ZGram - 6/1/2002 - "...the truth is marching on!"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny

June 1, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Of course I always like to show off, to the annoyance of our enemies, 
when I receive letters and articles such as the one below. 

Since the article is now posted on the internet on the 
http://www.ukar.org/ website, I can tell you that it came from a 
long-time Zundel admirer, Orest Slepokura,  who once told me that it 
only took some 30 minutes of one-to-one talk with Ernst Z=FCndel to 
have a lifetime of bias, brainwashing and misunderstanding of history 
be done with. 

Here Orest writes to Dr. Prytulak of UKAR:


Dear Dr. Prytulak:

I would like to make some comments regarding the April 26, 2000, letter
addressed to Professor Irving Abella I founded posted on the UKAR Web site
this morning (April 27). See:

http://www.ukar.org/abella01.shtml

"People capable of lying about the Holocaust, are capable of anything." So
says, or said, Irving Abella, [1] the clear implication being our professor
values truth in the matter of Holocaust reporting.

The statement appears in an introduction to a study on public opinion
evaluating the fallout from the 1985 "false news" trial of Toronto
publisher Ernst Z=FCndel; one which concluded that, on balance, the very
extensive media coverage the story got made ordinary Canadians somewhat
more sympathetic towards their Jewish neighbours. [2]

Abella, chairman of the Holocaust Documentation Project and a teacher with
York University's history department, who would later serve as President of
the Canadian Jewish Congress, was reacting to the debate dividing Canada's
Jewish community over whether a better way to lance the boil of Ernst
Z=FCndel's Holocaust revisionism might have been to simply pretend to ignore
it.

Recalling the ordeal Holocaust survivors endured under cross-examination
from Z=FCndel's attorney, Abella observed:

"They [i.e., Holocaust survivors] had to prove to the world that what
happened to them really happened, that events too horrible to be believed
were not too horrible to have taken place." [3]

Inclusion of the verb "believed" punctuating the phrase "events too
horrible to be believed" suggests to some degree a reliance on faith; the
sentence, when read as a whole, invites readers to accept that the
Holocaust survivors who testified against Zundel were all, of course,
unimpeachably honest.

It was, perhaps, to banish any such incipient doubt that Alan Bestic,
assistant to Rudolf Vrba in the authorship of his Auschwitz memoir I Cannot
=46orgive, prefaced Vrba's autobiography with these laudatory comments:
"[T]he immense trouble he took over every detail...the meticulous, almost
fanatical respect he revealed for accuracy." [4]

Rudolf Vrba (n=E9 Walter Rosenberg) is among the more famous of the Holocaus=
t
survivors. He is said to have escaped Auschwitz in April 1944, together
with Fred Wetzler, and returned to his native Slovakia, where he made a
report of his experiences; a seminal report that would serve as the basis
for the U.S. Government's November 1944 "War Refugee Board Report."

Readers were assured that Vrba was delivering the straight goods, a clean,
unvarnished, camera's-eye depiction of his Auschwitz experience. But, in
fact, as a prosecution witness at the Z=FCndel trial, Vrba owed to having
relied on his imagination and on hearsay, to having stretched the truth.
[5]

On the witness stand, with circumspect admissions to now and then having
included fiction in his Auschwitz memoir, Vrba at times resembled the
Artful Dodger. He was tenative, conceding he had employed the "licence of a
poet" in his "attempt for an artistic depiction" of his wartime experience.
[6]

I Cannot Forgive should be understood as "an artistic picture" and "not a
document for a court," he explained. At one point, Vrba even invoked the
Latin expression licentia poetarum to characterize several scenes.

"BOOK 'AN ARTISTIC PICTURE'" and "Survivor never saw actual gassing
deaths," bannered the Toronto Sun. The article below the headlines reported
that Vrba "told the Ernst Z=FCndel trial that his written and pictorial
descriptions of the Auschwitz crematoria and gas chambers are based on
'what I heard it might look like.'"  [7]

In other words, Alan Bestic lied about Rudolf Vrba having displayed
"fanatical respect... for accuracy," and Vrba himself had, in turn, fibbed
and fudged and basically lied to his readers. As for Irving Abella and
"People capable of lying about the Holocaust, are capable of anything," I
think our professor was just blowing smoke.

Only yesterday, Professor Ian Hunter in an op-ed in National Post [8]
recalled how Abella's spouse, Judge Rosalie Abella, had invoked American
playwright Lillian Hellman as a moral authority.

Leave aside the fact Hellman was a flaming Stalinist groupie, she was also
a shameless Holocaust fabulist and, hence according to Abella's own
definition, virtually "capable of anything."

Lillian Hellmann, as you probably know, has long been exposed for having
lied outrageously in her memoir Pentimento, when she alleged a
Holocaust-era heroine named "Julia" had been a genuine anti-Nazi resistance
leader, Jewish moreover, who had sacrificed all in an effort to rescue
fellow Jews from the Nazis, as well as being a close and dear friend of
hers.

How severely, I wonder, should we judge those, like Rosalie Abella, who
smugly invoke a Lillian Hellman as their moral authority?

If you believe Irving Abella, very severely indeed.

Sincerely yours,

Orest Slepokura


C. Professor Irving Abella

  Notes:

1. Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, Hate On Trial, Oakville: Mosaic Press,
1986, p. 14.

2. "Our single national survey yielded evidence that Canadians became more
sympathetic to Jews." p. 80.

3. p. 14.

4. Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic, I Cannot Forgive, Toronto: Bantam Books,
1964, p. 2.

5. Dick Chapman, "Book 'An Artistic Picture' / Survivor never saw actual
gassing deaths," Toronto Sun, January 24, 1985.

6. 1985 Z=FCndel trial transcript: pp. 1390-1392, 1446-1448.

7. Toronto Sun, January 24, 1986.

8. Ian Hunter, "How refreshing, if justice were served," National Post,
April 26, 2000.

<end>


=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day: 

Here's a short anecdote that illustrates the Jewish attitude toward Holocaus=
t
scholarship that debunks Holocaust lies:

A man bring his secretary home in mid-afternoon while his wife is away at he=
r
mother's in another city. But she returns home unexpectedly early and catche=
s
the couple upstairs in the master-bedroom. The husband turns to his wife jus=
t
as she stands in the doorway, deeply shocked and at a loss for words. That i=
s
the moment the errant husband seizes to proffer an explanation. "There's no-
thing happening here. Believe me! Who are we going to believe: me -- or your
lying eyes?"

(Letter to the Zundelsite)