July 28, 2007
Elie Wiesel may profess modesty and claim he is "not a symbol of anything" but, unfortunately, he has become a symbol of hypocrisy.
extract from Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, by Bradley R. Smith:
My Favorite Elie Wiesel Stories
.. She explained that she had taken classes in Holocaust studies at Harvard and felt she had a good background on the subject. I wasn’t talking to someone who was in the dark about what the Holocaust had been. I wanted to know what texts were followed in her classes but somehow she was unable to name them. She did recall the name of Raul Hilberg, and I was able to give her the title of his book, The Destruction of the European Jews.
"But the writer who influenced me most is Elie Wiesel."
"Is that right?" I said. "We have something in common then. I don’t know who has influenced me more in the way I regard Holocaust literature than Elie Wiesel."
"Is that right?" she said enthusiastically, turning in her seat toward me.
"He’s not a historian though, is he?"
She considered the question thoughtfully, "Not in a strict sense."
I told her some of my favourite Elie Wiesel stories. I started with the one where he writes that there is evidence that when some Russians were executed at Babi Yar in Ukraine that the cadavers of those who were Jews, in a unique protest against their ill treatment, spurted geysers of blood from their graves for months after they were buried.
"He wrote that in Jews of Silence," I said, "In a straight book of journalism about Soviet Jews and the refusal of the State to allow them to emigrate. Its not a book of poetry, straight journalism. What do you think about a man who would repeat such a claim? Wiesel writes in long hand in French. His wife translates his stuff into English. Presumably Wiesel goes over the translation. The translation is typeset and presumably Wiesel goes over the galleys. When he claims that the Jewish cadavers spurt geysers of blood from their graves for months after they were buried it isn’t a slip of the pen. Wiesel believes that it’s a credible story. He wants you and me to believe it’s credible. He wants the kids he teaches at Boston University to believe it’s credible. It isn’t only that Wiesel is not a historian. There may be other things as well that he is not. He may not be wrapped too tight, for example."
The girl didn’t say anything.
I told her some more of Elie Wiesel stories. I took them largely from his recommended reading list of survivor eyewitness testimonies. I told them as amusingly as I could, and as gently as I could. As I went along I introduced a few observations about the gas chamber stories from a Revisionist perspective. Occasionally she would smile or ask a question, but as I talked on she grew increasingly silent. After three or four hundred miles I had the feeling I had said enough, but I couldn’t stop myself. The longer I talked the more investment I had in wanting her to see what good sense I was making.
I told her about how Wiesel especially recommends the eyewitness testimony of Yankiel Wiernik as evidence for the gas chambers at Treblinka and the extermination there of about a million Jews. I told her how Wiernik claims that he saw with his own eyes how the cadavers of pregnant Jewish women that had been exterminated would burst open while they were being cremated…their bellies would burst open…and that inside their wombs you could see their fetuses burning like torches.
I said, "Here is the question I think Elie Wiesel’s students should pose to him: As the Americans and the British each specialized in burning alive German and Japanese women by the ten thousands in mass terror bombings, and as there are no reports that pregnant German or Japanese women were able to mount such displays with their own wombs and fetuses while their own bodies were in flames, as Yankiel Wiernik – is Elie Wiesel – suggesting that only Jewish ladies have the talent for it? What is it that Wiesel is attempting to suggest when he recommends Wiernik’s eyewitness testimony to his students at Boston University? What does he reveal about his standards for historical objectivity? What does he reveal about his inner life?"
At that moment the girl took her head in both hands, put her face on her knees and moaned: "I just feel like I’m being proselytized," she said. She shook her head slowly from side to side, still holding it in both hands, doubled over in her seat.
Confessions of a
Holocaust Revisionist is available from
Amazon
Zionist chutzpah and historiography: Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica
Wiesel has been a prominent spokesman for the very sizeable group of people known as Holocaust survivors. [According to Norman Finkelstein of the City University of New York in his book The Holocaust Industry published in 2000, ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million’ (p.83)]. Wiesel has chaired the US Holocaust Memorial Council and has been the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and Nobel Peace Prize (sic).
Time Magazine, March 18 1985:
‘How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields [Auschwitz and Buchenwald] of the century? "I will never know" he says. "I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?"
Compare this with Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993), under ‘Buchenwald’:
"In World War II it held about 20,000 prisoners.. Although there were no gas chambers, hundreds perished monthly through disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings and executions."
