Remarkable nonsense

By HAIM SHAPIRO

JERUSALEM (July 31) — Jewish children were burned alive at the very spot where Polish Catholics are now setting up crosses at Auschwitz, according to Naphtali Lavie, the former Israeli consul in New York.

Lavie, a Holocaust survivor, who now serves as vice-chairman of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, was reacting to a report in The Jerusalem Post this week about the erection of some 50 new crosses close to the fence of the concentration camp.

MK Shevah Weiss (Labor), another Holocaust survivor, sent a letter to the Polish president asking him to immediately intervene and ensure the removal the crosses.

[…]

Lavie said that the burning of the Jewish children was unparalleled among all terrible outrages committed against the Jews throughout their history.

“We know of cases of children being burned alive during the crusades, but not in such numbers,” he said.

The documentation for the crime has come in the form of testimony by a Polish Christian, Krystyn Olszewski, of Warsaw, who himself had been imprisoned in Auschwitz for trying to transport arms to a Polish resistance unit.

He related the incident to Lavie and his testimony was later recorded in writing.

“We were both weeping as he told it to me,” Lavie recalled this week.

According to his testimony, in February or March of 1944, Olszewski was part of a work crew that had been sent to dismantle makeshift barriers which the guards had constructed to protect their platforms from the freezing winds and blizzards.

At one point, he had been sent up to the tower to take down the barrier materials, while the other workers waited below. It was there that he first heard the children wailing.

“While tearing down the plate that was nailed to the barrier and the roof beam, a gust of wind brought a strange, distant cry of high-pitched children’s voices,” he said in his testimony, which has been translated to English.

Olszewski related how, as he deliberately prolonged his struggle to dismantle the plate, he saw a truck filled with naked children waving their arms. The truck was slowly rolling toward “the pit,” a place where the Germans burned corpses of those who had been gassed, but whose bodies could not be accommodated by the crematoria.

As he covertly watched, the kapo urged him to finish the job.

“I saw that the truck, which meanwhile had turned around, turned out to be a dump-truck. At this very moment the screaming throng of children was sliding down the raised truck-bed to the flaming pit. This was the last thing I saw.

“After I climbed down, nothing could be seen or heard. Gusts of wind brought the smell of smoke but no one thought it strange,” Olszewski said.

With his testimony, Olszewski enclosed a drawing of the lay-out of the camp.

“I am willing to participate in the investigation aimed at determining the exact site of the crime, which in my view, was the climax of the Holocaust,” he said.

Lavie said this week that he had received confirmation that the Germans burned Jewish children alive at Auschwitz from two other survivors, Polish Chief Rabbi Pinhas Menahem Joskowicz and Rabbi Menashe Klein, rabbi of the Ungvar community in the Jerusalem suburb of Ramot. Both said they had personally seen Jewish children being thrown into fires.

Prof. Yisrael Guttman, the historian of Yad Vashem, had also heard of such instances, Lavie said. He said that even survivors found it difficult to believe and said such a thing could not happen.

“If I had not heard this additional testimony, I myself would not have believed it,” Lavie said.

Lavie said that the period in question had been one when, according to the testimony of the Eichmann trial, the Auschwitz commander, Rudolph Hess [sic], had asked to slow down the transports, complaining that he could not dispose of the bodies quickly enough. In response, Eichmann had pressed him to work faster and faster.

He described the selection, where the men were sent to work and children three to seven were immediately sent to be murdered.

“I was at Auschwitz in 1941, when it wasn’t yet that bad,” Lavie said.

Lavie is convinced that the site of this outrage was where the crosses are now being erected. The pits in question, he said, were those where the bodies of Russian prisoners of war, who had been gassed, were burned.

“This is not a place for an Auschwitz museum, but for a Jewish memorial, where Jews can come and say kaddish,” Lavie said.

Jerusalem Post, July 31, 1998

Steve Paulsson writes (H-ANTISEMITISM Digest — 28 Jul 1998 to 29 Jul 1998)

[[ I don’t believe in the suppression of any form of speech, true or false, as long as it is within the law of libel etc. ]]

Jonathan E. Schiff (in the same issue) and Steven Paulson make good arguments why we should not enact a law against “Holocaust denial.” There is a fear that any curtailment of free speech could lead to the end of intellectual development, which is the hallmark of totalitarianism. Indeed, some of the lies about the Holocaust did force us to do better research and documentation for posterity. But the subject is far from being cut and dried, and I am far from being convinced as to which of the two evils is worse.

Making an effort to prevent publication of “Holocaust denial” is a better idea, so respectable magazines, newspapers etc. will not take this trash. Therefore, anti-Semites will have to spent their own resources, which will inevitably curtail the amount of it. What worries me is the case of crying “fire” is a crowded theater when there is no fire. All legal scholars agree that although free speech does allow it, it is illegal nonetheless since the trampling of people in the stampede on the way out overtakes the right of the free speech.

