Denial [Movie Tie-in] Page 2

  For four years I prepared for this trial by immersing myself in the works of a man who exuded contempt for me and for much of what I believed. I lost many nights of sleep, worried that because of some legal fluke Irving might prevail. For ten weeks in the winter of 2000, I had to sit barely fifteen feet from him and silently listen as he openly expressed that contempt in front of a judge and the world media. My scholarly work was deconstructed and my attire, personality, and personal beliefs were dissected in the press. Much of what was reported about me—for example, my age, sources of support, and political beliefs—was simply wrong. But I had no way of challenging it. Through the course of the trial, at the insistence of my attorneys, I did not give interviews or testify in court. Though my words were at the heart of this struggle, I had to depend on others to speak for me. For someone who fiercely prized controlling her life—even when it was better not to—this was excruciatingly difficult.

  A few years before filing the suit, Irving told a sympathetic audience that libel defendants are full of bluster upon learning they are to be sued. When they discover the onerous nature of fighting a libel suit in the United Kingdom, they “crack up and cop out.”6 Irving may well have anticipated that I would decide this battle was not worth pursuing and would agree to settle with him by issuing some sort of apology or retraction of my words. I was, after all, five thousand miles away and had to mount a defense in a foreign country whose laws heavily favored my opponent. Lawsuits can be exceedingly long and exceptionally expensive.

  I was wrong to dismiss this as just a nuisance. But David Irving had erred even more greatly if he thought that I, as the defendant, would “crack up and cop out.” I did neither. I fought this charge aggressively and never considered doing anything but that.

  And so a bit naive about what lay ahead, annoyed that I would have to spend time on what seemed to be a completely frivolous matter, and yet somewhat eager, I set out on a journey intended to prove that what I had written was true. This book is the story of that journey.

  THE PRELUDE

  Defense team members in the Auschwitz archives inspecting the architectural drawings of the crematoria.

  ONE

  A PERSONAL AND SCHOLARLY ODYSSEY

  “No, I am not a child of Holocaust survivors.”

  Ever since I began teaching about the Holocaust I have been asked about my background. Some questioners seemed surprised by my response. Why else would I be interested in the topic? Others, however, felt that my personal distance from the event allowed a more scholarly perspective.

  My father left Germany before the Third Reich and my mother was born in Canada. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I had known many “refugees.” No one called them survivors. Some had emigrated in the 1930s, leaving behind a comfortable middle-class existence. Others came after the war. My father helped many of them when they arrived in New York. He attempted to bring his five sisters to the United States but could not do so. They survived in other countries and came to New York in the postwar period. As a young child, I remember sensing that these Central European Jewish homes, with their heavy, dark furniture and steaming cups of tea accompanied by delicate homemade strudel and other distinctly European pastries, were different from those of my American schoolmates.

  My parents’ Modern Orthodox home was shaped by a dedication to Jewish tradition together with an appreciation for the surrounding secular society. One was as likely to find on our living room table a book on Jewish lore as a book on Rembrandt. My brother, sister, and I all attended Jewish schools. When I was in first grade, my parents decided to move from Manhattan to the suburbs. They chose Far Rockaway, a beachside community in Queens, because they admired the local rabbi, Emanuel Rackman, and decided that this was the man they wanted as a spiritual leader and a role model for their children. A graduate of Columbia Law School, he combined knowledge of Judaism with the contemporary world. His well-crafted muscular sermons, delivered without notes, covered a wide range of topics—everything from the weekly Torah portion to Arnold Toynbee. Shortly after the fall of Stalin, during a period of Khrushchev-style perestroika, he traveled with a group of American rabbis to the Soviet Union. On the Shabbat of his return my father suggested that I stay in the synagogue during the sermon—a time that we children generally ran all over the expansive lawn in front of the building. “It will be memorable,” he assured me. Though I was not quite sure what “memorable” meant, I knew the trip had been something important. I did not grasp all that Rabbi Rackman said, but I understood that he had made contact with a group of Jews who were not free to live as we did, and he said that we could not forget them.

