Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Israel’s overwhelming victory in June 1967 marked, to some extent, the virtual closure of the Holocaust for the Jewish people. It was as if they now grasped that “Masada would really not fall again,” the Jewish people would never again “allow themselves” to be destroyed. Talk about and study of the Holocaust became much more frequent. It was as if it was now safe to confront the issue.

  When I returned to East Jerusalem after the war, instead of hearing antisemitic cracks, I watched Jews who were deeply moved to stand in front of the Kotel. At the cemetery on the Mount of Olives families were walking around with crude maps looking for their relatives’ resting places. Some people were already collecting the garbage and trying to clear the gravestones. My year of study was ending. Convinced that to leave Israel now would be to miss seeing history unfold, I decided to remain in Jerusalem for another year.

  By the time I returned to the United States in September 1968, I understood the deep imprint of both the Holocaust and Israel on the psyche of the Jewish people. No longer satisfied with the study of American political history, I began graduate work at Brandeis University in modern Jewish history. A number of my courses focused on modern antisemitism. Soon, I had an unexpected opportunity to see and, in some small measure, experience that phenomenon.

  USSR, 1972

  In 1972, on the eve of the Jewish New Year—which happened to be a few days after the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics—I arrived in Moscow. I had come to make contact with Soviet Jews in general and particularly with refuseniks, those Jews who were refused permission to leave the Soviet Union for Israel or, for that matter, anywhere else. The Soviets considered the refuseniks’ desire to emigrate a direct assault on the USSR’s claim—one it had maintained for decades—that the country was the vanguard of a socialist paradise. The Soviets retaliated against them. Many were fired from their jobs. People who had once been professors became guards in empty office buildings, sitting at desks in poorly lit, unheated lobbies throughout the night. One physicist became a window washer, though, given the state of the windows around the city, I was never quite sure where he worked. Their children were harassed and their phones were tapped. Neighbors shunned them. The leaders of the refusenik movement were under KGB surveillance and were periodically arrested.

  Israelis, delighted that these Jews wanted to emigrate, knew that they needed tremendous help to buck the Soviet system. The inability—some would say failure—of world Jewry to assist their fellow Jews during the Holocaust, loomed large in their memory. They were determined to demonstrate that now that there was a Jewish state, no Jews anywhere would be abandoned. But they faced a problem. The USSR had severed relations with Israel in May 1967. Israelis could not enter the country. Unable to reach the refuseniks directly, Israel turned to American Jews who spoke Hebrew and had spent an extended period of time in Israel, and quietly asked them to travel to the Soviet Union and make contact with refuseniks. One day, an Israeli I knew who was working in the United States called to ask if I wanted to spend Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the festival of Sukkot in the USSR. I jumped at the opportunity. He suggested I travel with a mutual friend with whom we had studied in Jerusalem. In a slightly James Bond fashion, we were told to come to New York to the offices of a Jewish youth organization. We were greeted by a man of medium height with closely cropped hair and wearing a kippah. He introduced himself as “Aryeh from Kibbutz Sa’ad.” There was nothing distinctive about him. He looked more like a bank clerk than a man running a clandestine operation. He told us about the refuseniks and how much these visits bolstered their spirits and helped them in their struggle against the communist regime. He never mentioned who was organizing the visits, and it was clear that we were not to ask. (Years later I learned that Aryeh worked with the Office of Communication in the Israeli government and reported directly to the prime minister.)

  A few months later, on the night before we were to leave, we met with him again. He gave us the names and addresses of some refuseniks. We were to bring one family medication for their child. One refusenik, who had organized a Jewish history seminar, had sent a request via a previous group of travelers for Russian-language teaching materials. He gave us books on the Jewish holidays, tradition, and history, and souvenirs from Israel, including a number of small Jewish stars on a chain. He made sure to include a Russian-language edition of Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was exceptionally popular among Russian Jews. Our primary goal was to let these Jews know that Israel and world Jewry were partners in their struggle. We also took a couple of pairs of jeans and some Marlboro cigarettes, commodities whose value for Soviet citizens was more precious than rubles. The refuseniks could sell them on the black market for a handsome profit.

  Officially, the only reason a Soviet citizen was allowed to leave the country was for the purpose of family reunification. To have allowed people to leave for other reasons would have shattered the image of the USSR as a socialist paradise. Aryeh told us that some Soviet Jews might give us their names and addresses. Upon our return, we were to turn these over to him and he would arrange for someone in Israel with the same last name to invite their newfound Soviet “relatives” to reunite with the “family” in Israel.

  Soviet law permitted tourists to visit Soviet citizens. However, officials were enraged when any Soviet citizens—particularly those anxious to leave—were in contact with Americans. They did whatever they could to make our lives, as well as the lives of those we visited, difficult. We were followed as we wended our way to people’s homes. When we walked on the street, a car would slowly drive alongside. Our hotel room phone repeatedly rang in the middle of the night. It was unnerving, but the refuseniks assured us it was part of their daily routine. One took me over to the window of his apartment, pointed at a sedan parked in front, and waved at the man behind the wheel. “Wherever I go, he goes.”

