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Report to the President: President’s Commission on the Holocaust

• Report to the President: President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel (Chairman), Suite 7233, 726 Jackson Pace NW, Washington, DC 20503,40pp, paperback. ISBN: not given.

reviewed by Lewis Brandon (David McCalden)

Of the many dozens of Holocaust tracts examined by this reviewer, I thought I had become somewhat de-sensitized to the heavy ingredient of neurosis and paranoia which pervades all of them. But on reading Mr. Wiesel’s report, I must admit to a profound feeling of astonishment and shock, that the author has not been locked up in a looney-bin a long time ago. Indeed, the author himself describes some of his psychological problems in his introduction:

Why then cling to unbearable memories that may for ever rob us of our sleep? Why not forget, turn the page, and proclaim: let it remain buried beneath the dark nightmares of our subconscious. Why not spare our children the weight of our collective burden and allow them to start their lives free of nocturnal obsessions and complexes free of Auschwitz and its shadows?

Naturally, Mr. Wiesel goes on to explain why both he and succeeding generations should inflict upon themselves this insomnia. According to Wiesel, the survivors'

willingness to share their knowledge, their pain, their anguish, even their agony, is motivated solely by their conviction that their survival was for a purpose. A survivor sees himself as a messenger and guardian of secrets entrusted by the dead.

A cynic might, of course. suggest that the real reason for continually shoving this lie down our throats has rather less to do with preserving epitaphs, and rather more to do with elevating modern-day Zionists above all criticism, on the spurious grounds that to criticize Zionism is to encourage another “Holocaust.”

Wiesel pulls no punches in describing the “Holocaust” as an “Event” (original capitalization … is he confusing it with the TV show of the same name?) which is “essentially Jewish.” One wonders what ever happened to the five million “Others” which have been brought to the fore in Holocaust literature of late?

The Commission took nearly a year to complete its findings. It was composed of 34 members, including at least 24 Jews, some of whom claimed to themselves be “survivors.” One member of the Commission was Bayard Rustin, a convicted Negro sex-pervert. The Commission travelled to eastern Europe and to Israel-they claim at their own personal expense-to examine other nations' Holocaust memorials.

They visited the site of Treblinka, which is “now wooded,” and saw the Polish communist authorities' memorial representing railroad ties, charred skeletons, and a shattered menorah. The standard of aesthetics brings to mind the phoney Soviet memorial at Khatyn, which is supposed to commemorate “war dead” but is in fact a deliberate ploy to draw people’s attention away from Katyn, several hundred miles away.

The Commission went on to Auschwitz “without doubt the most lethal of all extermination camps.” This will come as a surprise to Exterminationist scholars such as Gitta Sereny, who say that Auschwitz was not in the main an extermination camp. Later, in Warsaw, the Commission met with communist officials, and arranged for the purchase of communist war propaganda films.

The next stop was the USSR, where Commission members visited Babi Yar, in the suburbs of Kiev. Although “80,000 Jews” were killed there, the Soviet monument bore no reference to “Jews” and so “the Commission was alerted to the danger of historical falsification.” Indeed! Indeed!

On to the colony of Israel where most of the Commission members must have felt really at home. They visited various Holocaust museums, including the Yad Vashem Center; and Nes Ammim, a study center run by Dutch Christians and dedicated to “atonement for the Holocaust.”

Among the somewhat predictable recommendations of the Commission are that a Holocaust memorial and museum should be built and attached to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. An Educational Foundation should be established to disseminate Holocaust propaganda to schools and colleges throughout the country. A “Committee on Conscience” to be composed of “distinguished moral leaders” should be established to advise the President on potential outbreaks of genocide anywhere in the world. (One wonders if the “distinguished moral leaders” would include in their brief Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians?)

A Day of Remembrance should also be established at the end of April (which is already recognized in Israel) so that special church and synagogue services could be co-ordinated. Special liturgies and litanies have already been written, we are told.

In addition, the Commission urges the President to have the Genocide Convention passed (which would make anti-Semitism a crime); that Nazi “war criminals” be vigorously prosecuted; and that the United States interfere in foreign countries if they allow their Jewish cemeteries to sprout too many weeds.

As regards financing, the Commission suggests that Uncle Sam should start the ball rolling with one million dollars, and that the balance of the expenses should come from private subscriptions. This short report does indeed provide a fascinating insight into Exterminationist thinking. The author will use ten words where one would have done. Adjective and descriptions are in lists rather than in any concise form, and are drawn from the peculiar Holocaust lexicon from which all of the Exterminationist scholars seem to draw their vocabulary. Their argot is not one of historiography, nor of any science whatsoever, but one of morbid, paranoid neurosis.

… the merchant from Saloniki, the child from Lodz, the rabbi from Radzimin, the carpenter from Warsaw, and the scribe from Vilna …

(One wonders whatever happened to the kosher-butcher from Cracow, the banker from Bremen, and the stockmarket-speculator from Stuttgart? Weren’t they “rounded up” and put on the cattle trucks also?)

Terror-stricken families hiding in ghetto-cellars. Children running with priceless treasures: a potato or two, a crumb of bread … Treblinka and Ponar, Auschwitz and Babi Yar, Majdanek and Belzec … betrayal and torture, anxiety and loss, desperation and agony.

And, needless to say, the human devils of the “Holocaust kingdom” also committed the one crime which has been visited upon Jewish offspring with tedious repetition ever since the Romans rolled up Jewish schoolchildren (all 64 million of them, according to the Talmud) in their Torah scrolls and set fire to them:

… in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens, or throw them into open burning pits.

Revisionism also gets a look in, in this turgid nightmare world of “charred souls … darkness … flames of darkness … fire … ashes … and torture” which one cannot decide bears closer resemblance to a Hieronymous Bosch painting or a Woody Allen movie:

Little did we know that, in our lifetime, books would appear in many languages offering so-called reproof” that the Holocaust never occurred, that our parents, our friends did not die there. Little did we know that Jewish children would again be murdered, in cold blood by killers in Israel.

The final cost-accounting for the President’s Commission on the Holocaust has yet to be published. But whatever the final bill comes to, one cannot help wondering whether the money might not have been better spent on paying for an analyst for poor Mr. Wiesel. He certainly needs it.