  A believer in intra- and interreligious dialogue, long before it was in vogue, Rackman reached out to people both within the Jewish community and outside of it. Right-wing religious Jews attacked him for his attempts to demonstrate how one could—and should—draw upon the best in both traditional Judaism and the secular world. I remember how my father would seethe at these attacks and stress how important it was for Rabbi Rackman’s ideas not to be silenced. Long before I knew precisely what a role model was, I knew that I wanted to be like him.

  Though synagogue attendance and observance of Jewish rituals set the rhythm of our home, we were very much part of the broader world. In addition to ensuring that my siblings and I received an intensive Jewish education, my parents exposed us to theater, museums, art, and politics. Even after we had moved to the suburbs my mother would often take us into Manhattan on Sundays to see exhibits, attend the special youth symphonies at New York’s Ninety-second Street YMHA, watch parades, climb the rocks in Central Park, and even tour visiting aircraft carriers. My parents encouraged a degree of independence in us. When I was twelve and wanted to go into the city to see a movie at Radio City Music Hall or visit a museum, they encouraged it. The problem was finding a classmate whose parents did not think it a totally reckless excursion. I usually managed to find an intrepid soul. I soon learned to navigate my way through the city.

  By middle school I had gained a reputation, particularly with my teachers at the Jewish day school I attended, as a feisty and combative student. When teachers did something that I did not consider fair, I would challenge them—often not very diplomatically. Invariably, my mother would appear in the principal’s office to defend my actions and plead my case. I had the impression that, although she did not appreciate these school visits, she admired my gumption. I knew that I had been named Deborah because she loved the biblical character. When I was still quite young she had described how Deborah led her people in battle and dispensed justice. I liked the notion that I was named after such a person. When my mother admonished me for getting in trouble, I told her I was just emulating Deborah.

  My mother was a free spirit. It was not unusual for her to announce: “There’s a wonderful Van Gogh exhibit at the Guggenheim. Ditch school. Let’s go.” And I did. Despite—or possibly because—neither my father nor mother had been able to attend college, they became intense autodidacts, continually attending classes and lectures. I remember spirited discussions around our Shabbat table about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, civil rights, the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, and the war in Vietnam, which we uniformly opposed. My mother and I marched in Harlem in solidarity with the Birmingham-Selma civil rights protestors. We took a vicarious pride in the fact that Andy Goodman, one of the civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi, had lived down the block from us and we always pointed out his building to visitors. The New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, and Commentary were regular fixtures in our home.

  I played basketball in high school and spent my summers at Jewish camps in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains teaching swimming. Somehow—I cannot pinpoint when—I learned about the Holocaust. Teachers in my Jewish day school made passing references to “Hitler, may his name be erased,” but we were never formally taught about what took place then. Periodically
Rabbi Rackman would refer to it in a sermon. At summer camp the Holocaust was woven into at least one program. At the Passover Seder, my father would recite a prayer commemorating the Holocaust and Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He would weep, as he spoke about those with whom he had grown up in Hamburg. I dreaded this moment. His tears frightened me. I was always glad when it was over. In our home there were books on this topic, including John Hersey’s The Wall, Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, and Edward Wallant’s The Pawnbroker. We watched portions of the Eichmann trial on television and read Leon Uris’s Exodus. Yet the Holocaust did not occupy a dominant place in the construct of our Jewish identity. It was one thread—among many—in the tapestry of our Jewish lives.

  ENCOUNTERING THE HOLOCAUST: ISRAEL, 1967

  At City College of New York, I studied twentieth-century American political history. I was intrigued by what scholars called the “paranoid style in American politics,” an American susceptibility to all sorts of conspiracy theories, particularly those that fostered prejudice and antisemitism. It was the sixties and I participated in various student demonstrations. At one point, we managed to shut the school down for an extended period in a fight for “open admissions.” We demanded that every high school graduate in New York city be guaranteed a place in the City University system. We won what proved to be a pyrrhic victory as the city colleges were filled by students who had been ill prepared by the public school system. Our victory effectively guaranteed the demise of high-quality education at these schools for many decades thereafter.

