Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYAn even more drastic case is the daughter of a then girlfriend ofmine. In 2002 at the age of 13 this daughter was for the first time in herlife confronted with the Holocaust during a history lesson at school.After she had watched a movie at school with the usual heaps of corpsesand the corresponding comments, she came back home completely distraught,stammering something to the effect that she had seen the deviland that she is terribly scared. We had to take her out of her historyclass for that phase in order to prevent further psychological damage.The last example occurred in the summer of 2000 when some Americanfriends of mine and I visited the Museum of Tolerance of the SimonWiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is basically a Holocaustmuseum. After touring the museum we attended a lecture by an Auschwitzsurvivor. Apart from us there were mostly students at the estimatedage of 12 to 14 years in the room. The lecturer told us about her allegedexperiences in Auschwitz, during which she included things which arenowadays considered untrue even by the mainstream version of history,like flame-belching chimneys, soap production from the body fat ofvictims, and corpses strewn all over the camp which burned spontaneously.At the end of her lecture we were allowed to ask questions, uponwhich an acquaintance of mine asked the lecturer what she thoughtabout the fact that even the worldwide leading research institute YadVashem in Israel has stated that the claim about soap production fromhuman fat is a propaganda lie. She had hardly asked the question, whena grumbling and murmuring went through the room, for already thosestudents had understood that it is a sacrilege to doubt the statements of asurvivor.When we wanted to leave the room at the end of this event, my acquaintancefound herself surrounded by students accusing her as to howshe could dare to doubt the statements of a survivor, because at the endof it, it was the survivor who had been in Auschwitz, but not my acquaintance.When I tried to help her with arguments, the students noticedfrom my accent that I am a German, upon which the entire situationbecame ugly, because those adolescents now started becoming personaland insulted me. The teacher of this school class terminated theconflict by cajoling the children into leaving. We then went to the undergroundparking lot to our car. There we once more met some of thesestudents, who were making disparaging remarks about us from thedistance. I took that as a reason to walk over to them in order to askthem to concider why this building is called “Museum of Tolerance.” I133