FW: Concerning Holocaust-denial

[jbor]

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From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: kmcvay at nizkor.org
Subject: Concerning Holocaust-denial
Date: Wed, Oct 4, 2000, 5:56 PM



Dear Ken McVay

This is just a follow-up to an inquiry made yesterday regarding the
characterisation of the Dora-Mittelbau labour camp as one of "the Holocaust
camps." I have, up until now, been using the definition of the Holocaust
provided at the Nizkor website:

"when one uses the term "Holocaust," the understood meaning is that of the
systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazi state"

http://www.nizkor.org/features/revision-or-denial/rebuttals-02.html

However, this is not the crux of the dispute.

My argument has been that in Thomas Pynchon's novel, *Gravity's Rainbow*,
which was published in 1973, the Holocaust as such is largely absent even
though the setting of the novel is the final year or so of WW II, and just
thereafter, primarily in Germany, with a sequence at Nordhausen and,
briefly, Dora. In the sequence at Nordhausen seen through the eyes of one of
the rocket technicians at the Mittelwerke, the camp inmates used as slave
labour in the V-2 program are referred to as "foreign prisoners". A scene
immediately after the liberation of Dora depicts the piled bodies of dead
and dying inmates of the camp. But what is not referred to anywhere in the
novel is the systematic annihilation of Jewish people in the death camps, or
the transportation of enfeebled Jewish (or other) camp inmates from Dora to
Auschwitz or Mauthausen to be murdered. At no point in the novel is the
narrative represented from the point of view of the Jewish victims.

I have remarked that the absence of any reference to these events,
situations and perspectives is striking in the context of the novel's
setting, but that the literary and historical explanations for it could be
that the narration is filtered through the points of view of various of the
characters, and that while there might have been some suspicion, or perhaps
even widespread knowledge -- on both sides of the war divide -- of the fate
of the Jewish prisoners at death camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald,
this knowledge or intimation was witheld, suppressed or otherwise ignored.
In other words, the war was not being fought over the Holocaust, was not
generally regarded as being fought over the Holocaust by the soldiers or
civilians of any nation, and, further, neither the issue nor the term itself
came into currency until later, from the time of the Nuremberg Trials at the
earliest. As a literary text the novel in this way enacts a type of dramatic
irony: the shadows of the Holocaust encroach at the edges of characters'
consciousnesses and in allusive details, but there is constantly a
suppression or denial of awareness of or their possible complicity in the
fate of the Jews and other victims of persecution; and that this is in
keeping with what was happening *at the time*. I find this to be a very
powerful evocation of one aspect of the Holocaust, which was the way that
citizens and officials in Germany, occupied Europe and the Allied nations
alike remained silent despite awareness, to varying degress, of the
systematic persecution and murder of Jewish and other peoples by the Nazis
during the 1930s and until the end of the war.

For this argument I have been accused of characterising the author as a
Holocaust-denier, and libelled as a Holocaust-denier myself. This public
defamation has been ongoing over a long period of time, to the point of
harassment, and has been very offensive to me. I would very much appreciate
your opinion on whether or not the arguments I have offered above can be
considered as Holocaust-denial, and whether there are any flaws in my
historical understanding of the era.

Best wishes and thank you very much for your time,

[...]