Real History and Fanciful Stories about the Holocaust

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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 back to the original sources to confirm parts of the story, for example for the names of some of the SS personnel involved. I have been to the National Archives in Washington and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.”

Mr Weale’s research even uncovered a photograph of Mr Pivnik’s grandmother, taken as part of an initial Nazi plan to evacuate Jews to Madagascar.

Research assistant Philip Appleby said: “There are three or four Holocaust memoirs where you can say people survived by a sheer miracle. Sam is one.”

Mr Weale expects to finish writing the book in around three months. A publisher is still being sought.

Mr Pivnik, now a retired tailor and art dealer living in London, told the JC: “I cleaned the trains at Birkenau — I was there at the beginning. I had typhus.

” At one time, I kissed Dr [Josef] Mengele’s boots, pleading not to be sent to the gas chambers. I have seen hangings; as a teenager, I had to pull the stools out from under people.

“I don’t know how I avoided being shot on the Cap Arcona. I jumped into the sea and held on to a lump of wood. The wind blew me to the coast. There was plenty of shooting.”

He later fought in Israel’s War of Independence as a Machalnik (volunteer from abroad). He will attend the final Machal reunion in Israel next month. [Website comment for non-British readers: Israel’s “Great War of Independence” was the dirty guerrilla war waged by Jewish settlers in Palestine against the British mandate troops, using every foul atrocity in the book. Under the circumstances, it seems strange that Pivnik still lives in London.].

“We did go back to Poland, but I couldn’t take it. It was very traumatic, like seeing nothing but black in front of me.”

The Friends of Sam Fund has been established to fund research and publicity for the project.

Rabbi Naftali Schiff, Aish executive director, said: “At a time when the Holocaust is under fire from revisionists, we value survivors so much because their courage to tell their stories turns a history lesson into a tangible, moving and personal reality.”

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