[
Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs | January/February
1999 ]
"A Terrible Fraud": Wiesel Ignores Palestinians
To the Jerusalem Post, Oct. 9, 1998 (as submitted by Prof. Daniel McGowan, Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY)
In your Oct. 9 article on Elie Wiesel, the American icon of Holocaust survivors, he is paid a special tribute as a "speaker of truth." This is the same Elie Wiesel who is continually referred to by Noam Chomsky and others as "a terrible fraud." What can explain such disparity of opinion?
Perhaps it is because Wiesel, who has written literally volumes Against Silence, remains silent when it comes to such issues involving Palestinians as land expropriation, torture and abrogation of basic human rights.
Perhaps it is because Elie Wiesel proclaims with great piety that "the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference," while he remains totally indifferent to the inequality and suffering of the Palestinians. Perhaps it is because he enjoys recognition as "one of the first opponents of apartheid" in South Africa, while he remains totally silent and indifferent to the apartheid being practiced today in Israel.
Perhaps it is because he decries terrorism, yet never apologizes for the terrorism perpetrated by the Irgun at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. He refuses even to comment on it. He dismisses this act of terrorism in eight short words in his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea. He remembers the Jewish victims at Kielce, Poland (July 1946) with great anguish, but ignores twice as many Palestinian victims of his own employer at Deir Yassin. The irony is breathtaking.
It is even more shocking that the world's best known Holocaust survivor can repeatedly visit Yad Vashem and yet keep silent about the victims of Deir Yassin who lie within his sight 1,400 meters to the north. He bitterly protests when Jewish graves are defaced, but has nothing to say when the cemetery of Deir Yassin is bulldozed. He refuses even to acknowledge repeated requests that he join a group of Jews and non-Jews who wish to build a memorial at Deir Yassin.
Elie Wiesel may profess modesty and claim he is "not a symbol of anything" but, unfortunately, he has become a symbol of hypocrisy.
Daniel A. McGowan,
Director, Deir
Yassin Remembered,
Geneva, NY
It's Official - No Actual Shortage Of Holocaust Survivors
(Extracts from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York (published by Verso publishers, London and New York, 2000)):
On page 83 Finkelstein notes that 'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.'
On page 127 he further notes 'If 135,000 former Jewish slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That's at least a half-million more than standard estimates.. If Jews only constituted 20% of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies, 600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By the Holocaust industry's reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn't have been that harsh at all; in fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate.. If, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews survived, the Final Solution couldn't have been so efficient after all exactly what Holocaust deniers argue. (pp127-8). '
'Both my father and my mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps.. One of my father's lifelong friends was a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment, my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and profit. As the rendering of the Holocaust assumed ever more absurd forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry Ford: "History is bunk." (ibid. p7).
'The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel' (ibid p30).
'Much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.' (p 55).
'Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics'. (p 68).
'Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor commemorations, often in state legislative chambers.. Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust museum in Washington.. (This) museum's annual budget is $50 million, of which $30 million is federally subsidized.' (p72). (This is in spite of the fact that, as he points out on page 32, per capita Jewish income in the US is almost double that of non-Jews). 'With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the (US Holocaust Museum) project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the president's recognition of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinians.' (p 73).
To conclude:
'The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the "greatest robbery in the history of mankind".. The Holocaust industry has clearly gone berserk.'(p 138-9).
'Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim' state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified. " (p3).
A Tricky Little Problem - The Missing "Holocaust"
"I've checked out Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and
De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."
- Richard Lynn,
Professor Emeritus, University of Ulster, December 5,
2005
Ground-Imaging Forensic Radar Exam Of WWII Treblinka Camp
Institute for Historical Review, 5-15-2
A detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground radar, has found no evidence of mass graves there.
For six days in October 1999, an Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination of the soil at the site of the former Treblinka II camp in Poland, where, Holocaust historians say, more than half a million Jews were put to death in gas chambers and then buried in mass graves.
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997), for example, "a total of 870,000 people" were killed and buried at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. Then, between April and July 1943, the hundreds of thousands of corpses were allegedly dug up and burned in batches of 2,000 or 2,500 on large grids made of railway ties.
Krege's team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) In its Treblinka investigation, Krege's team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples.
The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka II site, especially the alleged "mass graves" portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.
"From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site," says the 30-year old Krege, who lives in Canberra. "We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether." Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted.
