Tuesday,
September 14, 1999  UNERAL
[of my daughter Josephine]. A sad,
sad day begins. It is dark and overcast
outside and pouring with rain, the first
time in weeks.
At 10:20 a.m. Farm Street Church,
Mayfair. The hearse is waiting outside,
with Josephine in her final box. Four
pallbearers shoulder the coffin, while I
wait outside in the rain; I alone follow
the coffin in. The choir
sings beautifully from Fauré's
Requiem. I read from the Old Testament, the Rev.
Mike Mellor -- Josephine's local
vicar -- from the Gospel. It is the
largest foregathering of Irvings for
thirty years or so. Toward the end of the
service, I deliver an Address, speaking in
these terms: "THIS is the hour that every father
must dread. The moment when he must
dispatch his own daughter on her last
journey. "We are aided in this awful moment by
the upbringing that we all have as
Christians, by the knowledge that for
Josephine this is the moment of victory
over death. "Josephine has lived half of her life
in the sunshine, and half in the
shade. "I remember so well the moment on April
1, 1963, when the telephone finally rang
with the news of her birth. I had called
several times before, but for two days
there was no news. Now the phone rang, and
the doctor's quiet voice said, I remember
the words so clearly, 'It appears that
you've had a little girl.' "We discussed, Pilar and I, what to
call her. We had made no plans. Until that
moment we had had no idea what the baby
would be -- in those days you were not
told. We chose two names -- Josephine, and
then Victoria: Victoria, because April 1,
the day she was born, is La Dia de la
Victoria in Spain. I shall have to answer
for that choice in the High Court next
year, as my opponents in the ligitation
[Professor Brian Levin]
have deemed it particularly offensive that
I should call a daughter Victoria for that
reason. "Over the years that followed, I
watched as she grew up; and I wrote. "For over thirty years I have kept a
very detailed private diary -- rather like
my good friend Alan Clark, though
rather different in content. And last
night at home I decided to spend a few
hours alone, reading one year's
diary,
the diary I wrote precisely thirty years
ago in 1969, when Josephine was nearly
six. It is a diary full of happiness, as
she turns out to be a very talented child
indeed. She and her three sisters all went
to the French Lycée; I proudly
record the praise of her teachers -- she
jumps a year at the Lycée, she is
so gifted -- her accomplishments in art,
and reading and writing. She gets her
first bicyle, and rides it without the
side wheels. "Once, I record, she asks me in
puzzlement how there can be life after
death. What does it mean? At first I am
nonplussed by the question, but I answer:
'Josephine, when we die, we are remembered
by our friends and by our family. And then
by their friends and family, and that is
one way in which we live on after
death.' "In her last year at the Lycée,
while at the examinations, the disaster
befell her, and she began the illness
which overshadowed the rest of her life.
She was a bright girl, and she knew what
had happened, and sometimes she asked me,
'Daddy, why does it have to be me?' I
replied, 'It is the Lord's will.' "It was not much of an answer, but our
Christian faith helps us in such ordeals.
It was the Lord's will. I thanked the Lord
then, and in later years, that He had
placed Josephine, with this appalling
illness, in our family, where she would be
cared for, and not in some other family
inspired by less Christian values. We
cherished her, but allowed her her own
life, at her own distance, while
constantly keeping a watchful eye and a
caring hand over her. "In about 1982 she made the
acquaintance of the famous concert pianist
John Ogdon. John had won the
Tchaikovsky Prize of the Moscow
Conservatoire -- joint first with
Vladimir Ashkenazy. The same
debilitating illness had befallen him. In
an odd way, his crouching, bent stature
looked rather like Josephine's. He would
invite us round to his Chelsea home, and
he played Wagner sonatas to her all
afternoon on his Steinway grand piano. He
consoled Josephine that many people
afflicted with this illness are very great
and accomplished indeed, and we only had
to search for the Vincent Van Gogh
in her too. "Josephine was unique, and we shall
sorely miss her. But her going is cause
for Christians to rejoice. As the poet
wrote, whom I shall here only paraphrase:
each of us is an individual. We sail the
oceans of life alone, a little white sail
on a vast and sparkling sea. And the time
inevitably comes when the sail begins to
sink. For a brief instant, many eyes are
fastened upon that sail, as the waves
close around, and then over its tip, and
there is a gentle murmur, of 'There she
goes.' And so we say of Josephine, 'There
she goes.'" But at the same moment that murmur is
engulfed in a mighty cheer, a roar from
unseen multitudes in Paradise:
'HERE SHE
COMES!'"  REPEAT,
"Here she comes!" and lay my hand on the
coffin at the side of which I have spoken.
