When I arrived at the home of the Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg in Vermont a few months before the trial, we began by talking about numbers. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg lists one million Jews killed at Auschwitz. His total number for the Holocaust, however, is 5.1m, not 6m, a conclusion that led Irving to cite his work at the trial, and which has caused Hilberg no end of trouble. Does it really matter? I asked.
'Yes, it matters," Hilberg said. "It matters on a variety of counts. When you segment these losses by country, you find that the major difference between my count and those who say six million . . . is the Soviet Union. Which means, if they didn't die they're there . . . That matters - because you are talking about a substantial part of Jewish history. And you're talking about current Jewish history!" I asked about gas chambers. Irving devotes so much energy to creating doubt about gas chambers. Why? "People are shot or hacked to death in other countries, even after world war two - Rwanda, for example. You built the gas chamber with a view to killing a mass of people. Once you have a gas chamber, you have a vision, and the vision is total annihilation. In a gas chamber, you don't see the victim. So the gas chamber in that sense is more dangerous, the gas chamber is more criminal. The gas chamber has wider implications. So when you deny the gas chamber, you deny not just a part of the event, you deny one of the defining concepts. And of course you deny, apart from anything else, the death of several million people."
Whatever we talked about, we seemed always to come back to numbers. "These numbers do matter," Hilberg said. "They also matter for the very simple reason - call it religious if you like." At this point he saw my gaze shift from the Teletubbies magnets on his refrigerator to the menorah balanced on top of his television set.
"I'm an atheist," he said. "All these things belong to my wife, not me. I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgment it is not discussable, it is not arguable. It matters because it matters to me - it's my life."
entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word."
the Roman gallows, was replaced by the gas chambers."
The vatican´s spokesman Frederico Lombardi, declared in 2009: "Somebody who denies the shoah doesn´t no anything about the mystery of god nor the cross of christ." May be someday christian usages like communion or confirmation will be replaced by some kind of an obligatory "holy Auschwitz-never-again-oath" and "promise to fight for Israel´s right to exist.
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