[images added by this
website]  David
Irving comments: I DO hope that I can
persuade Rabbi Abraham Cooper to
repeat within the jurisdiction of the
English courts his reported remark that
"Irving hopes for" another Holocaust to
occur.
In the United
States of course newspapers can print any
libellous bunk they like and get away with
it. |
Wednesday, December 10, 2003 [previous
article] Columnist
Jeff
German:
Holocaust very
real to victims IT didn't take David
Berkovitz long to understand that he was in a
Nazi death camp when he arrived at Auschwitz in
1944 at the age of 13. He said he could
smell human
flesh burning in nearby
crematoriums. Eventually, Berkovitz was assigned to
a construction project, but his entire family,
including his parents and two sisters, were sent to
their deaths.  The
first day 16-year-old Lydia Lebovic arrived
at Auschwitz in 1944, her mother and sister were
killed in the gas chambers. The Nazis later moved
Lebovic to Bergen-Belsen,
where she said she regularly
saw "mountains of corpses" piling up in the
camp as she performed manual labor duties.
[Website picture right: prisoners at
Bergen-Belsen].
At 19 Sasha Semenoff saw murder and death
all around him at S[t]utthof, another
concentration camp. Gestapo officers would carry on
public executions to intimidate camp members and
leave the bodies of unsuccessful escapees hanging
on barbed wire fences for hours at a time, he
said. As local Holocaust survivors, these are painful
memories that Berkovitz, now 73, Lebovic, 75, and
Semenoff, 79, would prefer to forget -- but are
reminded of when someone like David Irving
comes to town to deny that 6 million Jews perished
at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. All three survivors are among many who have
responded with outrage to comments this week by
Irving, a British historian who is regarded as the
world's most notorious
Holocaust revisionist. "I don't understand how
the hate can be so big
in a person like this," Berkovitz said. "He
actually believes his lies." Added Semenoff: "How
can he deny this? The Nazis themselves admitted
it."
MICHAEL Berenbaum, a
well-known Holocaust
historian and former research director of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., said the Nazi atrocities have
been documented by millions
of witnesses and records. Irving, he said, has been thoroughly
discredited. "His claims are a fabrication of the
highest magnitude," Berenbaum said. As I reported
Tuesday, Irving slipped into Las Vegas to
address a small group of
followers Monday night
at the St. Tropez Hotel, but not before reaffirming
in an interview with this writer his flawed
contention that the Holocaust never occurred. The 65-year-old Hitler
biographer also let his anti-Semitic beliefs
surface during the interview when he suggested
that the affluent Jewish community in the United
States in 20 or 30 years will face animosity
similar to what occurred in Germany before the
Nazis took power.  "What
comes around, goes around," he said. "Ordinary
people don't like what they see. They don't like
the networking, and they get envious of the wealth.
It's going to happen all over again."
 Rabbi
Abraham Cooper, (left) associate dean
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based
organization dedicated to preserving the memory of
the Holocaust, said that statement not only exposes
Irving as a racist, but also as a hypocrite.
On the one hand, Cooper said,
Irving tries to debunk the Holocaust, but on the
other hand
he hopes for
another one to
occur. "It shows the man is an anti-Semite who goes to
sleep at night saying Hitler
didn't finish the job the first time around and
maybe we will get lucky and someone else will come
along to finish the task," Cooper said. If there is a rise in anti-Semitism
in this country, it's because of people like
Irving, who spread lies and practice bigotry, said
Meyer Bodoff, president and CEO of the
Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. "That's one of the lessons we learned from the
Holocaust," Bodoff said. "We don't remain silent
about things like this." There's no better example
of the local vigilance than the federation's
extensive Holocaust library, which has more than
15,000 books and 500 films on the subject. Edythe Katz Yarchever, who oversees the
library as the head of the Governor's Council on
Holocaust Education, called Holocaust-deniers like
Irving an "aberration of civilization." But you
can't fully understand the horror of the Nazi
concentration camps until you talk to survivors
like David Berkovitz, Lydia Lebovic and Sasha
Semenoff and hear them describe the pain they
suffered. Then you imagine the additional pain they
feel when Irving says their nightmare never
happened. Previous Las Vegas Sun stories
about David Irving: 18
Apr, 2000 | 20
Apr, 2000 | 30
Oct, 1997 | 9
Dec 2003 
David
Irving speaking tour details-
Tax dossier
Financing
the Wiesenthal Center
(pdf file of SWC's public tax information): A
family business -- note the high salaries for
anyone with the name "Hier".
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