Who believe that the Holocaust did not happen meet regularly

how the Revisionists Are

Posted Saturday, January 13, 2001

Esquire New York, February, 2001 [ Photos added by this website; you are urged to buy the magazine for the full article with illustrations ] INSIDE the BUNKER By John Sack The people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen meet regularly, in secret, to exchange theories and research. Are they anti-Semites, or are they just horribly mistaken?

The author went to find out. The last thing he expected was to like them. CHARLES ” CHUCK” PROVAN “Be fruitful arid multiply,” says Genesis, arid Chuck Proven, whose parents sent him to Bob Jones University, has fairly belabored the biblical verse. Missing from the photograph are Matthias and Nathanael, kids number one and two. Proven’s friends no longer ask him, “What are you raising?

A baseball team?” since Proven has just delivered (without any doctor’s help) his tenth, whose name is Gideon. All are unplanned, “Whatever shows up, we accept it,” says Proven, “If God can make them, then God can feed them. And my own problem isn’t too little food. It’s too much.” A man given to fierce obsessions, Proven once wrote a booklet called The Bible and Birth Control. (As you might have guessed, he was for the former, against the latter.)

Another obsession was the American pilots in Manila at the start of World War II, and another was the Holocaust and whether it really happened. Proven always believed the Germans had operated death camps, but he believed the toll was vastly exaggerated. He thought the number of Jews who died was one to one and a half million.

Then, with the help of his children, he had a revelation in December 1990 and soon concluded that the number who died was seven to seven and a half million. “Provan is a congenital liar,” one Holocaust denier wrote of this sudden apostate. “Never have I come across anyone dopier than Provan.” The people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen asked me to speak at their recent international conference.

The invitation surprised me, for I am a Jew who’s written about the Holocaust and (for chrissakes, I feel like adding) certainly hasn’t denied it.

To my eyes, however, the invitation, which came from the Institute for Historical Review in Orange County, California, the central asylum for the delusion that the Germans didn’t kill any Jews and that the Holocaust is, quote unquote, the Hoax of the Twentieth Century, was not just a wonderment; it was also a golden opportunity, a golden- engraved temptation.

We journalists usually sit at the outer edge of occasions: behind the bar in courtrooms, far off the floor of Congress, well out of passing or pitching range at football or baseball games. We are the beggars at banquet halls, waiting for the brass bell and the two-second bite, and the institute offered me what every journalist hungers for: the feast of unhampered access. Its letter was a safe-conduct pass to a country so fogbound that you and I can’t discern it. Who are the Holocaust deniers?

What are they like behind closed doors?

And why are they motionless stones as avalanches of evidence crash onto them, roaring, You’re wrong, you’re wrong?

I’d been invited to mingle with them like a mole in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and then ascend to a lectern to tell them off, and I wrote the institute saying that, yes, I’d come. I flew on a Friday to John Wayne Airport in Orange County and called up the institute, asking, “Where will the conference be?”

Until then I hadn’t known, for the institute feared that I might divulge it to the Jewish Defense League, a group the FBI has called active terrorists, and that the league might initiate violence. it had done so at other conferences to other speakers. One had been punched, punched by a fist also holding a cherry pie, one had been beaten up, and one had been beaten up in Paris, Vichy, Lyon, and Stockholm.

A man who’s older than me — I’m seventy-this last man had been maced, thrown to the ground, and kicked in the head because of his imprudent belief that the Holocaust didn’t take place. For six weeks his jaw had been wired and he’d eaten through a soda straw.

All three men, the leading lights of denial, would speak at this weekend’s conference, and the institute didn’t want to see their freedom of speech or their bodies imperiled by Jews who conducted chants of “Nazis!” “Neo-Nazis!” or “Anti- Semites!” or by Jews who threw punches. On the phone, an institute employee told me where the conference was but said, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Knowing where to go, I took a courtesy van to a palm-filled hotel with a Japanese footbridge over a rambling pool, the sun glinting off its rippling water.

A few deniers (who’d also called up the institute and been told, “Don’t tell”) were down in the open-air lobby, making hollow jokes about the threat, possibly imminent, possibly not, of the Jewish Defense League. “I’m checking everything out,” a man from Adelaide, Australia, laughed to me. “Should I have concerns about my security here?” a tall and broad-shouldered man from New York, an Italian, asked me. “Are you concerned about it?” “Now that I’m out of the closet, yes.

The people around me say I should be. Do you think my life’s in jeopardy here?” “We’ll soon find out,” I said. “The Jewish Defense League is right here in California and, I’m sure, know we’re around.” “Heh,” said the man from New York. By six o’clock the lobby was full. The deniers (by Saturday there’d be 140) were about three quarters men and one quarter women. Most were white, but one was African-American. One was bald, but none were razor-shaved skinheads.

Many wore beards, one a white bushy one like Santa Claus’s. Most wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts, but a few wore jackets, blazers, or business suits, one a safari suit, and one a white suit like Mark Twain’s. TWO wore T-shirts that said, NO HOLES?

NO HOLOCAUST ! a text whose exegesis I’d get on Saturday. The conversations I heard were about nutrition (“I was raised on raw milk”) and about paddle wheelers (“You know, like in Show Boat. You haven’t seen it?

I suggest you rent it”). All in all, the deniers that day and that weekend seemed the most middling of Middle Americans. Or better: Despite their take on the Holocaust, they were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual. Their eyes weren’t fires of unapproachable certitude, and their lips weren’t lemon twists of astringent hate. Nazis and neo-Nazis they didn’t seem to be. Nor did they seem anti-Semites.

I’m sure many anti-Semites say the Holocaust didn’t happen (even as they take delight that it really did), but I don’t believe I met any that weekend. The only debatably anti-Semitic comment that I heard was on Friday night, when I dined in the downstairs restaurant with a prominent denier in a NO HOLES?

NO HOLOCAUST ! shirt, an Alabama man whose name is Dr. Robert Countess. A gangling scholar of classical Greek and classical Hebrew, he had taught history at the University of Alabama and had retired to a farm outside of Huntsville, where he plays major league Ping-Pong and collects old Peugeots; he has twenty-two, some dating