  In 1966, anxious to experience travel abroad, I made a relatively impetuous decision to attend the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Though my family were supporters of Israel, I was not driven by a Zionist commitment. I wanted to travel, improve my Hebrew, and experience a different culture. Going to Israel was not a purposeful choice but was to have a life-changing impact.

  From 1948 to 1967, the sole border crossing between Israel and the rest of the Middle East was Jerusalem’s Mandelbaum Gate. It was the equivalent of Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Israelis would stand and watch people crossing the hundred yards of no-man’s-land between Israel and Jordan. They seemed to feel that if they stood there long enough, they would be able to see into the Old City. In order to make it difficult for tourists to visit Israel, Jordan permitted them to transit through the Mandelbaum Gate in only one direction, either into Israel or out of it. Once a year, at Christmas, the Jordanians made an exception, but only for Christians. They permitted them both to enter and depart through the Mandelbaum Gate, ostensibly so that Israeli Christians could celebrate the holiday in Bethlehem. In December 1966, a group of American students at the Hebrew University decided to take advantage of this. They told authorities that they were Christians and received their special travel permits. While I was tempted to accompany them and see the Old City of Jerusalem, I could not bring myself to declare that I was a Christian in order to do so.

  Three months later, increasingly beset by a desire to visit these places, I decided to take a more circuitous route. In April 1967, during a long school break, I flew to Greece. Since Arab countries automatically denied entry to anyone with an Israeli entry or exit stamp in their passport, I headed for the American embassy to apply for a new passport. When I explained my situation to the American official, he shook his head knowingly. Obviously, I was not the first person to make this request. He looked at my existing passport and asked if I wanted to drop my middle name, Esther, from the new passport. “It’s very ethnic you know.” I had been named after an uncle’s sister who was murdered in the Holocaust. Obliterating her name so that I could have this adventure seemed wrong. I told him to leave it in. He looked at me skeptically, but acceded to my request.

  I then took a train to Istanbul and joined my sister who had arrived from London, where she was studying on a Fulbright fellowship. After a few days of sightseeing, I bid her goodbye and boarded a plane for Beirut, then still rightfully known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” I planned to travel by taxi from Beirut to Damascus and then to Jordan. The night before I left for Beirut I combed my wallet and all the crevices of my luggage to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything that would identify me as coming from Israel. I doubted that customs officials would pay close attention but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  I arrived in Beirut uneventfully, only to learn that Israel and Syria had engaged in a series of aerial dogfights and Israel had downed six Syrian MiGs in one afternoon. This did not seem to be an opportune time for a single American Jewish woman with a brand-new passport issued at a foreign embassy to be traveling through Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and attempting to enter Israel through the Mandelbaum Gate. But there was no turning back.

  I needed a visa for Jordan. Americans I had met at a student hostel in Greece assured me that obtaining one in Beirut was easy to do. Upon landing in Beirut, I headed for the Jordanian embassy. A male clerk gave me the visa application. It included a line for one’s religion. I sat staring at it for a long time. I had come prepared to write “Protestant,” and yet, when it came to actually writing it, I could not do so. If I wrote “Jewish,” the Jordanians would automatically reject my application. I would then have to fly back to Istanbul and find a flight back to Israel. I knew that the couple of hundred dollars I had in traveler’s checks—this was long before students had credit cards—would not cover the cost of a ticket. I would have to cable my parents—who assumed I was in Istanbul with my sister—to send funds to Beirut. Suddenly my little escapade did not seem like a lark. I decided to leave it blank, hoping no one would notice.

  When I returned later in the day to pick up my passport and visa, the clerk who had taken my application asked me to wait. “The vice consul wants to talk to you.” My heart was in my shoes. I would have fled but they had my passport. Soon I was ushered into the office of a Jordanian consular officer. A tall, olive-skinned man in a white shirt with dark hair, glasses, and a somber face was waiting. Holding my passport in his hand, he greeted me: “Hello, Devora.” I was dumbstruck at his use of my Hebrew name, but I ignored it. “You have a very biblical name,” he said. “My family loves the Bible,” I said somewhat breathlessly. “Oh, and why,” he wondered, “do you have a new passport?” I said that I was studying in London—I gave my sister’s address—and had lost my passport while in Greece. In response to his question why I wanted to visit Jordan, I expressed my long-standing fascination with Petra. After a few minutes he stamped my passport. By then he had figured out, I assumed, that, whatever my background, I was no spy.

