Friday 15 December 2006

The Holocaust’s witnesses are dying off

First Post:
Soon no one will be left to speak out against those who deny the reality of the Nazi death camps, says colin bostock-smith

It's disturbing to watch those madmen as they gather in Tehran, eager to deny that during the late 1930s and early 1940s there was a determined attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.
Those invited to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative two-day conference - Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - include David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the revisonist author David Irving, in jail in Vienna for Holocaust denial.
More disturbing is the realisation that the people who actually witnessed the death camps, who freed the skeletons, who bulldozed the corpses into pits... those people are now dying themselves.

.............

My godmother, Nancy, was one such witness. She was a pretty and charismatic woman, and she was an ambulance driver in the first British army convoy to enter Belsen.

.............

One evening, after a heavy and convivial dinner, and far too much burgundy, I asked her about it again. What was it like? How did she feel? Her answer sobered us all up at a stroke.

"The worst thing," she began, "the worst thing was the doctor's rounds. I would have to go round the huts with a doctor, looking at the people. And the doctor would indicate to me which ones to take out for treatment. In other words, which ones stood a chance of surviving. The others were beyond help.

................

"The doctor knew that those who were left would die. I knew they would die. And they knew they would die. You could see it in their eyes. They crawled at our feet, begging to be taken out. But we couldn't take them all. We just couldn't."

She got up, the convivial evening lying in pieces at her feet. "It's their eyes," she told me coldly. "I can never forget their eyes."

Then she went up to bed. Days later she left England for the last time, returned to her farm in Kenya, and died a few months later after a short illness.

She's not here to tell the lunatics in Iran that they are a disgrace to humanity. And before too long no one else will be here to tell them either.