this money went to the victims. The large chunk of the rest of it, according to Ronald Zweig, an expert on the subject, went to Jewish communities in the Arab world, such as Iraq, and institutions such as Yad Vashem in Israel. You know why they didn't give everything to the survivors? That's what is so amusing. They said there weren't any victims anymore. All their needs had been met. So the irony is, after misappropriating the money in the '50s because there weren't any more victims, now they claim all these needy Holocaust victims have languished in poverty all these years, because the Germans gave them no money. I find that funny. Your mother received $3,500 from the German government right after the war. What happened? In the '50s my mother, a mathematician who worked for Chase Manhattan Bank, was diagnosed by a doctor -- I believe it was a Jewish doctor -- as having extreme hysteria, but this was not from her experiences in Majdanek, she was told, but from her difficulty with adjusting in the U.S. -- which is, of course, a filthy diagnosis. The Claims Conference was exactly designed to pay out money to people like my mother, who were either unfairly or inadequately compensated by the initial reparations. Cases like hers were being corrected by giving a lump sum. But she didn't get a penny. Only so-called outstanding Jewish leaders and rabbis got anything. My father got injured in Auschwitz and was given a lifetime pension by the Germans. They delivered the money promptly and efficiently. I still remember the blue envelopes from Trier. My father had Alzheimer's near the end of his life and I was his guardian. Every three months I had to go to the German consulate to pick up his checks and to prove that he was still alive. At the end of his life it came down to $600 a month. All in all, $250,000 during his lifetime. All the survivors I talk to -- the Finkelstein residence quickly became known as CCBC, Claims Conference Buster Central -- say the same thing: We want the money that was distributed by the German government; we don't want the money given to the Jewish organizations. I think that is one of the most devastating insights on the Holocaust industry -- that the victims of Nazi persecution trust the German government more than they do the Jewish organizations. On the one hand you complain about Jewish organizations claiming too much money; on the other you complain that people like your mother didn't get enough. Some people misinterpret my book as saying I'm against compensation. Oh no, I'm not! I'm all for compensation. But it should only go to the real victims, and not to pseudo victims or to Jewish communities and organizations. Your parents are Holocaust survivors. Doesn't that make you a second-generation survivor? I think such a concept is repulsive. That's simply an effort to milk the Holocaust for another generation. If I had ever said that to my mother, she would have given me a good smack in the face! And rightfully so! You suggest but never state explicitly that only camp survivors are real Holocaust survivors. What about Jews who fled to the Soviet Union, came back and had nothing -- why not call them "Holocaust survivors" as well? Fine, then we should call all Palestinians "Holocaust survivors." If you make the definition so elastic, so flexible that it includes refugees, then you should count them all. That wouldn't be fair to the real survivors. Are your serious? Oh man. It's not a question of fair. You can't argue on the one hand that the Holocaust is fraught with moral meaning, and then trivialize the term "Holocaust survivor" by including everyone. There is a difference whether you spent the war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, like Mr. Kissinger, or you spent it in Auschwitz. Mr. Kissinger is not calling himself a survivor, is he? Since Hitler targeted all of world Jewry, Israel Singer says, anybody who has survived is a Holocaust survivor. But I would say, what about all the Vietnamese people who suffered from the politics of Mr. Kissinger? Are they Holocaust survivors? No, no, we can't call them that. Do you think the Vietnamese received one nickel of compensation? Forget it. The U.S. won't even officially apologize. You go a step further and argue that the "Holocaust industry" has become an even bigger Holocaust denier than the usual Holocaust deniers. How so? The official number of Holocaust survivors the Israeli government now gives is a million. Or 960,000, to be exact. At the same time Jewish organizations have been claiming, since the early '90s, that 10,000 die each month. So that would mean that in 1990 there were 2 million survivors left. In 1990, not more that a quarter could be alive from World War II. That means 8 million in May 1945. Well, there were fewer than 8 million Jews in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. In other words, if these numbers are correct, the Holocaust didn't happen. As my mother used to say, if everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill? In 1998, Swiss banks restituted $1.25 billion to Jewish organizations for dormant Jewish accounts. Should they get their money back? The case should have been handled by the international Claims Resolution Tribunal, instead of by the World Jewish Restitution Organization. They could have processed the claims and given out the money to those who deserve it. By the way, nobody noticed one of the most interesting revelations in the book: that banks in the U.S. also sit on dormant Jewish accounts from the war. It's not even my own finding. It's on Page 2 of the Volcker Report [the $500 million audit report on Switzerland that came out in 1999]. It amounts to $6 million, of which only $500,000 is going to be paid. In other words, the American record is worse than the Swiss! That's what Seymour Rubin, American delegate during the negotiations, testified to the House Banking Committee. Not a word reported anywhere. Not a word. What American banks are involved? Nobody knows. We have to do a $500 million research report just like the Swiss to find out. We might never.  