  The refuseniks were pleased to meet someone who was studying for a Ph.D. in modern Jewish history. They asked many questions, particularly about the history of the Holocaust. The Soviet version of the Holocaust depicted the event as an assault by fascists on communists, not by Germans on Jews. To have identified the perpetrators as “Germans” would have implicated East Germany, a communist entity. To have identified the victims as Jews would have validated the notion of ethnicity, a concept contrary to Marxist ideology. But it was not just Marxist ideology that prompted the Soviets to promote this revisionist view of the murder of European Jewry. The term “Jew” was virtually a dirty word in the Soviet Union. The USSR sanctioned expressions of antisemitism, not just against refuseniks. Soviet attacks on Israel were laced with traditional antisemitic stereotypes. Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” about the site where the Germans massacred approximately thirty thousand Jews, protested not only this de-Judaization of the victims but contemporary Soviet antisemitism. It was a courageous rebuke of the Soviet system by one of its most prominent poets.

  For the first ten days of our trip, we heard a great deal about the heavy hand of Soviet oppression. Then on Yom Kippur we had a personal encounter with it. We had come from Moscow to Czernowitz, a city in the area of the Ukraine known as Bukovina, which once had an immense Jewish population. The hundreds of people gathered in front of the synagogue peppered me with questions about Israel and American Jewry. Some people slipped me scraps of paper with their name and address. Around noon, people in the synagogue leaned out the windows and shouted to the crowds, “Yizkor!” Everyone grew silent as the memorial prayer began. People around me watched closely as I opened my prayer book and recited the prayer for my father, who had passed away a few months earlier. They seemed intrigued by a young, Westernized woman who was conversant with Jewish tradition. They had neither prayer books nor—even if I had loaned them my book—the ability to read the Hebrew text. Sensing their frustration, I offered to recite the memorial prayer on their behalf. At the appropriate place I paused so that they could insert the names of their dead. One elderly woman told m
e that she had many people for whom to say Yizkor. As if to explain why, she kept repeating “Hurban, Hurban,” the Yiddish term for “Holocaust.” When I finished, she kissed my hand. At that point I left for my hotel.

  Later that afternoon I returned. A light rain was falling and the street was empty. I saw the old woman from the morning standing at the back of the sanctuary and squeezed myself in next to her. She held my arm in a gesture of familiarity. I handed her my small leather-bound prayer book. Unable to read it, she seemed proud just to hold it. When people walked by, she showed it to them. Suddenly, the relative calm of the moment was broken. The synagogue sexton who, it was commonly assumed, reported all unusual activities—including the presence of foreigners—to the KGB, burst in and accused me of being a provocateur, a serious charge by Soviet standards. When he saw that the old woman had my prayer book, his face grew bright red. Sputtering in a mix of Russian and Yiddish, he grabbed it and accused me of distributing religious items. People passionately argued with him. He brushed them off and disappeared down the street with my book in his hands.

  The next day we were waiting in our hotel lobby to depart for Kishinev. Suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by men in trench coats who identified themselves as KGB. Had I not been so frightened, I would have laughed aloud at the predictability of their dress. I lost any inclination to laugh when I saw that they had my prayer book as well as a list of every home we had visited in Czernowitz. When they questioned us, they used traditional antisemitic stereotypes, describing the Jews who wished to leave the Soviet Union as part of an international cabal and Jews in general as financial extortionists. They kept asking who sent us. We kept insisting we were just tourists. I suspected that the exercise was designed to frighten us. The Soviets probably knew precisely who had sent us. After a long day of strip searches and interrogation, my traveling companion and I—who were kept apart the entire time—were accused of spreading lies about the Soviet regime. We were “invited” to leave the country and, in the dark of the night, placed in an empty train car with an armed guard. Many hours later, after a long and circuitous route, we found ourselves in Romania.

  After reporting on our travails to the American embassy, we headed to the synagogue. When we told the Jews we had come from Czernowitz in the USSR, they corrected us. “Czernowitz? That’s occupied Romania.” An elderly Jew standing nearby whispered under his breath, “USSR? Romania? Czernowitz is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Had I not been so rattled by my recent experience, I would have been amused by this impromptu history lesson.

  Throughout this experience, I never feared for my welfare. I believed—maybe naively so—that the Soviets were uninterested in two innocuous graduate students. They wanted to frighten future visitors and the Soviet citizens who invited us into their homes. But I feared we had subjected these people to danger. I was painfully aware that I was leaving behind Jews who were struggling to live the kind of Jewish life I took for granted. I kept thinking about German Jews during the 1930s. I knew that the refuseniks’ situation was clearly not the same. But there was a parallel for me—the bystander. Jews were being oppressed. How would their coreligionists in the free world respond? To all those who asked about my trip, I rather self-righteously proclaimed that, unlike our parents’ generation, “this time” Jews were not going to sit silently by.