While his initial investigation suggests that there were never any mass graves at the Treblinka camp site, Krege believes that further work is still called for.
"Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated toward the end of the Treblinka camp's use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed," he says. "Personally, I don't think there was a mass extermination camp there at all."
Krege prepared a detailed report on his Treblinka investigation. He says that he would welcome the formation, possibly under United Nations auspices, of an international team of neutral, qualified specialists, to carry out similar investigations at the sites of all the wartime German camps.
Krege and his team are associated with, and funded by, the Adelaide Institute, a south Australia revisionist "think tank." Its director, Dr. Fredrick Töben, was jailed in Germany for seven months in 1999 for disputing Holocaust extermination claims.
(Sources: "'Vernichtungslager' Treblinka: archaelogisch betrachtet," by Ing. Richard Krege, in Vierteljarhreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, June 2000 [4. Jg., Heft 1], pp. 62-64;
"'No Jewish mass grave' in Poland," The Canberra Times, Jan. 24, 2000, p. 6;
"Poland's Jews 'not buried at Treblinka'," The Examiner [Australia], Jan. 24, 2000. [The latter two newspaper items are reprinted in facsimile in VHO-info, May 2000, p. 30.];
Information provided by Richard Krege; M. Weber and A. Allen, "Treblinka," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1992, pp. 133-158;
"German Court Sentences
Australian Holocaust Skeptic," The Journal of Historical
Review, July-August 1999, pp. 2-5; Y. Arad, "Treblinka," in
I. Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust [New York:
1997], pp. 1481-1488.)
Abraham Bomba, Barber of Treblinka, by Bradley R. Smith
Chapter 11 from Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist
I HAVE NOW SEEN the complete nine and one half hour documentary Shoah, which purports to be "An Oral History of the Holocaust." It was produced, directed, narrated and is now being promoted by Claude Lanzmann. From the newspapers I gather that Lanzmann is an assimilated French Jew who speaks neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. He is presently 60 years old. He worked as a journalist for many years in association with Jean Paul Sartre and Les Temps Modernes until 1970, when he turned his attention to making movies.
That is, Claude Lanzmann worked for twenty-five years in the eye of the intellectual storms that swept across France following the end of World War II. As a journalist he certainly learned during those twenty-five years how to conduct professional interviews. He certainly learned, through his associations with Sartre, de Beauvior, Camus and those who criticized the great triad, how to pursue a train of thought, considering the high-powered company he kept. It's a real eye-opener then to watch Lanzmann reveal his intellectual corruption in scene after scene of this shoddy movie, which he claims took ten years to complete.
My favorite interview in Shoah is the one with Abraham Bomba, the Barber of Treblinka. I'm not alone in my fondness for Bomba either. Many critics have commented on his performance. They gave him rave reviews. George Will of ABC Television, for example, wrote in the Washington Post that Bomba's narrative was "the most stunning episode in this shattering film."
Some eyewitnesses to alleged gas chamber horrors recount stories that are so lacking in credibility that they can be dismissed out of hand. Others repeat stories that cannot easily be shown to be false but reveal the characters of the tale-bearers to be so sniveling and shameless that one feels compromised by even listening to them. Bomba is becoming an important character in the Holocaust-survivor-eyewitness scenario in that he embodies much of both of these characteristics.
The way Bomba tells the story, he had been interned in Treblinka about four weeks when the Germans announced that they wanted some barbers for a special detail. Bomba volunteered, of course, then helped the SS identify 16 other Jewish barbers among the internees. They were all taken to the second part of the camp where the 'gas chamber' was. They were led inside the gas chambers where a Kapo (almost certainly a Jew; note 1) explained that the 17 barbers were to shear the hair from the woman who would arrive to be gassed. Lanzmann asked Bomba about the greatest murder weapon of all time, the German homicidal poison gas chamber.
Lanzmann: How did it look, the gas chamber?Bomba: It was not a big room, around twelve feet by twelve feet. (note 2)
And there you have it. Claude Lanzmann is finished with his in-depth investigation of how the Treblinka gas chamber looked. It takes all kinds. If I had been in Lanzmann's shoes I could have thought of a few more questions to ask about "how it looked". Particularly if I had some feelings about the stories that maybe a million of my kinsmen had been exterminated in it. Maybe I would have wanted to know what Bomba could tell me about what material the walls of the gas chamber were made of -- what the roof was made of. How would Bomba describe the ventilation system? Where and how, exactly, did the "gas" enter the room? Maybe Bomba would have remembered if the room had been illuminated or not. If it had been, how? What were the doors made of? How did they seal so that the "gas" could not escape? As historians have not bothered to ask these simple questions, Lanzmann could have done their work for them and helped uncover one of the great mysteries of the 20th century -- how the fabled Nazi gas chambers really looked.
