| masraum |
09-03-2018 02:41 PM |
Anyone spoken to or understand holocaust deniers?
I was reading this article, Mel Mermelstein Survived Auschwitz, Then Sued Holocaust Deniers in Court. It's not the first time that I've heard of or read about folks that say the holocaust never happened, but it's still amazing every time I hear it.
Has anyone ever met someone that believes this or spoken to someone or have any insight as to why someone could think this? I can almost (if I squint really hard) understand the folks that think we didn't go to the moon. I'm not that surprised by the flat earthers (there are enough crazy folks for that to not be surprising), but the holocaust seems like one of those things that should be impossible to refute.
Not the whole article
Quote:
In October 1981, Judge Thomas Johnson made an announcement. After deliberation, he had accepted a fact into judicial notice—a legal term for a fact accepted in a court as true without the need to produce evidence. The Holocaust, said Johnson, was an indisputable fact.
The pronouncement seems slightly ludicrous given the weight of evidence that has emerged since the extent of Hitler’s “Final Solution” was revealed at the end of World War II. But for the plaintiff in the case, Mel Mermelstein, it was nothing less than a triumph—a critical moment in a decades-long struggle to tell the world that what he experienced in the Holocaust happened.
In 1944, Mermelstein, then 17 years old, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was not alone: Despite the attempts of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy to prevent it, the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to camps kicked off within weeks of Germany’s occupation of the country in spring of that year.
Mermelstein was the only one in his family to survive the Holocaust. He recounted his experiences in the 1979 memoir By Bread Alone. Not long after the book’s publication, Mel would live to tell his story again—this time, in Johnson’s court, as he and lawyer William John Cox took on a group of Holocaust deniers who dared Mermelstein to prove the Holocaust happened at all.
“I would not let them get away with it,” Mermelstein, 91, said via e-mail.
Mermelstein’s long journey to becoming a public witness to Nazi inhumanity began in January 1945. He was one of the 60,000 Jews set forth on the infamous death marches. Over three weeks, Mermelstein and 3,200 other prisoners walked roughly 155 miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the savage Polish winter. It’s estimated a mere ten percent survived. To keep going, Mermelstein took a pair of shoes off a warm corpse, a recent shooting victim on the wayside whose body hadn’t frozen yet.
From Gross-Rosen, Mermelstein was packed onto a train for three days and nights—without food or water—and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He arrived in February, stricken with typhus and weighing 68 pounds. He was shunted to the predominantly Jewish “Little Camp” section, a series of barns built for 450 that were filled with more than 10,000 sick, dying, emaciated prisoners. The hunger he experienced there, he said, was “vicious torture …by bread and bread alone.”
After two months, on April 11, Buchenwald was liberated by U.S. forces. The next day, Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton toured Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the larger concentration camp and found 3,200 naked bodies in shallow graves, some showing evidence of cannibalism. Three days later, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall asking for members of Congress and journalists to visit the liberated camps to report the atrocities to the American people.
“I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda’” Eisenhower wrote in his 1948 memoir Crusade in Europe, presaging the Holocaust denial Mermelstein would fight head-on more than three decades later.
After a few weeks of recuperation, Mermelstein returned to Munkacs, but the 18-year-old quickly realized all of his immediate family was gone. His household obliterated, Mermelstein decided to leave Europe. About the only thing he kept was a box of family photos, which had been safeguarded by a friend. During his travels, Mermelstein would say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every chance he got.
Mel knew he had an Uncle Adolf and an Aunt Florence in the United States. He didn’t know them well, but it was enough to begin anew. On August 31, 1946, he arrived in New York harbor aboard the SS Marine Perch.
“Dad didn’t speak English, but he had a great ability for languages and picked it up quickly,” says Edie Mermelstein, Mel’s daughter. “He was also fluent in Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, so he was able to get a job at the United Nations.”
Mel worked for a number of years in New York City. Along the way, he fell in love and married Jane Nance. The couple didn’t want to raise a family in Manhattan, so they headed out west and settled in Long Beach, California. In 1965, Mel started a manufacturing company that makes wooden pallets, and is still in operation today.
Owning a successful family business gave Mermelstein the resources to travel overseas and begin building his personal collection of Holocaust-related artifacts. At first, he didn’t speak publicly about his concerns that the world would forget the slaughter of the Jews. In 1967, the Six-Day War stirred him to action. “I saw [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser shaking his fists and saying he was going to drive the Jews into the sea,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “It reminded me of Hitler.”
From then on, the Holocaust was omnipresent in the Mermelstein household.
“I grew up with the Holocaust. As a child, my father took me to a screening of Night and Fog at the public library he was hosting,” says Edie, 54. “No second-grader should see a movie filled with actual Nazi footage, but Dad was never afraid to talk about it. Confronting the Holocaust became his mission.”
At the height of the Cold War, Mermelstein repeatedly returned to the extermination camps —more than 40 times. He always brought back objects to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, the Huntington Beach-based nonprofit he started in 1975. Mermelstein was an Indiana Jones-type, crossing the Atlantic to visit the camps and (with the blessing of the employees overseeing the grounds) take home various artifacts including light posts, barbed wire, Zyklon B canisters, human teeth and bone fragments, and bricks caked with ash. Mermelstein even found personal evidence: a photograph of himself in the barracks with a group of starving men and pieces of the oven where his mother and sister were cremated.
Mermelstein built a private 1,000-square-foot museum in the back of his lumber plant and started speaking to schools, synagogues, and community groups. As this was years before the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded, the film Shoah was released, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was opened, his mission was a solitary, under-the-national-radar one. It was his 1979 memoir, By Bread Alone, that made him the target of rabid hatemongers.
<for the rest click the link at the top>
|
|
