Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYthing ever took place. He bolsters his contention saying “Historians,among them Telford Taylor, confirmed it.” The truth is that TelfordTaylor was not a historian but rather a lead prosecutor at Nuremberg,and nowhere did he write or confirm that people, let alone infants, werethrown alive into fires.Yet Wiesel persists in telling this lie. In 1985 before the Senate ForeignRelations Committee he said under oath: 12“Mr. Chairman, I have seen the flames. I have seen the flamesrising to nocturnal heavens; I have seen parents and children,teachers and their disciples, dreamers and their dreams, and woeunto me, I have seen children thrown alive in the flames.”While we can forgive the melodramatic presentation, the fact remainsthat there is no forensic evidence whatsoever that people weremass murdered at Auschwitz by being thrown into fires. Yet again thisuntruth goes unchallenged and Wiesel continues to be admired as an“honorable witness” and a “nationally approved moral luminary.” 13There is a famous photograph taken in Buchenwald in adult Block56 by a professional American photographer Harry Miller of the SignalCorps. When it appeared in the New York Times on May 6, 1945, noneof the former prisoners were identified. Years later in 1983 Wieselclaimed to be shown in the photo, and he is now so identified in Holocaustmuseums all over the world. 14Not only does the image not appear to be a boy of 16, but if his storyin Night is true, he could not possibly have been in the photo. Buchenwaldwas liberated by the Americans on April 11, 1945; Wiesel claimsto have become very ill three days later with food poisoning and claimsto have been “transferred to a hospital” where he “spent two weeks betweenlife and death.” 15 The photograph was taken on April 16th inadult Block 56, not children’s Block 66 where Elie was sheltered afterthe death of his father in January. 16 Yet Wiesel claims, “The truth I presentis unvarnished.”1213141516Mark Chmiel. Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 127f. as taken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 99th Congress,1st sess., Congressional Record (7 March 1985), S2857.Ibid., p. 136.Samuel G. Freedman, “Bearing Witness: The life and Work of Elie Wiesel,” New York Times,23 October 1983.Night, p. 115.www.buchenwald.de/english/index.php?p=16815