As to whether Bomba is being honest about having seen a gas chamber at Treblinka consider Rachel Auerbach's description of that gas chamber in her The Death Camp Treblinka (note 3). Auerbach is given a place of honor in this, the most comprehensive book published on the camp. As she was (she died in 1976) a permanent research staff member of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem, her description of the gas chamber should not be dismissed out of hand.
... The floor of the gas chamber was sloping and slippery. The first ones in would slip and fall, never to rise again. Those who followed would topple over them ... About 25 to 45 minutes later -- [after the "gassing" began, that is] -- the chutes on the other side could be opened and the corpses tumbled out."
It would seem that while he was being interviewed for Shoah Mr. Bomba forgot about how slippery the floor is supposed to have been in his little gas chamber. It seems he forgot how it slanted steeply in the direction of the chutes. As a matter of fact, Mr. Bomba forgot to mention the chutes. If Lanzmann had read the literature even superficially he would have been aware that Bomba was leaving a few things out of his story. As Lanzmann claims he worked for ten years on Shoah, I'm going to guess that Lanzmann is aware of Auerbach's description of the Treblinka gas chamber and chooses to ignore it.
In any event, once Lanzmann's curiosity was satisfied about how the gas chamber looked (not big), he wanted to know what happened next.
Lanzmann: Can you describe precisely?Bomba: Describe precisely ... We were waiting there ... inside the gas chamber ... until the transport came in. Women with children pushed into that place ... They were undressed, naked, without clothes, without anything else -- completely naked -- because they come from the undressing barrack ... where they had undressed themselves.
Lanzmann: What did you feel the first time you saw all those naked women?
Bomba: I felt that accordingly I got to do what they ... [Germans] ... told me, to cut their hair ...
There you have in a nutshell how eye witnesses to the gas chamber atrocities typically describe their behavior. They did whatever the Germans or anyone else requested of them. When they received a request to help prepare their kinsmen -- and even their own families as well as we shall soon see -- to be exterminated, or genocided or whatever, these fellows say they hopped right to it. I don't believe them, but that's the persona that they have chosen to project to the world at large. In the neighborhood where I grew up men who behaved like Bomba claims he behaved would have been spit on. In the upside-down world of Holocaust survivordom, however , the Abraham Bombas are seen as martyrs and even heroes. It's a peculiar psychological slant on manly behavior.
Lanzmann expresses a little more curiosity about how Bomba cut his ( for hasn't Bomba according to his own story become a working partner in the alleged genocide of his people?) victims hair than he did about how the gas chamber looked. He asked if Bomba had shaved them, if he had used scissors, and if there had not been mirrors available inside the gas chamber. Bomba said that he did not shave the women, and that the Germans had not provided the barbers with mirrors.
Lanzmann: "There were no mirrors?"Bomba: "No, there were no mirrors. There were just benches -- not chairs, just benches ...
There's an interesting note. According to Bomba the Germans had provided benches inside the little gas chamber for the ladies and their children to sit on. We're not told how many benches. There could have been 17 individual ones, but more likely Bomba would have said -- if Lanzmann had thought to ask him -- that there were maybe four or five, half a dozen perhaps. Two or more ladies with their kids could have sat on each bench. No matter how you slice it, traffic is picking up. Seventeen barbers, the benches for 17, and now the 17 women and their kids are all there together inside the gas chamber, which is about the size of a small bedroom in the rear of an ordinary tract house -- and the hair is flying. But we're not finished yet:
Lanzmann: "You said there were about sixteen ... [Lanzmann has forgotten that Bomba makes the seventeenth] ... barbers? You cut the hair of how many women in a one batch?"
Bomba: "In one day there was about, I would say, going into that place between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time."
