Gita Nazareth - Forgiving Ararat

Sam lit a new cigarette, visibly angry. Ott was astonished. For the first time, he had met somebody like himself, with a legitimate reason to be angry at Jews. But it still didn’t mean the Holocaust was a hoax. He felt sorry for Sam and called for Trudy to bring them another round.

“I never looked at it that way,” Ott said. “I guess I’ve never thought of the Arabs as having so much in common with the Germans. So that’s why your people are blowing themselves up in Israeli markets-because your land was taken from you?”

“No,” Sam said, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke in disgust. “We do suicide bombings because we’re stupid, uneducated, and don’t know any better. That only hurts us, not the Jews. Do you see Jews blowing themselves up? Or Germans? Or anybody else? Of course, Jews have been working on taking back Palestine for two thousand years, while we’ve only been at it fifty; who knows, maybe the Jews were doing suicide attacks against the Romans in the first century? It takes time to see reality and the path from here to there; history is as much a function of the present as the past, and it’s more a function of emotion than fact. History and truth are what we want them to be, Ott. For example, most historians now agree that fewer than one million people in total died at Auschwitz, not the four million originally claimed. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Okay. Did you know that many historians also agree that fewer than four million Jews in total died during World War II, not the six million in schoolbooks-versus twenty million Soviets, fifteen million Chinese, six million Poles, and nearly three million Japanese?”

“No, I didn’t know that either.”

“And no credible historian believes Germans turned Jews into soap and lamp shades.”

“I never believed that,” Ott said. “Germans aren’t animals.”

Trudy brought the drinks. She heard this last comment, raised her eyebrows, shook her head and walked away. Ott sipped his beer more slowly now. He was beginning to feel intoxicated, and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to follow what Sam was saying.

“Did you know,” Sam asked, “that more Jews died of disease and malnutrition in the camps than of unnatural causes? Why are the so-called ‘facts’ changing over time? Now consider this: standard disinfection and delousing techniques across Europe to control the spread of typhus and cholera in prison populations included fumigation of inmates with insecticide gases in the nineteen-thirties. So, yes, in a sense, the Jews were gassed, but not to kill them, to save them, and other prisoners, from infestation. And air raid shelters at the camps, and throughout the rest of Germany, utilized airtight doors for fear of chemical attacks after the terrors of World War I, and shower facilities at the camps often doubled as bomb shelters.”

“Struck out,” Ott said with a groan. “Game’s over.” Sam glanced up at the television, then back at Ott.

“Add to this that cremation has always been viewed suspiciously by the Jews, who thought of it as a sacrilege and means of concealing crimes. Then consider that the Soviets, more bloodied by the Germans than anyone else-and governed by pathological, Stalinist liars-captured the prison camps in eastern Europe and denied access to the west. Today, those camps are the only camps believed to have had gas chambers; even the Jews now agree no gas chambers existed on German soil. Now consider this: The eastern European Jews were the ones most insistent upon the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine before the war began; and they were the ones who claimed the Germans were gassing them. Motive and opportunity, Ott, motive and opportunity. All you have left to support the Holocaust stories are the tortured confessions of some Nazi officers and the inconsistent accounts of a few prison camp survivors about the general horrors of war.”

Ott teased himself. Could it be true? Yes, he thought, it had to be! The Jews weren’t butchered and burned in the improved crematoria of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons!

“And here’s the clincher,” Sam said. “I had a chemist do a forensic analysis at three of the so-called death camps. He detected high levels of Zyklon B cyanide gas embedded in the concrete walls of the delousing chambers in Auschwitz and Treblinka, but nothing-nothing-in the showers.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Sam said, clinking his glass against Ott’s. “If the showers had been used to gas millions of Jews, traces of cyanide would be all over the place. It’s a hoax, and it’s all in my documentary. By convincing the world of a German Holocaust, the Jews did in five years what even God couldn’t do for them in two thousand-they created a Jewish state in Palestine that now has a military stronger than all of the other Arab nations combined.”

Ott shook his head, thinking. He was convinced, but he was still trying to come up with a counterargument. “What about the pictures of all those dead bodies? What about the incinerators?”

“I’m not saying the Nazis were angels,” Sam said. “The camps were terrible places, as are all prison camps during a war. People were killed, many Jews among them. As the Allies squeezed Hitler, Hitler squeezed the country, and the entire German population began to starve. The prisoners in the camps were the last to be fed or receive medical care. They were worked like animals, and disease was rampant. Many died in the camps, and there were, of course, many executions as well. Germany’s ‘final solution’ for all the dead bodies piling up everywhere was to cremate them. But that’s not the same as mass genocide.”

“How are you going to get the documentary distributed?” Ott said. “What can I do to help?”

This was the moment Sam had been waiting for, the reason he had come to see Ott. “We need money,” Sam said. “But the documentary is just the beginning of the story for me. You just want to clear your family’s name, and we can definitely do that; but the misery of the Jewish occupation of Palestine continues for my people, all of whom now live like prisoners in concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza with the Jews as Nazi guards and executioners. What the Arabs fail to understand is that suicide bombers and guns won’t push the Jews back into the sea, any more than bombs and guns would push the Palestinians out of Palestine. The Jews will only go out through the door they came in-the revolving door of public opinion.”

Sam was animated now, his voice raised, using his hands.

“When the world believed the Jews were liars, thieves, and murderers-responsible for everything from Jesus’ death to economic collapse-the world contained them, enslaved them, scattered them, and hunted them down. There isn’t a country that hasn’t done it, from the Egyptians to the Romans, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. But when the world believed the Jews had been driven almost to extinction during the Holocaust, the world felt guilty about it, and created the State of Israel as a nature preserve to save them-a refuge for an endangered species. Anybody who hunts Jews now is punished, and the world is determined to protect them. It’s like gray wolves. Do you know the story about gray wolves?”

“Yes,” Ott said, immediately seeing the analogy. “When gray wolves were considered a threat to humans and livestock, the government funded programs to exterminate them, and they were hunted to the brink of extinction; but when there were only about four hundred left, we started feeling guilty about it and thinking they weren’t so bad after all. Big nature preserves were created for them in Yellowstone, and we punished anybody who hunted them. It’s been a big success; there are thousands of wolves roaming the wild again.”