Denial denial

“Senior editors at … publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object.” Thus the English historian David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany. He made these remarks last week in the opening statement to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.

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Misleading, inaccurate, distorted, and uninformed reporting

Kim Murphy’s article “Danger in Denying the Holocaust” could be dismissed as amateurish at best were it not the Jan. 7 Column One story of the Los Angeles Times. Because of where it appeared, some of the issues it raised must be addressed. She doesn’t present the stakes in the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel case and she falls into the traps set by the deniers, hook, line and sinker.

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Fragments of a fraud

Christopher Hope called it “achingly beautiful”; the New York Times said it was written “with a poet’s vision; a child’s state of grace”; Anne Karpf in this paper described it as “one of the great works about the Holocaust”; all were agreed it was a masterpiece. There is just one problem — Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir of surviving as a Jewish child alone in the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz was a fabrication, invented from beginning to end, one of the great hoaxes in publishing history.

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Debate rages over future of the Holocaust’s legacy

  • Some say politicizing event will trivialize it

In the past 14 months, the director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was fired when he objected to the museum being used for political purposes.

The editor of an influential magazine on Jewish affairs was called “brainless when it comes to the Holocaust” for criticizing the growing field of Holocaust studies.

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‘St. Louis’ passengers often survived the war

Tracing Fates of 907 Jews on Liner Turned Away in 1939

In June 1939, Ilse Marcus was so tantalizingly close to the saving shores of the United States that she could see the palm trees of Miami.

But the American Government refused to provide a refuge for her and the 906 other German Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing their homeland’s Nazi terror. The ocean liner, which had already been turned away from Cuba, was forced to return to Europe, where the passengers were dispersed to Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain.

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