You might think that Claude Lanzmann is about to express some doubt about how Bomba is blocking out this scene for him. Sixty to seventy naked women in the 12-square-foot room. Lanzmann isn't going to express doubt, however, about anything told to him by a survivor. Lanzmann is a Holocaust fundamentalist. The role of the fundamentalist in any cult is to accept absolutely the testimony of those who claim to have been eyewitnesses to the original sacred event. Once the original story is made to fly, the most elegant minds can elaborate on it endlessly in good faith.
Two thousand years ago there were Jews who believed utterly that the son of their God had been nailed to a pole and executed and that he rose from his tomb to sail off the planet into the heavens. That tale was a runaway hit. Now we have Jews everywhere committed to the proposition that millions of them were exterminated in itty-bitty gas chambers, were cremated, and rose up toward the heavens in smoke. This one has all the signs of becoming a real blockbuster too. We Gentiles used to be made of sterner stuff. It took the Jesus story more than three hundred years to be accepted as Truth by the State. In our own time the State bought the Holocaust story at the first screening.
What was the rush, one wonders?
Lanzmann urged Bomba to say something more about how he felt as he went about preparing the women and their children to be exterminated. Something more perhaps than the homely: "I felt that accordingly I got to do what they told me, to cut their hair ..."
Bomba: "I tell you something. To have a feeling about that ... It was very hard to feel anything ... your feelings disappeared, you were dead. You had no feeling at all.
This is a universal response by eyewitnesses to the alleged gas chamber murders. The claim Bomba makes that his feelings were "dead," that he had "no feeling at all," resembles the "temporary insanity" claim murderers use to diminish their responsibility for their behavior in the eye of the State. The ordinary murderer claims that his mental process was so diminished at the time he murdered that he was not responsible for his act. The eyewitness to the alleged gas chamber murders claims that his sensibilities were so diminished while he worked as a link in the murder process that he was not responsible for his behavior. The murderer was out of his "mind," while gas-chamber eyewitnesses ran out of "feeling." When Bomba describes himself as being inwardly "dead' he is saying that he cannot be judged guilty of being an accomplice to mass murder. He can accuse Germans of whatever he likes -- participate in the crimes he accuses them of -- yet remain forever innocent while Germans remain forever guilty. It's a nice set-up.
In the film Bomba goes on to illustrate how dead he was inwardly while working for the SS at reblinka. He describes how he shared the hair from women he knew personally from his home town, from his own street: ". . . and some of them were my close friends." They would ask Abe: "What's going to happen to us?" But Abe would hold his tongue. With Abe it was just snip, snip, snip. "What could you tell them?," he asks Lanzmann. "What could you tell?"
Snip, snip, snip.
Now Bomba relates to Lanzmann the story that reviewers have remarked on more than any other in Shoah. (note 4)
Bomba: A friend of mine worked as a barber -- he was good barber in my hometown -- when his wife and his sister came into the gas chamber ... I can't. It's too horrible. Please.Lanzmann: "We have to do it. You know it."
Bomba: (holding back tears) "I won't be able to do it."
Lanzmann: (very quietly) "You have to do it. I know it's very hard. I know and I apologize."
Bomba : (struggling) "Don't make me go on, please."
Lanzmann: "Please. We must go on."
Bomba: (unable to control tears, leaving the frame for a moment, returning) "I told you it's going to be very hard. They were taking that ... [hair] ... in bags and transporting it to Germany."
Lanzmann: "Okay, go ahead. What was his answer when his wife and sister came?"
Bomba: "They tried to talk to him and the husband of his sister. They could not tell him this was the last time they stay alive, because behind them was the German Nazis, SS, and they knew that if they said a word, not only the wife and the woman, who were dead already, but also they would share the same thing with them. In a way, they tried to do the best for them, with a second longer, a minute longer, just to hug them and kiss them, because they knew they would never see them again."
To tell the truth, this is my kind of story, simple and lurid. There is also some new information in it. In addition to the 60 to 70 women and their kids, and the barbers and the benches, there were also "SS men" inside the 12-foot by 12-foot gas chamber. We don't know how many, but as Bomba speaks in the plural he must mean that there were at least two. If Lanzmann had thought to ask him about it, Bomba might have said that there were 10 or 15 SS men in there. And then there is the welcome news that the SS would allow the Barbers to hug and kiss certain of the naked women inside the gas chamber. Bomba speaks only of married couples. Lanzmann might have asked perhaps how the SS were able to identify which of the naked women were married to which of the barbers. It must be doubtful that the naked women entered the gas chamber carrying their marriage certificates. Maybe the barbers had previously petitioned the SS to keep their own copies of their marriage certificates on the chance that just such a reunion as Bomba claims he witnessed would take place. On the other hand, maybe the SS men took the barber's word for who was married and who wasn't. If they did, it would betray a generosity of spirit that is not usually ascribed to the SS by Jewish survivors.
