Joseph Hirt was concerned about ignorance of the truth, so he made up a lie to support the truth.
He wasn't arrested by the Nazis, he didn't escape from Auschwitz under an electric fence, and he didn't meet Jesse Owens, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Dr. Mengele. He did get a tattoo of Primo Levi's camp number, “in no way an attempt to take on his identity, but in an effort to incorporate his symbol as a way of remembering him”.
As historian Ken Waltzer wrote when Herman Rosenblat was found to have embellished his memoir, "This shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust." People's susceptibility to lies about the Holocaust proves the necessity of believing in it, obviously.
Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.
No comments:
Post a Comment