Another Holocaust Witness

Real History and Fanciful Stories about the Holocaust The Posted Sunday, April 20, 2008 Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) origins of anti-semitism [Images added by this website] London, Thursday, April 17, 2008 Survivor’s horrific tale will be used to ‘rubbish deniers’ By Rachel Fletcher THE STORY a Birkenau survivor who also lived through the 1945 sinking of the Cap Arcona ship is being meticulously researched in order to refute the claims

of Holocaust-deniers. David Irving comments: Mr PIVNIK really does have rotten luck. First Auschwitz , and having to lick the boots of Josef Mengele ( below ), no less; then cruising in the Cap Arcona ; and finally having Andrew Lownie as his literary agent. If we did not know better, we would say that Pivnik is one of those characters one comes across, like Albert Speer , who want to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

Lownie was for a time my own London literary agent; he proved to be even more useless than the insipid, pink-shirted pansy Michael Sissons , whose flabby hand I today still remember pressing, forty-five years after I walked into his office at A D Peters in the Strand. Eeeugh .

As for the incomparable Lownie: he signed the deal I struck with editor Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times , under which that worthy would pay me £75,000 for the excerpts of the Goebbels Diaries which I brought back from the KGB archives in Moscow in 1992. After publishing the excerpts, The Sunday Times welched on the final two payments, over fifty thousand; they never paid me. Not the first time they had acted so, it turned out.

But this time it was because they had come under severe pressure from those nice folks next door, who told them not to part with one more penny to that dreadful Mr Irving (or there’d be no more advertising revenue, see?). Wringing his hands, Andrew Lownie minced around his office, and decided there was nothing he could, or would, do about this Breach of Contract. He left it to me to take Neil’s newspaper to the High Court. Which I did. (But Lownie still pocketed his fifteen percent).

As for this unfortunate Anselmus-character Mr Pivnik, he reminds me of a reader’s letter I read decades ago in The Daily Telegraph – which had obviously verified the writer’s credentials: he had survived the sinking of Titanic in 1912, then the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 — the only recorded occasion in history when the British got to the beaches before the Germans — and he had been one of the first British soldiers to hit the sands of Normandy on D-day in 1944.

We await Mr Pivnik’s new book with interest, and hope he does not turn out to have Slept with the Wolves, or to be a close relative of Mr B. Wilkomirski and other ASSHOLS – fellows of the Association of Spurious Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars. Polish-born Sam Pivnik , 81, spent four months in Birkenau before being sent to a coal-mining camp in Poland. He was one of just 350 survivors of the Cap Arcona ship, which sank in 1945 after being mistakenly fired upon by the RAF.

Thousands of concentration-camp prisoners who were aboard died. [ Website comment: They will be saying that Dresden was mistakenly bombed next ]. Both his parents and all but one of his six siblings were killed in the Holocaust. Mr Pivnik’s story has been researched by writer and former army officer Adrian Weale , and is supported by literary agent Andrew Lownie and Aish.

Mr Weale, who has spent the last five years working on books about the SS and Holocaust survivors, said: “In the process of doing background research, I read a lot of Holocaust memoirs. Many are quite contrived and often not true . [ Website comment: In Germany and Austria they imprison writers for saying that. ] We are trying to set down an unimpeachable record that can’t be rubbished by deniers. “People like David Irving will pick apart inaccurate books to say it never happened.

It is damaging to history and sows confusion in the minds of the younger generation. “I have been going