Saturday, July 25, 2015

Primo Levi's Reply to Faurisson, 3.1.1979

Cited by Van Pelt here:
No, Professor, life is not like that. The dead are truly dead. Even the women, and even the children, tens of thousands in Italy and France, millions in Poland and the Soviet Union. That's not so easy to conceal. You don't have to wear yourself out to find the evidence. If you really want to be informed, ask the survivors - there are enough of them in France. Listen to them. They saw themselves dying day after day, one by one, after their comrades who walked the dark path to the crematoria. They returned (those who did return), and they found their families wiped out. The path to avoiding guilt is not that one, Professor. Even for chair-borne Professors, facts are stubborn. If you deny the slaughter organized by your friends of that time, you must explain why, from 17 million in 1939, Jews were reduced to 11 million in 1945. You must deny the hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans, and you must deny us, the survivors. Come and debate with us, Professor,and you'll find it harder to teach your pupils. Are all of them so badly informed that they accept this stuff? Has none of them raised a hand to protest? Then what have the university authorities done in France, and the law? By letting you deny the dead, they have tolerated your killing them a second time.

5 comments:

  1. Primo Levy:

    "There are few to whom the name Auschwitz can be new. Around 400,000
    prisoners were registered in this camp, of whom just a few thousand survived.
    Almost four million other innocents were swallowed up by the extermination
    plants erected by the Nazis at Birkenau, two kilometres from Auschwitz."
    - The Black Hole of Auschwitz

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  2. And what's the rabbit's point supposed to be?

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  3. Clearly Levi can only be judged by what he could be reasonably expected to know, namely that the people with whom he was deported kept disappearing and the conditions were so bad that there was clearly no expectation that these Jews would live very long before they were replaced by a fresh batch of deportees. Then of course comes the fact that 650 people were on his transport but fewer than 25 returned to Italy after liberation and, to my knowledge, none of the others were ever traced, and were presumed dead. However 10,085 Italian POWs held in the USSR were eventually repatriated to Italy (by 1954), so we are expected by deniers to believe that only the Jews who were 'resettled via the Polish camps' to the USSR were never repatriated. Or the resettled Jews' death rate under the Soviets was somehow 100%, even though Italian POWs, who were actually the USSR's enemy, had 10,085 repatriated survivors.

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  4. And.....

    He certainly did not count the victims, such an exaggeration is expected.

    Fluffy Bunny strikes out!

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