Denying Holocaust Denial

more than seven decades after the end of world war ii there are still those who try to raise doubts about the historical fact of the holocaust the deliberate systematic murder of six million jews an exhibit at the royal ontario museum called the evidence room emerged in part as a result of such holocaust denying and helps remind us that the struggle for historical truth is never ending robert yan von pelt is university professor in the department of architecture at the university of waterloo and co-author of the book the evidence room and he joins us now for more on this topic robert it's good to see you again thanks for coming in the evidence room what is it it is a installation originally created for the 2016 venice architecture vienna and it is the result of my work as an expert witness in the trial that was held in the year 2000 in which a holocaust denier david irving sued the american author deborah lipstadt and i was called in as an expert witness to deal with all matters relating to auschwitz and wrote an expert report defended it in court and wrote a book about it uh no that's actually another one it's a case for auschwitz oh okay that's it it actually got the an award for the worst title of the year it was published 2002 but in any case that book describes the role of auschwitz in holocaust denial and in this particular trial it raises the issue of evidence and in 2015 i was approached by the curator of the 2016 biennale if i was interested to put an exhibit in the biennale about let's call it the forensic interpretation of architecture and how is it that it's come to the royal ontario museum um now uh we got a lot of support uh from um from uh people here in ontario uh we that is the university school university of baltimore school of architecture my colleagues uh donald mackay and bordello and independent curator uh sasha hastings we had ideas but we didn't have any money and so bruce gurbarra an architect the founder of kpmb architecture he basically volunteered to raise money in the community and he came to the opening and he said i think we need to show this in ontario and so we started talking to the rom they became excited about prospect they had space available and so we opened in june of this year an enlarged amplified exhibition at iran and we have some video of you explaining all about this so let's take a look at that right now sheldon roll the clip please now holocaust deniers say that this gas door actually had not a genocidal function that airaid shelters have gas doors because during an air raid one could also have all kinds of toxic gases now why is this not a door for an air raid shelter first of all the question is if you walk into this space this is protected by the door you wouldn't want to be inside with somebody on the outside being able to close the door like this when we go to the other side of the door and we look now at the door as it would be from the inside we see also that for an aerated shelter this door would really not have worked the first thing which is very clear is that there is no hint that there is no way on the inside to actually manipulate this door this we call the victims side of the door people were pushed in this room 10 people per square meter and when the gas was introduced a panic would happen the panic was such that we have eyewitness reports that the victims tried to break the glass of the peephole if the only thing that you can still do is try to break the glass in debt people as the gas enters it really means that you have no agency no options whatsoever this was part of the forensic evidence that was introduced at the irving trial yes uh the holocaust deniers they basically claimed that a forensic investigation of auschwitz will show that the gas chambers wouldn't have worked that the ovens wouldn't have worked and so on they they make arguments that for example this gas door this gas door that was found in 1945 in a building yard close to the camp that this was an air raid shelter door and so i had to refute all of these arguments by looking very carefully forensically like i do in this clip at all of the pieces of evidence the deniers had put forward to basically make the opposite argument and so what we did in this exhibit we basically took uh the key pieces that were in play during the trial and and which i had to defend under cross-examination and we we we we call if we make models or monuments of these scale one-to-one models the gas door the gas column and the gas hatch and then we display the evidence uh around it in the form of of castes that in some way support our interpretation of this evidence if all of this sounds somewhat familiar to people it may be because there was a motion picture made about this right yes so uh the last year the movie denial was uh was was in in in the cinemas um uh rachel weiss plays deborah lipstadt uh mark gattis plays me and uh yeah so the testimony that i gave it was five days of testimony in the courtroom but we had i think three minutes of it in the movie what do you think was at stake in that courtroom now the the what happens of course is that the deniers are not going to be convinced by any argument they believe that the holocaust is a great conspiracy and once you believe in a great conspiracy you will never lose basically your faith that there is a conspiracy arguments don't make a difference there are a different fact immune to fast yeah i mean and this has become a kind of universal phenomenon in that sense holocaust denial i think is the canary in the mind that that leads us to what's happening today with fake news and so on but what we did was basically say okay let's put all of the evidence in front of a judge yeah and this is a a well-respected judge and then we have a court decision of course we didn't choose this battle i mean irving sued deborah limpstead but once we had in some way the courtroom as a place where we could present the evidence at length the full scope of it then we thought that it might be useful for other people who might have doubts or for people who have no doubts yet but who might be at a certain moment stumbling on uh denial uh uh stuff on the internet which is all around which is all there it was a huge risk though robert because had you lost that now you won but had you lost my goodness the the fuel that would have put into the deniers uh would have been astonishing we talked about that before the before the trial and we basically said to ourselves we cannot lose and the reason we couldn't lose is because we had the evidence yeah now it must be sad that we uh we had a trial