We would be on a slow boat to Munich. You are totally opposed to the claims that are now being laid on property owned by the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland. Your family is from Poland. You could get some money back after all. No! It never occurred to us. We don't want the money. My mother's father owned a little tobacco store, my father's father owned a little lumber mill. Jewish organizations are claiming back my grandparents' property without asking our permission. We never gave our sanction! It's grave robbery! I say: Enough. The American Jewish community is rich enough. It doesn't need to evict Polish peasants from their land, Polish tenants from their homes and Polish sick from the hospitals for more money. They have plenty of money. Mr. Bronfman just sold Seagram for $27 billion. That's plenty. You don't have to impoverish Polish people even more. What if your grandparents' lumber mill is owned not by a poor Polish family but by a wealthy former Communist apparatchik? Still not interested? That wouldn't make any difference. Have you ever been to Auschwitz? No. I've lived with the Holocaust for 40 years. That's enough. I don't need to have more of it. I'm not like one of those second-generation Holocaust victims that go lie in a replica gas oven. Have you seen "Schindler's List"? I never had the nerves. I tried to see some of those films. I started with "Sophie's Choice." I left after 40 minutes. I thought it was vulgar. I didn't see Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah," but my parents saw it and they both liked it very much. Your book is meant to preserve the legacy of your parents, who both died in 1995. Would they have been pleased by the book? My mother was one of the smartest people I've known. I put a lot of her wisdom in the book, so I think she would have liked it. I don't know about my father. He didn't say much. Perhaps both of my parents, like most Holocaust survivors, would have had a little difficulty with my views on Israel. Weren't you afraid that your book would fall into the wrong hands and be used against exactly the causes you stand for? I thought about that. I recognize that problems can arise from the book. I had to do a kind of moral balancing act. I asked myself: Which poses the greater danger now, the Holocaust industry or the Holocaust deniers? Actually, what I wanted to do is disarm the Holocaust industry and the Holocaust deniers at the same time. How are you disarming the Holocaust deniers? Now they say: "Told you so." If David Irving [the British Holocaust denier] is saying, "Well, an Auschwitz survivor is born every day," he can say that, because if you look at the numbers of the Holocaust industry, it's true. The way you defang the deniers is by scrupulously preserving the historical record. The only way we can learn from the Holocaust is by restoring it as a rational object of historical inquiry, and the only way we can do that is by putting the Holocaust industry out of business.   ----------------------------------------------- Slate |culturebox Crying Wolf Why did it take so long for a far-fetched Holocaust memoir to be debunked? By Blake Eskin Posted Friday, Feb. 29, 2008, at 6:32 PM ET In 2002, I published a book about a man who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of Fragments, an acclaimed but, it turned out, bogus Holocaust memoir. Wilkomirski—his actual name was Bruno Doessekker—used my own family history (my great-grandmother was a Wilkomirski) to concoct a Jewish identity for himself. While researching the Wilkomirski case, I came across Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca. Published in 1997, Misha is about a Jewish girl from Brussels who walked across Europe by herself during World War II and spent months living in the forest. Like Fragments, it's the story of a vulnerable child, alone in the world, who travels great distances and faces perils as chilling as they are difficult to verify. Even if you forget for a moment that Defonseca has two prolonged encounters with wolves in war-torn Europe, her story strains credulity: She walks from Belgium to Ukraine, sneaks into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and stabs to death a Nazi rapist who attacks her—all between ages 7 and 11. Now, 11 years after publishing her memoir and almost two decades since she went public with her story, Defonseca has admitted that she is actually Monique De Wael, the orphaned daughter of two Catholic members of the Belgian resistance. Yesterday, through her lawyer, she released a statement to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir. The story of Misha, she said, "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving." Why did people take her seriously for so long? Raising questions about the authenticity of someone's Holocaust testimony, however implausible it seems, is a joyless task and one that puts you in unsavory company. The book was published, with blurbs from Elie Wiesel and from the head of the North American Wolf Foundation. Misha Defonseca's story thus hung around for more than a decade, hovering between the two meanings of incredible: amazing and unbelievable. In this suspended state, her story was translated into 18 languages, became the basis of an Italian opera, and, last month, a feature film released in France. The genesis of Misha is almost as bizarre as the memoir itself. Defonseca, who has lived outside Boston since the mid-'80s, first told the story of Misha