Forgiving Ararat

by Gita Nazareth

  “He is a bit eccentric,” Sam said, “but he’s one of the most talented people I’ve ever met. He could build a computer out of cereal boxes and sell steaks to vegetarians.”

  Ott studied Sam’s blue eyes and dark complexion and laughed. “That’s true,” he said. “But, I don’t know...I think he actually dreams he’s Hitler when he’s asleep. He’s got some pretty extreme ideas.”

  “He’s not such a bad guy,” Sam said, taking another drag on his cigarette. “Everybody has dreams, and dreams sometimes become reality if you work at them long enough. He’s been good to me. I owe him.”

  Ott picked up his beer and turned back to the baseball game. He didn’t like talking about Holden Hurley and wished he hadn’t even brought him up. He enjoyed the camaraderie of The Eleven enough, and the military training and the paintball war games they played—and the way everybody treated him like a celebrity because of his family’s past—but he couldn’t understand the president of The Eleven’s rabid hatred of Jews and blacks—it was just this kind of extreme racism that made people believe the Holocaust actually did happen. Sam’s defense of Hurley meant he was probably just as radical. “Where are you from?” Ott asked, changing the subject.

  “New York.”

  “No, I mean your family. What kind of name is Samar Mansour...French?”

  “No, it’s Palestinian, actually.”

  Ott examined Sam more closely. He could see the Arab face now—the steep nose, beard, and dark skin, but where did those blue eyes come from? Ott had never known an Arab, and he couldn’t imagine somebody like Holden Hurley doing anything to help one. Hurley hated anybody who wasn’t white and a Christian. Maybe it was because Sam seemed more European than Middle Eastern, with his aloof attitude, articulate speech, and pressed blue cotton dress shirts and black pants—more like a Londoner or a Parisian. “When did your family come here?” Ott asked, looking back up at the baseball game.

  “My dad came over when he was about your age. He was one of the Palestinian refugees...his parents were killed by the Jews during the war in 1948.”

  Ott glanced at him, then back at the game.

  “Most Palestinians stayed in the Middle East,” Sam continued, “but after the war my father got a job carrying equipment for an archaeologist on a dig in Jerusalem. He was a professor from over at Juniata College; Mijares was his last name. I think he was Argentinean. In any case, he was very wealthy, and very generous, and he liked my father; I guess he thought my dad was pretty smart, because he offered to send him to college here, all expenses paid. My father accepted. He attended Columbia University, married an American woman, and stayed. I was born in New York.”

  Sam waved for Trudy to bring them another round of drinks.

  “Be right there, honey,” she said, pulling two glasses from under the bar, grateful for something to do.

  “Just another refugee story,” Sam said to Ott. “Not very different from your own.”

  Ott was thinking the same thing. He finished his beer, accidentally dribbling a little onto his t-shirt. “You know my story?” he asked, reaching across to another table for a bar napkin.

  “I know all about you,” Sam said. “Brian and Holden told me a little, and I’ve done some research on the Rabuns too. I’ve spent a lot of time doing research in Germany, actually. People don’t realize it but Germans and Arabs have a lot in common. Das ist warum ich beginnen wollte, Sie zu kennen.”

  A look of surprise flashed across Ott’s face. “Sie sprechen Deutsches?”

  “Wenig.”

  “Wieviele Male sind Sie nach Deutschland gewesen?”

  “Ich habe ein ungefähr Jahr dort verbracht.”

  They stopped speaking in German when Trudy brought the drinks to the table.

  “You boys want anything from the grill?” she asked. “I can fix you some burgers.”

  Sam shook his head, no. “You want anything, Ott?” he asked, “I’m buying.”

  “No, thanks,” Ott said.

  “You boys just let me know,” Trudy replied, a little disappointed. She returned to her stool behind the bar to watch the game.

  “Too bad about Brian, wasn’t it?” Ott asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “He was pretty young to have a heart attack, and in good shape. I guess you never know.”

  “The funeral was tough; Tim and his mom took it hard. On top of everything else, I guess Brian had everything mortgaged to the hilt and stopped paying his life insurance. They have to sell their house and the mushroom farm to pay off their debts. Tim’s been staying with me for awhile.”