Imagine trying to visualize this scene from the wife's point of view. Try imagining what might have gone through her mind at the moment she spied her husband. The hope that must have jumped in her heart. Then what her thoughts were as her husband sheared off her heir without speaking to her. Imagine what she must have felt as he held her silently for a minute or so, his cheek pressed lovingly against her scalp, then turned with scissors and comb to the next patient lady waiting her turn. Did his wife run her fingers over her skull and think:
"Ah, I've always known what kind of man you are. A schmuck when I married you and a schmuck today."
There are a number of observations that can be made about my presentation of Lanzmann's presentation of Bomba's testimony. It could be observed that while Rachel Auerbach's research suggests that Bomba is inventing his gas chamber story out of whole cloth, it can still be claimed that we are left with Auerbach's scholarly outline of the alleged reblinka gas chambers. Therefore, while Bomba's investigations may destroy his own credibility as a witness, the Treblinka gas chamber story itself remains as it was, an extensively documented story of a weapon used to annihilate about a million Jews. To give you a quick fix on Ms. Auerbach's scholarly instincts and her even-handed objectivity, I will quote from her famous essay "In the Fields of Treblinka."
As I read such passages in Rachel Auerbach's essay I take the trouble to remind myself that after the war was she was "one of the first active members of the Jewish Historical Committee in Poland;" that after emigrating to Israel she became a "permanent research staff member of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum," and that this In-the-Fields-of-Treblinka essay was thought worthy of reprinting as recently as 1979 by The Holocaust Library, which was found and is managed by survivors themselves and is distributed by a major Jewish publishing house, Shocken Books.
Polish people still talk about the way soap was manufactured from the bodies of Jews. 'Sent away for soap!' was the expression the Poles would use when they spoke of transports to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The discovery of Professor Spanner's soap factory in Langfuhr near Danzig proved that their suspicious had been well founded. Witnesses tell us that when the corpses were burned on pyres, pans would be placed beneath the racks to catch the fat as it ran off, but this has not been confirmed. But even if the Germans in Treblinka or at any of the other death factories failed to do this, and allowed so many tons of precious fat to go to waste, it could only have been an oversight on their part. They were fully capable of doing things like that. It was entirely in keeping with their proclivities. Only the newness of this branch of manufacturing was to blame for this omission. If the Germans ever would make another drive across Europe, they would not make this mistake again.
Professors Spanner's "soap factory" in Langfuhr near Danzing was apparently an invention of active members of self-proclaimed Jewish historical committees, based upon the entrepreneurial reports of professional slanderers, and has since been kept alive by research staffs at Jewish Holocaust memorials around the world. A photograph of this "factory," with no documentation, appears in the scholarly Encyclopedia Judaica, published in Israel and shelved in many of the larger libraries across the United states.
Polish Jews such as Rachel Auerbach witnessed Germans destroying their culture. They witnessed Germans tearing apart Jewish families during the titanic, brutal resettlement programs. Those Jews can be forgiven their credulity and even some of their hatred, expressed in their eagerness to believe every accusation made against Germans, no matter how corrupt. Americans, however, who suffered nothing of what European Jews suffered at the hands of Germans, have little right to indulge themselves with it. Which brings me to Mr. George Will, Washington Post columnist and ABC Television commentator.
I am willing to accept Mr. Will's own assessment of himself. He is a brilliant and principled man. I disagree with some of his viewpoints, particularly with his obsessive-compulsive attachment to the state of Israel, but I can't show that attachment to be morally wrong. As luck would have it, Mr. Will has written a column about Shoah where he makes a remarkable observation.