at Temple Beth Torah in Holliston in 1989 or 1990. "When Holocaust Memorial Day came around, I asked her if she would speak to the congregation," said Rabbi Joanne Yocheved Heiligman. The memorial service involved the lighting of six candles, Heiligman said. "She asked to light one of them for animals; I thought that was out on a limb but said, 'OK.' And everybody was very moved." Defonseca's intense feelings for animals also led her to commission a two-hour-long video tribute to her dead dog, Jimmy. Jane Daniel, who was doing PR for the studio that assembled the memorial video, also had a small publishing company, and when she heard Defonseca's story, Daniel signed her up to write a memoir. She asked Vera Lee, a French-speaking friend, to be Defonseca's co-author. Disney had an option on the film rights but let it lapse. Oprah taped a segment with the author at a wolf preserve, but it never aired. Vera Lee, who had been fired before the manuscript was finished, filed a breach-of-contract suit. A Massachusetts jury found that Daniel and Mt. Ivy had withheld royalty payments, hidden money in offshore accounts, and failed to market the book. All rights reverted to Defonseca, and in 2002, the judge tripled the damages and told Mt. Ivy to pay Defonseca and Lee $32.4 million. You'd think that an eight-figure judgment against a publisher would have become cocktail chatter among midlist writers, but Mt. Ivy was not exactly Random House—all told, it published a half-dozen books, including such titles as Main Dish Salads and Gigolos. Misha never became a best-seller in the United States, but Daniel had enlisted Boston's Palmer & Dodge literary agency to sell the foreign rights. In France and Italy, the memoir sold more than 30,000 copies. Survivre Avec les Loups, a feature film based on the memoir by the French-Jewish filmmaker Véra Belmont, opened in January to praise for its red-haired heroine, Mathilde Goffart. (The film hasn't found an American distributor, but here's the trailer.) When Ha'aretz interviewed Belmont and mentioned historians who doubt Misha's veracity, she said: "That is exactly like the people who deny the existence of concentration camps. This is a true story. Everything that happened during the Holocaust is unbelievable and impossible to grasp." But the film brought Defonseca's story into the realm of popular culture and prompted scrutiny from new corners. Serge Aroles, a French surgeon who has written a book-length study of feral children, called out Defonseca for recycling "the usual surrealist clichés" about children who live with wolves. And last week, appearing on Belgian television, Maxime Steinberg, a respected historian of the Holocaust in Belgium, challenged Defonseca's claim that she left Brussels in search of her deported parents in the spring of 1941. Deportations of Belgian Jews, he said, did not begin until August of 1942. Meanwhile, Jane Daniel, having exhausted her appeals, had taken to the Internet to debunk the story that she had helped bring into the world. In August, she launched "Best-Seller," a blog that began as a windy retelling of Daniel's misadventures in publishing Misha. The blog changed course after Sharon Sergeant, a Massachusetts genealogist, stumbled onto it. "I contacted her, and I said, 'I think this case can be solved,' " Sergeant says. Most Defonseca doubters had focused on passages that were was logically or historically implausible, but Sergeant assumed the story was false and instead scoured the various versions of the text for clues to the author's real identity. The American edition mentions the name Monique De Wael; the U.K. edition includes a date of birth—May 12, 1937—and the fact that Misha's father worked at the town hall. Sergeant plugged these data points into genealogical databases and found researchers in Belgium to help look for information. Last week, Daniel posted a baptismal certificate from a Brussels church for a Monique De Wael, born to Robert De Wael and Josephine Donvil on May 12, 1937. She also posted a register from an elementary school near the De Waels' home that shows Monique enrolled there in September 1943—two years after Misha claimed to have left Brussels. In the school register, Robert De Wael is identified as a municipal employee. The Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported these developments and added that Monique's parents—Catholic resisters—had been arrested, deported, and killed. In the face of this mounting evidence, Defonseca confessed. In a statement released through a Brussels attorney, she tries to head off the questions that swirled around Bruno Doessekker: whether her alter ego was a delusion or a conscious scam for which she may bear legal liability. In her statement, Defonseca continues to paint herself as a victim: My parents were arrested when I was four. I was taken in by my grandfather, Ernest De Wael, then by my uncle, Maurice De Wael. They called me "the traitor's daughter" because my father was suspected of talking under torture at St. Gilles Prison. Other than my grandfather, I hated those who took me in. They treated me badly. Defonseca also claims she was the victim of her publisher. "At first, I didn't want to publish, and then I let myself be talked into it by Jane Daniel. She made me believe, and I believed it." Daniel may have persuaded Defonseca to publish Misha, but Rabbi Heiligman says that the core of Defonseca's story did not change since the first time she told her story, years before Defonseca met Daniel. And Daniel had no hand in the U.K. edition or Véra Belmont's film. Defonseca is no innocent, but she could not have made Misha into an international phenomenon on her own. When the historian Debórah Dwork told Daniel that Misha was not authentic testimony, that didn't stop Daniel from publishing the book. Nor did these questions keep Véra Belmont from making her film and comparing those who dared question its authenticity to Holocaust deniers. Since Defonseca came clean, Rabbi Heiligman told me, "I wish she had published it as fiction—it's a compelling story." And a spokesman for Belmont told the Boston Globe, "No matter if it's true or not—she believes it is, anyway—she just thinks it's a beautiful story." In her statement, Defonseca says, I always felt different. It's true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community. ------------------------------------ January 28, 2001 Sounds of SilenceA Holocaust historian examines the challenge of writing about the Nazi genocide. By MORRIS DICKSTEIN RETHINKING THE HOLOCAUST By Yehuda Bauer. 