  “He’s lucky to have you as a friend,” Sam said. “It must have been hard on you when you lost your grandmother. She was a great woman; I admired her a lot. It wasn’t that long ago, was it?”

  Ott nodded uncomfortably, losing eye contact. “About a year now, I guess—less than a year after she got out of prison. Prison killed her. We were real close.” He looked out the window painfully, filled with grief and pent-up rage, then back again at the baseball game. “How come I never see you at any of the meetings?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “I’m not exactly a member,” Sam said. “The Eleven supports what I’m doing, and I support what they’re doing.”

  “What are you doing?” Ott asked.

  “I’m making a documentary proving the Holocaust was a hoax.”

  The Pirates scored another run on the television. Sam looked up, but suddenly Ott was no longer interested in the game. “So you’re the one?” Ott said, amazed. “Brian told me he knew somebody making a documentary about the Holocaust, but he wouldn’t tell me anything more than that.”

  Sam turned from the television back to Ott and grinned like the player who had just scored the run. “It’s been a secret,” he said, “but now that I’m finished, Holden thought I should talk to you and maybe you could help. That’s why I wanted to meet with you today.”

  “Can I see it?” Ott asked eagerly.

  “Sure, soon.”

  “Are you some kind of filmmaker? How many documentaries have you done?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I was just finishing my Ph.D. in history at Juniata, actually—as a recipient of the Mijares Fellowship. The documentary is my first; it was supposed to be part of my dissertation, but the head of the history department is a Jew and, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t too happy with my subject or my conclusions. He gave me the option of picking a new topic or leaving school without the degree. I left. Holden heard about it and he and The Eleven have been funding the project for two years. Now all I need is some money to get it distributed.”

  “Wow,” Ott said. “I give you credit for taking on one of the most controversial issues in the world. But it’s going to be pretty tough convincing people the Holocaust was a hoax. Don’t get me wrong...nothing would make me happier than finding out it was a lie, but I’ve seen the pictures and read the histories. I’ve been to some of the camps too. My family built the incinerators. There’s a lot of evidence out there to disprove.”

  Sam frowned. “But you don’t really believe your family, or your countrymen, would murder millions of their own people in cold blood, whether they were Jews or not, do you? It doesn’t make any sense; the Germans weren’t barbarians, they were Europeans. I’m a student of history, Ott, and as a student of history, I’ve learned that the men who leave a mark on this world are the ones who turn black into white and white into black; it’s along the border between opposites that we find the energy to create and to destroy.” Sam crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the table as if illustrating his point. “Atoms split and fuse into world-changing bombs; tectonic plates shift and new continents are formed; politicians make peace into war and war into peace; religions turn sinners into saints and saints into sinners. Have no doubt: the actions of men are good or evil depending upon which quality we choose to see.”

  The beer was hitting Ott now, and he was beginning to enjoy himself. He felt a warm tingling in his lips and forehead. Sam wa
sn’t the extremist he feared after all; he was a rational thinker, a man who used logic and reason. Ott liked philosophical discussions, and the challenge of talking to educated people; he believed he could do well in college, and he was even thinking about going, maybe to a university in Germany. He hadn’t done much of anything in the year since he graduated from high school, except hang out at the mansion in Buffalo or at The Eleven’s training compound in the woods near Huntingdon. Most of The Eleven were just disgruntled local men, unemployed or underemployed; they drove pickup trucks, drank beer, loved guns, and hated Jews and blacks but couldn’t tell you why. Although Hurley was an extremist, he had taken Ott into his confidence and shown him how to use The Eleven’s sophisticated satellite telephones, encryption technology, and remote computer servers that would ensure secure communication when the race war Hurley dreamed of finally started. Maybe, Ott thought, he would study computers in college. He liked the precision and unambiguousness of math, and computers gave him the unconditional acceptance he craved.

  “Think about all the great men,” Sam continued. “Einstein demonstrated that mass is energy and energy, mass—that’s turning black into white and white into black. Galileo demonstrated that the earth orbits the sun. Columbus demonstrated that the earth is round. Moses demonstrated that the Law is the only way, then Jesus came along and demonstrated that love is the only Law, and later the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, came along and convinced the world that the Law is the only love. All black into white and white into black. In the entire history of the human race, of all the billions of people who have lived and died, we remember only a few thousand at most. These are the men who demolished prevailing beliefs and formed new worlds using contradiction as their chisel. That’s why they’re remembered . . . and that’s how I want to be remembered.”