with only a judge uh the judge was supposed to he and but you know he would it was a judge only trial if we had had a jury it might have been more of a risk because you know you never know the dynamics in the jury but it was really the material was so overwhelming both in scope as as well in complexity and much of it being in german that it would have been impossible for a jury to deal with this and this is why both sides agreed early on that it would be a judge only trial any evidence that david irving changed his mind about any of this as a result of the verdict no not really i mean i think that he conceded during the trial a number of issues the one issue he did not concede was the auschwitz issue and and so for deniers auschwitz remains always the central pivot of their denial let's turn our attention to auschwitz today because it still is there in the south of poland and you have described it thus as a kind of theme park cleaned up for tourists it's a place that constantly needs to be rebuilt in order to remain a ruin for us what are you saying there now it i i probably wouldn't say it exactly like that today i mean i think that i've gained over the years much more empathy you said that seven years ago yeah yeah but but it is in a sense i mean it's a tourist side let's be honest the first thing is that uh two million people go to auschwitz every year and these people need to be accommodated with clean toilets with food with you know in an infrastructure of tourists and the site certainly outfits one one of the two sites that is available for visits is rather small and so it's very difficult to accommodate that especially on summer days the second thing is is that if we go to beer canal it's a ruin just explain it there's auschwitz which is where you you came in and birkenau where you went to be burned yeah that birkenau is the it's the large site this is where the four crematorium with the gas chambers were uh this is the in some way the key site of the holocaust and it was an appendix to the original camp auschwitz that had been created uh for the terrorization of the of the polish population so birkenau is a ruin the crematoria are in ruins uh the most of the barracks are in ruins they were left like ruins by the germans in 1945 and it's very difficult to preserve a ruin especially the scope of the site is enormous uh it's also it is a tough climate there barbed wire has a lifespan of around 10 years then it's rusted through it has to be replaced the concrete posts on which the barbed wire uh basically uh uh hangs uh that every 20 years they basically have to be replaced so the ruins are all maintained they need to be maintained as ruins and that is a very difficult task and the result of it is that in fact the preservation department in auschwitz is one of the best in the world today because they have an impossible task here's what you said in that same smithsonian magazine interview seven years ago about beer canal you described it as the ultimate nihilistic place a million people literally disappeared shouldn't we confront people with the nothingness of the place seal it up don't give people a sense that they can imitate the experience and walk in the steps of the people who were there okay if that's the mission how do you do that um now i think that uh you know obviously people want to go there yeah so i i i put this out polamically as a thought experiment what would happen if uh the most deadly place on earth and birkenau was the most deadly place or certainly the site of crematorium two in which around five hundred thousand people were killed in a in a room which is 200 square meters large or small if if that were to become unavailable if we say that in some way as humanity as a species we have lost the right to occupy this place on earth and and this has to do also with with i think the nature of the gas chamber uh there is an old tradition i think amongst many civilizations that if we feel that as a civilization as a society we need to kill people we need to execute people because they have transgressed a certain moral boundary we always do that in the open yeah we do that in in the face of the god so to speak it's a public there are witnesses to that in auschwitz there were no witnesses in a sense that people are put underground in a room and they die invisibly to all i mean you can't see anything anymore through that people once the light goes out ss cannot see anything anymore so i think that that that in auschwitz we transgress the most the most basic of of boundaries of morality that is the respect we we need to have as mortals for the death of others but we also have an education listen i'm not going to argue with you but i'm going to put the other side forward and then you tell me what you think auschwitz stands today if i understand this as a kind of an educational mission we you know there's a need to educate each successive generation that this happened and i don't know how you do it if you don't have access to it now that is that of course is the problem the problem negotiation what would you at a certain moment take out of that is available for us as literally tourists and and how do you compensate for that now but it's not tourism like going to the eiffel tower is tourism it's a different kind of tourism it is it is different and it's the same too it is it is it is different in the sense that you can call it a pilgrimage you know we could we could put that label on it but it is the same in in in in the sense it is tourism in the sense that uh it is it is something which we can you know in some way describe in advance is what's going to happen there is no risk right for us buses pull up shows get off yeah and you have your hour there you're two hours there buy tickets to go in you buy tickets to go in and so on i think that what the magic of the place i mean you know i my first visit was in 1989 and i'm we're now what is it uh 28 years later and i'm still working on it i'm still i'm touched by the visit to basically uh make it my life's goal to understand this place so i certainly was changed by this experience of visiting auschwitz but i think always that the great the great transformation the questions come afterwards once you've left it that is the power of the place and i think that by withholding something in your visit by suggesting that no not everything is available to us as a let's call it still casual visitor might actually help us to raise that question of what is ours and what's not ours as a species which right now seems to be quite capable of destroying the planet so you are referring only then to