335 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $29.95. IN THE passionate debates about the Holocaust over the last three decades, which shattered the near-silence of the postwar years, some striking differences have emerged. Many writers take their inspiration from Theodor Adorno's dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. They are convinced that the enormity of the Holocaust opened up a rift in human consciousness that cannot be bridged by conventional forms of discourse. Writers, critics and historians as unlike each other as Elie Wiesel, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Lawrence Langer and Saul Friedländer have probed the boundaries between history and memory, witness and objective narration. They look to safeguard the subject from kitsch and normalization, arguing that such unspeakable events test the limits of our ability to represent them. On the other hand, most historians (and many survivors) have simply labored to reconstruct and explain what actually happened, to shed light in darkness, something that the perpetrators, by covering their traces and eliminating nearly all witnesses, tried to make sure would never be done. Heinrich Himmler, in his notorious speech to SS officers in Poznan in 1943, congratulated them on remaining "decent" in the face of a mountain of corpses, adding: "This is a glorious page in our history which has never been written and never will be written." Events that followed, beginning with the Nuremberg trials in November 1945, proved him wrong. In its wealth of documentary detail, Raul Hilberg's (left) "Destruction of the European Jews" (1961) clarified how the Holocaust was physically organized. Another respected and authoritative figure in the field is Yehuda Bauer, the former research director of Yad Vashem and a retired professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His eloquent new book, "Rethinking the Holocaust," recast and rewritten from separate essays and lectures, is an eye-opening synthesis of the whole historiography of the Shoah. Bauer's writing, like Hilberg's, is stringently matter-of-fact, altogether free of the fear and trembling of those who approach the subject in the spirit of Adorno or Wiesel. To him their qualms about whether the Holocaust can be described or explained smack of a "retreat into mysticism."+ "If we label the Holocaust as inexplicable," he insists, "it becomes relevant to lamentations and liturgy, but not to historical analysis." He maintains that "the murder was committed by humans for reasons whose sources are found in history and which can therefore be rationally analyzed." He finds it deeply troubling that no Nazi document has come to light ordaining this "systematic humiliation." This reveals how much it simply emerged from the logic of the whole system. ---------------------------------------------------------- THE JEWISH DAILY ___________________ FORWARD The Jewish Daily Six Million Little Pieces? Oprah’s Latest Pick Stirs Memoir Controversy By Joshua Cohen Fri. Jan 20, 2006 Days after Oprah Winfrey’s last Book Club selection was unmasked as fraud, triggering a national conversation among literati and lay readers alike about the definition and significance of memoir, the talk show host and cultural arbiter announced her next choice: “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s seminal autobiographical account of his experience during the Holocaust. Wiesel is, of course, a Nobel Prize winner, canonized as an international voice of conscience. Still, Winfrey’s imprimatur assures the book and its writer a fresh financial success, not to mention millions of likely new readers — the kind of jump in stature that might make even the venerable Nobel committee blush. Then again, Wiesel clearly had something to offer the television hostess in return. As public relations strategy, the move is near genius. Winfrey is acknowledged as a demigoddess in publishing. Her Book Club, an offshoot of her wildly popular television talk-show, is credited with almost single-handedly reviving American book sales. Right now, however, she seems to be smarting from the shrapnel of last week’s debate over “A Million Little Pieces,” James Frey’s 2003 account of his descent into drug addiction and violence — and Oprah’s most recent Book Club selection. As disclosed by a Web site called The Smoking Gun, the memoir contained a host of inconsistencies. Frey has since been subjected to numerous attacks in op-ed pages and the blogosphere, an uncomfortable session with Larry King and a class-action lawsuit. Given all this, it stands to reason that Oprah might have been in need of a little credibility. The rehabilitation of truth requires a trusted voice — a true survivor. There is no one more closely identified with the term survivor than Elie Wiesel. There is no doubt that Wiesel survived the Nazi genocide with which his name is nearly synonymous. Born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. “Night,” his first book, was