The most stunning episode in this shattering film lasts about five minutes and involves 'only' the talk of a barber now in Israel. While he clips the hair of a customer he talks, never needing to raise his voice to be heard over the small sounds of a familiar ambiance. He describes his duties in Treblinka, cutting hair from naked women on the threshold of the gas chamber, and the day a fellow barber saw his wife and sister enter the room. (note 5)
Remarkable, eh? Cutting hair from naked women on the "threshold" of the gas chamber. Do you see it? The threshold is the place directly below the door to a room. A door sill perhaps. An entrance or a doorway. According to Mr. Webster it is a "place or point of beginning." Taking Mr. Will's own obvious assessment of himself, he is the proud possessor of a formidably organized intellect. A man who always distinguishes carefully between similar but different points of fact. While doing so enrages those lesser men who cannot do it themselves, it gives Mr. Will a lot of pleasure, which is why he does it so regularly. That being so, what am I to make of the fact that Mr. Will has changed the wording of Mr. Bomba's testimony?
Lanzmann: "Excuse me. How did it happen when the women came into the gas chamber? Were you yourself already in the gas chamber?"Bomba: "I said we were already in the gas chamber, waiting over there for the transport to come in. Inside the gas chamber -- we were already in."
If Mr. Bomba swears that he was inside the gas chamber at that particular time, why does Mr. Will write that he barbed those naked women on the "threshold" of the gas chamber? Mr. Bomba can be seen on film saying that he was inside the gas chamber when he did it. In the text of the film published by Mr. Lanzmann, Mr. Bomba again insists he was inside the thing. What happened in Mr. Will's brain as he wrote "threshold" rather than "inside" or "in?" Is it possible that Mr. Will found Mr. Bomba's story ludicrous? He wouldn't want to say so publicly of course as Mr. Will is one of our brightest and best Holocaust fundamentalists. Nevertheless, having the kind of relentlessly rational mind that he does, something at the bottom of it might not have bought Mr. Bomba's story the way Mr. Will would have preferred to buy it. Maybe a single wire got crossed in the depths of Mr. Will's brain, out of the millions that are twisted around in there. Maybe Mr. Will wanted to express some doubt about Mr. Bomba's story but could not bring himself to do it. He may have been in that peculiar place where writers sometimes find themselves -- smart enough to know that something needs to be said but without enough character to go ahead and say it. When this happens it causes a psychological malfunction known as writer's block. Mr. Will isn't the sort to be bothered with writer's block, he has the habit of full production, but if he wasn't going to spill the beans he had to turn somewhere. It looks like he turned to invention. I suppose in the moment it was easy enough for a man wired the way Mr. Will is wired to invent a threshold image and use it to replace the one Mr. Bomba invented. You can judge how much more intelligent Mr. Will is than Mr. Bomba when you compare the rationality of their two opposing visualizations.
Now that Mr. Will had Mr. Bomba on the threshold of the gas chamber rather than inside it, Mr. Will could go on indulging his fantasy about Mr. Lanzmann's Shoah. As the threshold to an exterior door not only leads inside, but turning about leads to the great outdoors and indeed to the survivors who claim to have actually seen a homicidal poison gas chamber. In this scenario, as the eyewitness testimony is not allowed to be challenged, the genocide theory can not be challenged either, and if that is so then European Jews had every right to conquer Palestine and the U.S. Government is morally obligated to protect forever the Israeli State. That is the line that has been spoon-fed to American so successfully for 40 years now. Mr. Will's threshold caper is a small example of how our intellectual elites accept the use of invention on the one hand and the suppression of good sense on the other to bolster a world view that is based, incredibly, on a handful of stories told by a handful of Abraham Bombas.
I believe the worldwide Jewish community is being betrayed by the coupling of such men as Abraham Bomba and George Will. Jews are being betrayed by their own spokesmen, and they are being betrayed by gentiles who profess to be friends and allies of the Jewish community but who in reality are merely supporters of a Zionist leadership, entrapped by the rhetoric of the Holocaust Lobby, too ashamed to reveal the immense fraud and falsehood on which so much of its influence has been built.
Notes
Kapo: German for "trustee".
Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, by Claude Lanzmann. Pantheon Books. New York, 1985. Unless otherwise noted, all the passages quoted in this article are from the Pantheon Books edition, pages 111-117.
The Death Camp Treblinka, Ed. by Alexander Donat, Holocaust Library (New York, 1979). See Rachael Auerbach's contribution, In The Fields of Treblinka.
The parenthetical descriptions of Bomba's reactions here are not in the published text. I have added them from memory. While I watched the film I could not help but be touched by Bomba's sincere distress. His tears brought tears to my own eyes. At the same time I was aware of what a laugh I thought his story is. A nice irony for the psychotherapists.
The Washington Post (Nov
15, 1985)
These items were contributed by Jason
Collett