birkenau not necessarily only to berkeley and it might even be in birkenau only the the site of the crematorium now the the the auschwitz museum has this great difficulty they don't want people to climb on the ruins of the crematorium it happens constantly the problem is how do you actually you so what what are you going to do to separate the crematoria from the crowds that visited it are you going to put a fence around it are you going to you know put a glass dome over it i mean these are difficult aesthetic choices and and there's no right way to do it let's be honest about it not that long ago in the nation's capital here uh there was a holocaust monument unveiled and i guess they forgot to put on the plaque the fact that this was a phenomenon that happened to jews and no reference to the six million and so on now eventually they fixed all the wording and it's better now but the bigger question do monuments such as the one we're now seeing pictures of in ottawa or do monuments like auschwitz in the south of poland help us to retain the memory of past tragedy and i have to say that i belong to one of the teams that that participated in the in the competition and that did not win the final commission so having said that um i think that the key to any any monument to memorial like this is the education part uh i think the most successful holocaust memorial is the one in berlin created by eisenmann near the brandenburg gate and it's not because of the memorial but it is probably of the most compact brilliantly thought through teaching education center which is actually below the blocks you walk in at grade and then go down you go down and then the block you are at the underside of the block so to speak around it and they but they do in five they do in five rooms in five rooms they tell the story in a brilliant way which really which really motivates people to start now to interpret the memorial i think that the the the the problem i have with the ottawa memorial or with most other holocaust memorials is that teaching component is missing and and it is you know what what a what a memorial is supposed to do is to slow you down for a moment to give you an opportunity to pay attention to for one moment not look at me on your iphone yeah and not being in the bigger connected world to be disconnected from that but then when you're disconnected the question is what do you do with that precious 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes and i think then you need to have something in place that will really uh allow to uh to basically change the consciousness of the person in that memorial and so i don't think the memorial itself by you know an inscription can do it or maybe uh some kind of artistic representation i think you need to have some facts you need to have some story and that i think is is is is what the berlin memorial has shown that that it can do it very effectively and and i think that uh you know i've been there probably 60 times by now with groups in that particular 60 yeah six oh yeah you know i'm doing a lot of uh of traveling uh with teachers and so on uh over the years and i'm far four or five times a year in in europe with teachers going to you know places like berlin and auschwitz and so on and and the brilliant memorial is absolutely i think uh a paradigm of how something can be done we saw uh just a couple of years ago in this country again actually a very nice woman i know her a very nice woman from hamilton who ran for the ndp in an attempt to be elected in the 2015 federal election when asked about this said i don't know what auschwitz is i don't know what the holocaust is um i mean what did you make of that this is somebody standing for parliament uh now of course we we have a right to be ignorant about whatever we want to be ignorant about i don't think it's good for a politician i mean i wouldn't vote for a politician like that um i think that you know for better or worse auschwitz has become a symbol of many things that are beyond auschwitz uh there are many other uh atrocities uh in the holocaust itself you have uh mass graves in in in in now the ukraine and belarus full of corpses of of of of two million people probably we don't remember them for one reason or another uh in some way history uh as the spirit of history whatever it is has in some way chosen that this camp is remembered while other things are forgotten and so i think then that that if we live in a society where the drift in the past 70 years has been for auschwitz to become the symbol also of uh of of what humans can do to each other i think that as a as certainly as a politician who is going to be a steward of our civic society of our ability to live together with our disagreements that you should be able to understand this symbol interpret it and if relevant apply it to your in some way to the decisions you have to make as well i mean for the record she she didn't win but she just didn't know right i mean she just didn't know and and i wonder i mean here we are almost three quarters of a century later do we have to accept the fact that uh in spite of the best efforts of um people like you who've devoted your lives to this genocides in general and this one in particular are simply the fact is going to recede from our memory as time goes on yeah now i i fear that there will be other genocides they will be lining up in the future to take the place of the holocaust in in our memory i don't i don't want to say that we always need to remember this particular genocide i think that that between when it happened and now certainly it has certain let's call it exemplary characteristics uh but i fear also that this that it's not necessarily so that a hundred years from now we will be labeled to look back at the 21st century that we're going to say that you know auschwitz was still in some way a symbol of the worst that happened can happen to humanity uh i'm a cheerful pessimist but i am a pessimist so uh i hope that a century from now auschwitz will still be the worst uh that our children and children children will have to remember but i'm not sure about that as they say from your lips to god's ears if you believe in god and that'll be another conversation for another day thank you for this standby we're going to continue our conversation in just a moment help tvo create a better world through the power of learning visit tvo.org and make a tax deductible donation today

Channel: TVO Today

Views: 86,425

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Holocaust, Second World War

Id: jocFLOQ81wk

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017