published in French in 1958, and came to prominence as an enormously popular and influential accounts of a young man’s experience in the Holocaust. But there is a problem. As E.J. Kessler reported in these pages, even “Night” has raised red flags. In 1996, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book, then titled “Un di velt hot geshvign” (“And the World Kept Silent”), with the later 158-page French version (“La Nuit”), which is the text that was translated and constitutes the Oprah-book as we now know it. According to Seidman’s account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies, Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions — suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism more fitting to Wiesel’s emerging role as an ambassador of culture and conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel altered several facts in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments that conflicted with the earlier version. (For example, in the French, the young Wiesel, having been liberated from Buchenwald, is recuperating in a hospital; he looks into a mirror and writes that he saw a corpse staring back at him. In the earlier Yiddish, Wiesel holds that upon seeing his reflection he smashed the mirror and then passed out, after which “my health began to improve.”) Wiesel is no Bernard Holstein (Brougham), who claimed to be a survivor, with a “fake” tattoo and all, and forged a life for his memoir, “Stolen Soul.” Neither is Wiesel anything like Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of the debunked “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood,” which caused a scandal when it was proved fiction — only after its author won every award under the sun offered for Holocaust writing. Unlike the others, Wiesel unquestionably lived through the events he chronicled. If he altered some facts and the tone in which they were told, it was for reasons that have nothing to do with those of the likes of Frey. Wiesel’s “Night” went from the shtetl-declamatory of his native Yiddish to the Camus-like despair of his adopted French because the two languages (and their audiences) are markedly different. If Oprah’s choice encourages us to understand the difference, it will have served a higher purpose, after all. Wiesel’s books differ from those frauds in one more essential: the insoluble morass known as intent. Frey, for one, seems to have falsified the facts of his life in order to satisfy ego and the demands of the market. Wiesel’s liberties seem more like reconsiderations, his process less revision than interpretation. Reading “Night,” one encounters the birth of thought about the Holocaust — the future of history, concomitant with its study. Intent, in fact, is one excuse offered by Winfrey in her public defense of Frey. She issued a statement essentially arguing that it doesn’t matter if every fact in a memoir is true; it’s enough if the memoir in question was written in the spirit of truth — if its heart is true. As we are about to enter a world in which no survivor of the Holocaust will be left alive to give testimony firsthand, the record of witnesses becomes all the more critical. -------------------------------------------------- THE INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel By Robert Faurisson Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: [1] These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself. But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. [2] He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that! Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain circles. This is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains. The gassing version was spread by the Americans. [3] The version that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles and was subsequently abandoned in the Western media, largely because the stories were used to portray the Poles as the primary victims. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets and subsequently abandoned in the Western media because it was used by Soviets. [5] The fire version is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies. He writes: [6] Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.) A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks." An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: [7] Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it. The problems of some of what could be graciously called hyperbole as well as his subsequent reediting where fire is set aside for gas chambers (published in 1961 and then 1967 when the Holocaust first gained wide currency) exceed memory slippage. These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes. The various discrepancies have been roundly acknowledged including dates and versions of the same incidents. It is not his discrepancies but the way they still must be accepted as historical record by description and magnitude (or quantification) without support that unfortunately politicizes and demeans both this history and other parallel histories. That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a miracle. He says that: [8] In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why? In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: [9] Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous half swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the imposture. Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved. Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, [11] little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan. Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14] Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others. We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: [15] Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead. At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in the process of reconciliation." [16] That is what might be called "going from National Socialism to national masochism." Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel: Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust." As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a recognizable truth." [17] Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of singular extermination in a war that saw such devastation visited upon Europeans (including the Soviets).   Wiesel himself, one of several proponents not of the particular historically verified events of mass starvation, work camps, indiscriminate bombing, use of bilogical agents, etc., but of the politicized exceptionalism that has become commonly accepted though it springs from such limited fonts. A gas chamber in the hands of a potent political writer, along with consistently elaborated and often contradictory (unsupported) claims achieves the exceptionalism that Wiesel himself argues, even as he condones Israeli aggression of the most egregious kind and uses his pen (as he used it as a member of the terrorist band Irgun) to further an agenda. Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet been published. He notes that the nature of the Nazi policies prevents substantive proof. [18] Fair enough but how might Klarsfeld and Wiesel explain their support of the Nakba or various ethnocidal and genocidal acts that occur this day with such vigor, with such blatantly political motivations and expect that they can maintain a singular immunity to challenges of their own internal and verifiable contradictions? On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth probably on has the legitimacy that Zionism has, that is, it is tied up with political fate built upon force, political currents and influence rather than morality or reason. The indisputable, unchallengeable legitimacy breathed its last breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François Furet presided. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians keep quiet. But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against history being distorted and misrepresented to suit powerful political agendas. That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never was one. [19] The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored methods of historical criticism. Summary Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most unsupportable stories of other "eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald. The achievement has been a political one, but one that may diminish the real horrors of the war one day. When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors. He does not explain why he choose to offer this tale today since he pronounced this vignette only in the wake of Soviet support for the Arab states in the the Arab-Israeli dispute. This unscrupulous and careless choice was suppose to emphasized to the audience how he (and his father) realized the danger of the Communist but the context revealed the latitude in which he has spun unlikely political-histrionic. Where so called revisionists (often capable and intrepid historians) have lost some of their validity of course is when they do not challenge the denials of the Nakba, Indigenous Americans, Africans, Japanese, the people of the Indian subcontinent or even the Russians, while Wiesel has made it his business to deny that any of these people have experienced genocide; a position Wiesel espouses to preserve the political uniqueness of a franchise (the "holocaust") of which he is one of the central architects. It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance. Notes Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and the crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or "crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.) See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93. Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New York). Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6. A reply to a reader By HENRY GALLAGHER FIELDS I am happy to receive some civil and fairly rational, if erroneous, criticism from Mr. Purdy after wading through the asininity of Mr. Kent's tirades. It is a blessing that Mr. Kent has decided to cease his screeds and retreat to his prescribed quarters or to the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, as the case may be. (Since Mr. Kent has raised the issue of shoestrings, I note that the latter temple of instruction may be expected to be the more tolerant of those dangerous items, and of belts and neckties, too.) Now to Mr. Purdy and his call for The Last Ditch to profess its opposition to "anti-Semitism." Since "anti-Semitism" is the most slippery, protean, and far-reaching indictment that is in vogue today, surpassing even "racism" and "homophobism," one would like to see a full definition of it and try to get it to stay in one place, so to speak, before professing anything about it, pro or con. Speaking for myself, I have always held that Jews should be treated by the same standard as any other group. And that Israel should be treated the same as any other country. It is apparent that this is not the rule in contemporary mainstream academic and media circles, which are obviously biased in favor of Jews and Israel. Worse: in some currents of what is laughably called the "mainstream" these days, my approach may well be indicted as ... how you say? ... anti-Semitic. To his credit, Mr. Purdy does offer us some idea of what he means by "anti-Semitic," and for that matter his argument that "ascribing pernicious motivations to entire peoples is not libertarian thinking" is perfectly true as it stands, insofar as modern libertarianism