The choir's voice rises, singing
Fauré's In Paradisum. The little
congregation stands, the pallbearers lift
Josephine to their shoulders, I turn
sideways, she passes by. I fall in behind.
In the driving rain outside I stand in the
street, watching as they fill the hearse
with so many wreaths and flowers that
there is not enough room for more, and
they cover the roof as well. I kiss the
coffin, the door closes, and the
cortège drives off out of sight
around the corner. It has been a hard day,
and it is not even half over.
I write the diary. Life's escapement
has clicked another notch.
Tuesday,
September 28, 1999  ICHAEL
Hoffmann has posted a rather inaccurate
and distinctly unhelpful account of the
Cincinnati function on his Hoffmann
Newswire, an Internet newsletter. He
reveals what he claims are to be my
tactics in the Deborah
Lipstadt case;
most illuminating. He also identifies
members of the audience, and the speakers,
by name. They will surely appreciate
that.
I inform him by email:
"NOT very helpful
that you have reproduced at such length my
tactics in the case against Lipstadt. You
have really laid it on the line for her
lawyers, unfortunately." He replies in the evening, a letter
which does not bear quoting here, stating
that he was unaware that he was not
supposed to report on the function. To which I respond: "You will have
surely noticed at the foot of the
programme the note stating that no members
of the media were being invited or allowed
to attend, and that any delegate seen
giving interviews to the press would be
thrown out...? Was that not plain enough
language?" THE MEDIA have never done us any
favours, and I see no reason to do any for
them from now on. I drive east and south
all day, past Pittsburgh and Washington to
a motel somewhere in northern Virgina,
where I halt after driving for twelve
hours. There are fifty e-mails waiting. The
Internet is an odd animal. Three people
have today sent me copies of a posting on
the discussion group called H-net List for
History of the Holocaust It is from an Israeli calling herself
Ester Golan [sic] and
reads: - Re:
Shoa
Showdown
- Date:
9/26/99
- Reply-To:
- H-NET List
for History of the
Holocaust
- From: Ester
Golan
<[email protected]>
Shoa Showdown
is an article by Elli Wohlgelernter in
the Friday 24th September 1999 edition of
the Jerusalem Post about the renowned
denier David Irving taking Lipstadt and
her publishers to court A courtcase in
London set to begin in January pits a top
U S historian against a British denier,
which could result in the Holocaust itself
going on trial. A quote from
Devorah Lipstadt: "I don't believe
Holocaust denial is a clear and present
danger, it's a clear and future danger.
When there won't be anybody around to say
'this is my story, this is what happened
to me' it will become easier to
deny." My question is,
how does the American press react to this,
how does the Britsh press react and how do
members of the list feel on the
subject. Although aware of
the presence of deniers, I felt rather
shocked that Briten [sic] of all
places should allow to pitch truth against
the whim of a person writing fake facts
under the academic cloak of a
historian. Greetings from
Jerusalem
Shalom Ester Golan I go to the website of the Jerusalem
Post, but cannot find the article; nor
does there seem to be any recent reference
to me or to a Wohlgelernter. Mystery!
Perhaps Ester herself can help.
[Mr
Irving was wrong. The posting is not a
hoax. See headline
link
on this page.] [Previous
Radical's Diary]
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