No Light, No Smoke, No Stench, No Holes

In addition to the phrase "No Holes, No Holocaust," one may now add: "And no light, no smoke, no stench." This is thanks to Dr. Maurice Rossel, an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who, in September 1944, visited the Auschwitz camp Commandant. (For more on this, see my 1980, essay, "Sur Auschwitz, un document capital de la Croix-Rouge Internationale," reprinted in the 1999 collection of my writings, Écrits révisionnistes (1974-1998), pp. 219 ff.)

On the front page of the "Style" section of The Washington Post of June 25, 1999 (pp. C1, C8) appears a lengthy article by staff writer Marc Fisher that sympathetically reports on a new film by French-Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, "A Visitor from the Living." [See also: S. Thion, "Claude Lanzmann and `Shoah': The Dictatorship of Imbecility," Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 8-10.]

An extract from the Post article about the film:

Lanzmann moves in, his short, calm questions presented like invitations to a dance, with all the proper flourishes and courtesies.

"Did you know you were in an extermination camp?"

"I didn't know the scale it had reached," Rossel says, and for the first time, he is looking off, just slightly away.

"Did you see a light glimmering?" It seems the Poles in nearly villages have told Lanzmann that they saw this light from Auschwitz, this reflection of horror.

"I saw none, no smoke," Rossel says.

"No stench?"

"No stench."

Robert Faurisson is Europe's foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar. Born in 1929, he was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as a professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. He was a specialist of text and document analysis. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in several books and numerous scholarly articles, many of which have been published in this Journal. A four-volume collection of many of his revisionist writings, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), was published in 1999.