Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 8: THE HOLOCAUST WITNESSES: UNVERIFIED TESTIMONIES

A similar confusion reigns with respect to the witnesses. We are presented with bands of witnesses to the genocide of the Jews. Whether orally or in writing, these witnesses claim to assert that Germany carried out a plan for the overall extermination of the Jews of Europe. In reality, these witnesses can only attest to such facts as the Jews deportation, their internment in detention camps, concentration camps or forced labour camps, and even, in some cases, the functioning of crematoria. The Jews were to so great a degree not doomed to extermination or to end up in mass-execution gas chambers that each one of these countless survivors or escapees, far from constituting, as some would have us believe, a living proof of the genocide, is, on the contrary, a living proof that there was no genocide. As has been seen above, at wars end the number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust probably exceeded three million.

For the camp of Auschwitz alone, a considerable list may be made of former Jewish inmates who have borne witness in public, orally or in writing, on television, in books, in the law courts. Among the best known I shall mention:

Odette Abadie, Louise Alcan, Esther Alicigüzel, Jehuda Bacon, Charles Baron, Bruno Baum, Charles-Sigismond Bendel, Paul Bendel, Maurice Benroubi, Henri Bily, Ada Bimko, Suzanne Birnbaum, Eva Brewster, Henry Bulawko, Robert Clary, Jehiel Dinour alias K.Tzetnik, Szlama Dragan, Fania Fénelon, Arnold Friedman, Philip Friedman, Michel Gelber, Israël Gutman, DrHafner, Henry Heller, Benny Hochman, Régine Jacubert, Wanda Jakubowska, Stanislas Jankowski alias Alter Fajnzylberg, Simone Kadouch-Lagrange, Raya Kagan, Rudolf Kauer, Marc Klein, Ruth Klüger, Guy Kohen, Erich Kulka, Simon Laks, Hermann Langbein, Leo Laufer, Sonia Letwinska, Renée Louria, Henryk Mandelbaum, Françoise Maous, Mel Mermelstein, Ernest Morgan, Filip Müller, Flora Neumann, Anna Novac, Myklos Nyiszli, David Olère, Dounia Ourisson, Dov Paisikovic, Gisella Perl, Samuel Pisar, Macha Ravine-Speter, Jérôme Scorin, Georges Snyders, Henri Sonnenbluck, Jacques Stroumsa, David Szmulewski, Henri Tajchner, Henryk Tauber, Sima Vaïsman, Simone Veil née Jacob, Rudolf Vrba, Robert Weil, Georges Wellers

I shall also mention the resounding case of one late arrival, the clarinettist Binjamin Wilkomirski. It is not very clear why, but this false witness was publicly exposed after a three-year spell of glory which had seen him honoured with the US National Jewish Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, the Mémoire de la Shoah prize in France, and an impressive series of dithyrambic articles in the press world-wide. His purported autobiography of a child deported to Majdanek and to Auschwitz(?) had been released by Suhrkampf in 1995 under the title: Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kinderheit, 1939 bis 1948 (in English, Fragments: memories of a wartime childhood(24)). At the end of his investigation, Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried revealed that Binjamin Wilkomirski, alias Bruno Doessekker, born Bruno Grosjean, had indeed had some experience of Auschwitz and Majdanek but only after the war, as a tourist(25). In 1995 the Australian Donald Watt had himself deceived the great English language media with his alleged testimony telling of life as a stoker in crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau(26). Between September and November 1998, there was organised in Germany and France a vast media operation around the sudden revelations of DrHans-Wilhelm Münch, one-time SS physician at Auschwitz. The vein is decidedly bountiful.

Primo Levi, for his part, tends still today to be presented to us as a reliable witness. It will be seen further on in this work that his reputation as such was perhaps deserved in 1947, with the publication of his book Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man). Unhappily, P.Levi conducted himself somewhat unworthily afterwards. E.Wiesel remains the undisputed star false witness of the Holocaust. In his autobiographical account Night he does not mention the gas chambers; for him, the Germans threw the Jews into blazing pits; as late as 2 June 1987, at the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyon, he testified under oath that he had seen, in a little wood, somewhere in [Auschwitz] Birkenau, SS men throwing live children into the flames. In the present work, it will be remarked how the translator and editor of the German version of Night resuscitated the gas chambers in E.Wiesels account of Auschwitz. In France, Fred Sedel would in 1990 proceed in like manner whilst re-editing a book which had appeared in 1963, putting chambres à gaz where, twenty-seven years earlier, he had mentioned only fours crématoires(27).

In the same boat of pious lies may be put the testimonies of some non-Jews, in particular that of General André Rogerie who, strengthened by the support which Georges Wellers lent him, introduced himself in 1988 as a Holocaust witness who had beheld the Shoah at Birkenau(28) whereas, in the original 1946 edition of his memoirs Vivre, c'est vaincre he had written only of having heard talk of gas chambers(29). In the very camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau our heros lot was a privileged one. He lodged in the bosses(30) barracks and enjoyed a royally cushy position of which he has fond remembrances(31). He ate pancakes with jam and played bridge(32). Of course, he wrote, not only merry events take place [in the camp](33) but, on leaving Birkenau, he had this thought: Unlike many others, I have been better off here than anywhere else(34).

Samuel Gringauz had got through the war in the ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania. In 1950, that is, at a time when it was still possible to speak somewhat freely on the subject, he was to make an appraisal of the literature thus far produced by the survivors of the great Jewish catastrophe. In it he deplored the trespasses to which their hyperhistorical complex was then giving rise, writing:

The hyperhistorical complex may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric. It concentrates historical relevance on Jewish problems of local events under the aspect of personal experience. This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilletante [sic] philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies(35).

One can only assent to this judgement, dating from 1950, which could be perfectly applied today to a Claude Lanzmann or an Elie Wiesel. For the latters hyperhistorical complex, for the judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric character of his writings, one may refer to his two recent autobiographical volumes published under the title Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, Mémoires 1 et 2 (All Rivers Run to the Sea). In so doing, one may also realise that, far from having been exterminated, the Rumano-Hungarian Jewish community of the little town of Sighet in all likelihood survived its deportation, notably to Auschwitz in May and June of 1944, in great numbers. Himself a native of Sighet, E.Wiesel endured the fate of his fellow townsmen. After the war, he journeyed to various places in the world where, thanks to a succession of miracles, he would come upon an amazing number of relatives, friends, old acquaintances, and others from Sighet who had survived Auschwitz or the Holocaust.