  I crossed through Syria without an incident, and after a brief stop in Damascus, I arrived in Jordan. After a couple of days in Amman and in Jericho, I caught a taxi up to Jerusalem. I was directed to a student hostel right on the edge of the border with Israel. I realized I was only a hundred yards—and miles of barbed wire—from a street that I had often walked during the past ten months.

  The next morning I headed for the Old City. In an attempt not to draw attention to myself, I did not ask directions to any Jewish site. Only on the next day, when I returned to the Old City, did I manage to find my way to the Kotel, the Western Wall, the sole remnant of the retaining wall of the Jewish Temple Mount. After the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Kotel remains the holiest place in Jewish lore. Jews had been denied permission to visit since 1948, when the Jordanians took control of the Old City. In contrast to the Christian sites, which were properly marked, there were no signs to this site. I wanted to touch the wall but I was concerned about attracting attention. Instead, I stood in front of it fiddling with my camera and thinking about the tens of thousands of people who dreamed of this opportunity. My reverie was interrupted by an Arab tour guide who arrived with a group from Britain. He told the group that “Jews used to come here to hatch plans on how to cheat people. But in 1948 they stopped coming. Now let’s proceed to the Dome of the Rock.” I cringed, but said nothing.

  Bristling with anger, I left and walke
d up the Mount of Olives, from which there is a panoramic view of the Old City and West Jerusalem beyond it. I passed a massive Jewish cemetery, which had been used by Jews in Jerusalem for hundreds of years until 1948, when the Jordanians denied access to it. Since then, the place had been systematically vandalized. It was a mess. Gravestones had been toppled. Garbage was strewn about. Donkeys grazed among the graves. The path on which I walked was paved with gravestones. I could decipher the Hebrew characters. When I reached the top of the Mount of Olives, I looked over at West Jerusalem, saw familiar landmarks, and decided that Petra would have to wait. It was time to go “home.” Never before had I thought of Israel with such emotion.

  I hurriedly packed my bags and rushed to the Mandelbaum Gate. I knew the Jordanians could still deny me permission to cross. Two very bored-looking policemen waved me through. As I crossed into Israel and handed the border officials my passport, they asked the purpose of my visit. When I explained in fluent Hebrew that I was a student at the Hebrew University, I realized that for the first time in days, I could simply tell the truth and did not have to fear being identified as a Jew. As I left for the university, I heard one guard say, “She’s got guts.” His colleague shook his head. “But maybe not sechel [common sense].”

  At the university word quickly spread about my escapade. All the Israelis who approached me—from the fervently religious to the devoutly secular—had the same question: “Were you able to visit the Kotel?” When I said yes, they looked wistful, obviously thinking that this was a place they would never see. No one realized that would change shortly. Approximately four weeks later the political situation in the Middle East markedly deteriorated. Egypt moved military forces into the Sinai Desert and closed the Strait of Tiran, the waterway at the foot of the Sinai Peninsula, to Israeli vessels. Jordan then joined the Syrian-Egyptian military alliance. Israelis feared an invasion by the surrounding Arab armies. Mass graves were prepared in anticipation of overwhelming casualties. Suddenly, Holocaust analogies were present in everyday conversation. Actually, it was not analogies one heard as much as contrasts to it. “This time we won’t stand idly by. We are ready. We will fight,” the Polish-born owner of the little grocery store I frequented told me. As he spoke, I noticed the number tattooed on his arm. The tension was palpable. I delivered mail and volunteered at a children’s home whose staff had been drafted. My American classmates received calls from their parents urging them to return home. Most students ignored these pleas. My parents simply assumed that I planned to stay. And I did.