proceeds from individualist premises. However, I am disappointed that he did not provide some context, acknowledging that a similarly biased approach is the modus operandi for the many prominent Jewish intellectuals and organizations that cavalierly attribute various heinous attributes to Palestinians, Germans, Poles, Russians, Christians, and so on. (Think of the record established by the current luminary Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.) Since Mr. Purdy seems to be cautioning TLD about the perils of criticizing group tendencies, I hope that, as a fair-minded man, he has leveled a similar complaint against the infinitely more influential pro-Jewish individuals and entities — Commentary magazine, the Wiesenthal Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and so forth — some of which receive tax revenue. "More than a couple" of the letters to the editor posted in response to my original piece disturb Mr. Purdy, but letters do not represent the thinking of TLD or its writers. As far as I can make out (not being the head honcho here), TLD tries to air a variety of reader viewpoints so long as they do not promote violence, rely on obscenity, involve actionable libel, or, in general, exceed a generous allowance of frothing at the mouth. I might add that I have seen nothing in the letters to the editor criticizing Jews that surpasses the insults leveled against me. Libertarians should not should not hide from the truth. Just as it would be untruthful to deny that Nazi leaders were predominantly German or that most white Southerners of the 1940s supported laws requiring racial segregation, it would likewise be untruthful to deny that the Soviet Communist leadership in the 1920s and 1930s was disproportionately Jewish or that Soviet atomic spies in the United States during World War II were disproportionately Jewish. And it is untruthful to deny that the neoconservatives who currently dominate American foreign policy are also disproportionately Jewish and pursue Jewish and Israeli interests. Such truths are conventionally labeled "anti-Semitic" by the Jewish establishment, and people who utter them suffer various forms of punishment, including being blacklisted by the libertarian/conservative media — for example, Joe Sobran. So that my statements are not (deliberately?) misinterpreted, I emphasize I am not implying that all Jews are now or ever were Soviet Communists, pro-Soviet atomic spies, neoconservatives, or, for that matter, pioneers in composing atonal music. Mr. Purdy claims that "Judaism invented the idea that those outside the tribe are to be treated as those inside." I am no more convinced that Judaism invented that idea than that the Russians invented "beisbol." The old rabbis included much in the Talmud that certainly seems to be tribe-obsessed and hostile to gentiles; and that fact has been brought out by such Jewish writers as Israel Shahak, Israel Shamir, and Norman Cantor. There is, naturally, much more that could be written on this subject, and one writer who has actually written it is the fearless goy Kevin MacDonald, in his three books on the Jews: A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and Its Discontents, and The Culture of Critique. [Editor's note: Dr. Stephen Sniegoski's review-essay from 1997 on the first of the three books, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, has been posted to the TLD site.] On the Holocaust, Mr. Purdy adheres to the official story that Jews suffered 6 million deaths in World War II, though he doesn't address the gas chamber/mass-killing scenario. As TLD senior editor Ronn Neff has pointed out, Murray Rothbard, whom Mr. Purdy regards as one of those libertarian "iconic figures," himself questioned the official Holocaust story. But whether "iconic figures" affirm or question the official accounts is actually beside the point. The fundamental fact of the matter is that absent freedom of inquiry (where no one is punished for his views) it is impossible to rationally study any issue. The official Holocaust story enjoys a status in the West parallel to that of Lysenkoist biology in Stalinist Russia, where public disagreement with its radical-environmentalist presumptions meant a trip to a forced labor camp, and the only biology one was allowed to study was Lysenkoist. Obviously, then, everything a loyal biology student read would confirm Lysenkoist biology, just as everything produced in mainstream circles today confirms the official Holocaust story. In the current climate of intellectual suppression regarding the Holocaust, any halfway intelligent man who has a nodding acquaintance with objective methods of inquiry should be brimming with skepticism. Is there actual physical proof for the claims of millions of deaths? Why is there a need to suppress criticism and analysis by nonbelievers? One would expect to see Mr. Purdy, as a Holocaust believer, hastening to caution Holocaust aficionados who suppress free inquiry, because by engaging in such suppression they make it appear that there is something to hide. One would expect to learn that Mr. Purdy, as an intelligent, fair-minded man, had already made strenuous efforts to open up the entire Holocaust issue to free inquiry. Once such freedom of inquiry came about, and extensive scientific investigations were undertaken, perhaps no evidence would be found to militate against the official Holocaust story, and physical evidence would finally turn up to confirm the alleged millions of deaths in the various death camps. Until that time, however, individuals motivated by a search for the truth can only treat Holocaust orthodoxy with a high degree of skepticism. And that is the case whether or not the people in charge of us nowadays decide that skepticism is "anti-Semitic."