  “Interesting,” Ott said. “I agree with you, but that still doesn’t prove the Holocaust was a hoax.”

  “Two outs,” Sam said, glancing up at the television. “I know you, Ott,” Sam said. “I know what you want. I’m just like you.”

  Ott looked down, embarrassed.

  “I’m not a religious zealot, and neither are you” Sam continued. “We’re practical men. My mother was a Roman Catholic, and that’s how I was raised; I converted to Islam purely for authenticity. The simple reality is this: In 1948, the Jews evicted Arab families from their homes and re-created a state that didn’t exist between the year seventy and nineteen forty-eight. Think about that. There was no Israel for one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight years. What happened to the Jews in the nineteen forties to change all that?”

  “The Holocaust?” Ott said.

  “See, I told you we think alike,” Sam said. Ott smiled. “Now, the Jews base their claim to Palestine on a four thousand year old legend of self-serving hearsay—an alleged oral promise supposedly made by God to Abraham. There’s no writing, no deed, no nothing; just a single Hebrew man’s claim that God told him the land was his and his descendents’. God didn’t tell the rest of the world about the deal; he didn’t say a single word about it to the other people living there; he supposedly just whispered it to one man, who happened to be a Jew, who happened to want to live there. If that happened today, and this guy showed up in court to claim his land, he would be laughed out of the place; but since it happened four thousand years ago, and one of the guy’s ancestors wrote it down in the Bible, some people believe it must be true. Amazing. That’s a pretty thin reed to build a country on, but it’s not by any means unprecedented. Every civilization, and every conquering power, has claimed their land as a matter of Divine Providence; that’s what leaders need to say to motivate their people to kill other people, and that’s what leaders and their people need to say to each other to soothe their consciences.

  “Now think about this: For nearly two thousand years, this alleged promise from God wasn’t enough to restore Palestine to the Jews. If God really wanted the Jews to have that land, don’t you think he would have made sure they had it? He is, after all, God. So, again, any rational human being would conclude that the claim that God promised the Jews a home in Palestine is a fabrication, pure and simple. But the Jews have been clinging to it for two thousand years, because they really want that land. Then, in 1948, they finally get their chance.

  “There’s no dispute that many millions of people were killed during World War II; it was an ugly, horrendous war. And there’s no doubt that the Nazis, like the Soviets, had prison camps and they did their share of mass killings of all sorts of people for all sorts of despicable reasons. It’s also true that your grandfather’s incinerators turned thousands of bodies at those camps into ash. But the big question everybody’s eager to overlook in indicting an entire nation for genocide is what kinds of bodies were processed in those incinerators, and how did they die?

  “Yes, there is significant evidence of anti-Semitism among Hitler and other Nazis, but that has been true of all of Europe and Russia for centuries. We must concede that, for centuries, Christian Europe greatly preferred that Jews find someplace else to live. We must also concede that, for centuries, Jews have resisted this; but, suddenly, they came up with a bold, new idea. Instead of demanding room in Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and London, they offered to leave willingly if they could return to Palestine. And, guess what? The Europeans just happened to control Palestine after the war! How convenient! But there’s a big problem: the Arabs who already live there. The Europeans are a people with high ethics and morality; they’ve just fought two world wars and they’re not about to take part in the eviction of another people from their land. So, the Jews come up with yet another bold, new idea. They convince the world that they alone were singled out, above all others, for extermination by the Nazis, and that this will happen again and again unless they have their own state in Palestine. They also remind everybody that they lived in Palestine until the Romans—another European power—kicked them out in 70 A.D. So, the Europeans of today would only be righting the wrongs of the past by helping the Jews re-create the State of Israel. And, besides, they argue, using the same bigotry they claim led to the Holocaust, it’s just a bunch of stupid Arabs on a worthless piece of desert! Who cares about them? Who cares about desert? It’s genius, really. The Europeans gave up the innocent lives and lands of millions of Arab people as a burnt offering for their own sins. My family became the fatted calf for somebody else’s sacrifice.”

  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.”