  I returned to my graduate program at Brandeis in the fall of 1972, but I carried this experience with me. I found myself increasingly drawn to the study of the Holocaust, particularly to the question of how the bystanders—Jews and non-Jews—reacted.

  In 1974, I accepted a position at the University of Washington’s History Department, where I introduced a course on the history of the Holocaust. One day, while I was lecturing to my class on President Roosevelt’s knowledge of the Final Solution, a student demanded, “But what could my parents—not the White House, Congress, or the State Department—have known?” Intrigued by his query, I decided to examine the American press coverage of the Holocaust. While the press may not determine what the public thinks, it certainly influences what it thinks about.

  After working my way through thousands of articles, I concluded that, while news of the persecution of European Jewry appeared in many American papers, it was presented in a way that made it eminently missable or dismissible, i.e. in small articles in obscure places in the paper on the comics, weather, or, somewhat more appropriately, obituary page. Readers who noticed these articles would have been justified in assuming that the editors did not believe them. Otherwise, how might one explain a story on the murder of one million Jews placed on the bottom of page six next to an ad for Lava soap?1

  During the 1970s, the American Jewish community began to show great interest in the Holocaust. The desire to learn more about this event was encouraging, but I was disturbed by the tendency of Jewish communal leaders to invoke the Holocaust for a variety of causes. Young Jews were told that in order not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory, they should marry Jews, have children, and observe Jewish tradition. Fund-raisers cited the Holocaust to motivate Jews to contribute to a host of philanthropic causes. I found this a serious perversion of Jewish history and tradition. Jews have survived despite antisemitism not because of it. It was a terribly lachrymose message to transmit to younger generations of Jews. Why, I wondered, would the murder of six million coreligionists strengthen one’s Jewish identity? Though I, together with others, criticized this approach, I knew we were fighting a losing battle.

  By this time I had moved to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA. My departmental home was the Department of Near Eastern Languages where my colleagues were primarily older, male, European-trained philologists. Someone on campus described it as a place to study “dead languages taught by nearly dead men.” My colleagues dismissed my study of newspapers as a form of “journalism” and, because I had large classes, considered me a “popularizer,” an academic double kiss of death. Admittedly, it was a strange place for someone whose research focused on the American response to the Holocaust. I was not surprised when, despite the fact that three publishers were vying for my manuscript on American press coverage of the Holocaust, UCLA denied me tenure.

  A TENTATIVE FORAY INTO THE WORLD OF HOLOCAUST DENIAL

  Shortly thereafter, Professors Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem asked me to conduct a research project on Holocaust denial. Convinced that deniers were fringe extremists, I asked these two leading Holocaust scholars: why study the historical equivalent of flat-earth theorists? Bauer and Gutman believed this a new, potentially dangerous form of antisemitism. Though they thought it should be analyzed, I was not entirely convinced. I doubted whether it warranted a book, and, if I did write one, whether there would be substantial interest in it. Nonetheless, my deep respect for these scholars convinced me to explore the project. I accepted a small research subsidy in order to undertake what I anticipated would be a limited research project. I signed the standard university contract, giving the university virtually all the royalties on any book that might result from my work. I anticipated a year’s work and maybe a couple of articles on the topic. After that, I assumed, I would move on to my project on America’s postwar response to the Holocaust.

  As I did my research, my assessment of the deniers began to slowly evolve. I was struck by the sophisticated camouflage tactics they had developed. The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the California-based denial group, depicted itself as a scholarly group driven by a “deep dedication to the cause of truth in history.” Their conferences resembled academic confabs. Their journal had a scholarly veneer. Students at leading academic institutions who encountered it in their university libraries assumed it a product of genuine scholarship. Though the IHR claimed to be interested in the broad sweep of history, it focused all its energies on the Holocaust.2 Their attacks had both an antisemitic and an anti-Israel bias. According to the IHR, the “corrupt, bankrupt government of Israel
and its army of unpaid agents in the United States” had perpetrated a theft on the American people through the clever use of the “Greatest Lie in all of history—the lie of the ‘Holocaust.’”3

  The IHR also demonstrated racist sympathies. It contended that the Holocaust myth lowered the “self-image of White people.” The IHR’s founders were associated with the Liberty Lobby and Noontide Press. The New Republic considered Liberty Lobby to be so extreme that it was “estranged from even the fringes of the far right.”4 Noontide Press’s catalog featured antisemitic works such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as a series of books on the dangers of racial integration and the lower IQ of people of color. Deniers had made common cause with neo-Nazi groups in the United States, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and other countries.5 Denial was also finding a warm reception in the Muslim and Arab worlds. While I still did not consider deniers an imminent danger, I felt that given their camouflage tactics and their alliances, I could no longer dismiss them as a laughing matter.