Put it another way. If a lie is repeated enough times it takes on a life of its own, and that has to be prevented. The blood libel in the middle ages is a good example. Telling this lie so many times over the years, that Jews sacrifice a Christian child before Pesakh in order to use his blood for some rituals is a complete fabrication. Free speech doctrine says we must allow these people to tell this lie; but the consequences of telling the lies is that people die as a result of it. Do the innocent people who die as a result of this repeated lie have rights too? The question is then: when do we reach the point that we can legitimately stop “Holocaust denial” or similar antisemitic fabrication in order to protect the Jews from the next progrom?

I think, therefore, that some limit on free speech is a legitimate policy. How to articulate that balance is for others to fathom. Steve Paulsson already pointed out that libelous acts can be persecuted today. He in fact says that a direct damage caused by lies has a legal remedy today. The issue raised here is how do you deal with the indirect damage? It seems to me that a complete free speech doctrine without some balance of protection for the people who are indirectly damaged by it is not a good policy.

Gilad J. Gevaryahu

A ROW has erupted over the decision by a Jewish magazine to publish the names of 2,000 members and financial supporters of Australia’s anti-immigration One Nation party.

[…]

But one of the Jewish community’s most senior rabbis, Brian Fox, gave the magazine his full support. Rabbi Fox, former president of the New South Wales Council of Christians and Jews, said that if Jewish people had published a list of Nazi sympathisers and supporters in 1933, the history of the world would have been entirely different. He said: “Millions of people, including one and a half million Jewish children, would never have died in Auschwitz.”

International News Electronic Telegraph, Friday 10 July 1998, Issue 1141.

Governments must outlaw Holocaust revisionism in order to fight a hi-tech, well-financed movement that denies the Holocaust ever occurred, a group of Jewish legal experts said yesterday.

[…]

“The denial movement has a historical institute which is reviewing history and whose real aim is to deny the Holocaust,” said Itzhak Nener, an Israeli who is deputy president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

“They have tremendous sums of money.”

[…]

During World War II, Nazi Germany rounded up about six million Jews and exterminated them at death camps.

[…]

Zionist Organization of America, 4 East 34 St., New York, NY 10016, USA; phone 212-481-1500, fax 212-481-1515; e-mail: [email protected]; website: http://www.zoa.org.

“… At one Thanksgiving,” Mr. Rosenbaum explains, “in 1982 — one of the last ones I had with my father before he had a stroke — he mentioned out of the blue that he had a cousin, a second cousin or something like that, who died in the Holocaust.” The off-hand remark came as a shock.

“My father had never mentioned him till [sic] then. I started wondering: Why did he mention it then?” The questions nagged. “At a certain point I started thinking about all of the victims of the Holocaust as part of my extended family.”

“Looking for Hitler: Rosenbaum’s Revenge,” Forward, June 26, 1998, Page 12

Final Thought: “The Holocaust Show”

Jerry Springer, Ringmaster!

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, pp. 247-8)

Several years ago, before my parents died, I went to visit them in New York. My dad was seventy-eight at the time and he had this big old Chevrolet that he kept in the garage at the apartment building they lived in in Queens. He didn’t drive it much anymore because frankly, it was too dangerous: his eyes weren’t too good, his reflexes had slowed considerably and being really short, he could barely see over the steering wheel anyway. And my mom was deathly afraid every time he took it out for a ride. In fact, she refused to go along with him and begged him to please sell the car.

But he stubbornly refused, so Mom asked me, “Gerald, will you go talk to your dad and convince him to get rid of the car?”

Well, I really wasn’t crazy about getting into the middle of it all, but Mom had a point. So I took Dad aside and said, “Pops, why don’t you sell the car?”

“I’ll tell you why,” he told me. “You know, I don’t drive it much anymore. In fact, I hardly drive it at all. I just want to know I have it here in case we’ve got to get away.”

In case we’ve got to get away.

Understand, he was a bright man. He’d been living here in America for almost forty years. Nazi Germany and storm troopers and the concentration camps and the loss of our family, it was almost a lifetime ago — or so I thought. And how wrong I was. It suddenly hit me: the scars of a Holocaust are forever. Apparently, Dad never had a night where he didn’t think it could all come back; he knew how fragile the character of civilization was.

But here’s the good news. The same species that gave us the slime of a Hitler and his Nazi cohorts also can give us the bravest and most decent humans who graced our show today. I hope our kids were watching. I want them to know that there is good in this world, that there are heroes and not all of them hit home runs — some just open up their basements.

“… The Review’s decision also disturbed 83-year-old George Preston, a Holocaust survivor who lost his family during World War II and was instrumental in getting the Holocaust Monument erected in Wilmington. He said he would be willing to talk to [University of Delaware] students about his experiences. He said it is “pathetic” that survivors have to defend and justify themselves because of historical revisionists.

“I was there. I saw millions of people go directly to the gas chambers and never come back,” Preston said. “I’m a witness. I have a number on my left arm to remind me.”

“Existence of Holocaust Questioned in Article, Ad”, Wilmington News Journal, Thursday, December 11, 1997, Page A 14