In 2009 I was awarded a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I anticipated a quiet six months during which I would be surrounded by outstanding colleagues and extensive scholarly resources. Relieved of all teaching and administrative responsibilities, I planned to use the time to work on my book on the Adolf Eichmann trial, which took place 50 years ago in April.
But something happened that summer that brought home to me, more than ever, the complex relationship between the historical past and the burning present. I’d felt it before, of course, when I was sued in Britain for libel by David Irving, the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier, for calling him a denier. The three years of legal preparation, the ensuing three-month trial, and years of appeals not only turned my personal and academic life upside down but forever linked me to the fight against denial.
What happened on June 10, 2009, however, brought home even more viscerally the urgency of the story I was trying to tell.
Around noon on that day, I came down from my office, on the fifth floor, and headed to a classroom where I was to deliver a seminar on Holocaust denial. As I walked past the main entrance, I noticed the long line of school groups, summer tourists, and other visitors waiting to pass through the metal detector and be checked by the security officers on duty.
A few minutes later, just when I had just begun my talk, a series of sharp blasts rang out. Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security staff and a man beloved by many, had seen an elderly man approaching the entrance. Eager to be of help, Special Police Officer Johns reached out and pushed open the heavy glass door. The man—a racist, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier—raised a rifle from beneath his coat and shot Officer Johns, who died from his injuries. A far greater tragedy was avoided when two of his colleagues fired back and brought the shooter down.
Most mornings, including that day, Officer Johns was on duty at the front door when I arrived. Often he would kid me about the piles of books I always seemed to be carrying. How ironic that he was killed trying to do a kindness.
Suddenly the threat of Holocaust deniers became very real. A man’s obsession with the “myth” of the Holocaust had led him to commit homicide.
The next day the museum was closed as the police and FBI officials gathered evidence. I received special clearance to return to my office to retrieve my personal possessions. As I walked through the library and research offices, I was struck by how normal everything looked: backpacks and briefcases strewn about, laptops open, mugs of coffee on tables. The only thing missing was the people. It was as if they had been eliminated. The effect was eerie.
As I watched law-enforcement officials do their work from my office window, I began to think in a different way about the connections among the Eichmann trial, Holocaust denial, and the actions of the man who shot Stephen Tyrone Johns. The man’s ruthlessness, the devotion of the museum guards, and, indeed, the mandate of the museum itself extend the arguments made at Eichmann’s trial, a trial that in many ways is still going on and that is vital to our understanding of not just the Holocaust but genocide in general.
Deep-seated hatreds, whether inculcated from youth or adopted later in life, can lead a seemingly normal person to commit horrendously abnormal acts. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the “chief operating officers” of the Holocaust, laid out in full graphic relief the lesson of what happens when anti-Semitism or, for that matter, any virulent enduring prejudice becomes an accepted norm.
In contrast to the Nuremberg tribunals, where the murder of the Jews was treated as a sidebar—one example, among many others, of crimes against humanity—the trial of Eichmann, in Jerusalem, placed the attempt to annihilate European Jewry front and center. The other striking difference between Nuremberg and the Eichmann proceedings was that at the former, the prosecution relied almost exclusively on documents and called few survivors to give testimony. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, more than 100 survivors testified. They had spoken before, but never had their words received such media coverage.
The trial gave these survivors what my colleague at Emory University, Shoshana Felman, has so aptly called “semantic authority.” The story they had to tell was and is of tremendous importance, not just to Jews but to the entire world. Their ability to speak in the first-person singular—to say I was there, and this is what happened to me—is a powerful response to deniers’ falsehoods. It made the genocide real and brought home in a deeply personal way the terrible cost of anti-Semitism.
After the museum shooting, I saw more vividly than ever the nexus that linked the Final Solution, the efforts of deniers, and the killing of Officer Johns with the message of the Eichmann trial: All of those actions were motivated by an abiding anti-Semitism. While the person who shot Officer Johns might be dismissed as a lone crazy man, he was also the product of an ideology that lives in different forms around the world: one that despises Jews, sees them as a source of evil, and is willing to take up weapons—including those of mass destruction—to eliminate them.
The shots at the museum had rung out just as I was saying to the seminar participants, “Denial is a danger, but we must be careful of overreacting and panicking.” I wanted them to understand that, while deniers pose a continuing threat that must be monitored and fought, they should not be accorded too much importance. Deniers’ threat is more insidious than immediate, and I did not want to create a false sense of panic.
Yet now a beloved man lay dead at the hands of a denier. Maybe the threat was greater than I had imagined.
It is not just in relation to the Holocaust that deniers try to ply their wares. Whenever deep-seated prejudices encounter inconvenient history, there will be those who will try to deny or discount that history. That is what the Turks have done with the Armenian genocide. The toxic legacy of denial was brought home to me in an encounter I had a number of years ago at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial in Jerusalem to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. While there I met a group of young Rwandans. They had come to be trained in how to conduct oral testimonies with the survivors of the 1994 genocide that had decimated their country. Anxious to ensure the Rwandans’ comfort, and aware that their lingua franca was French, Yad Vashem had invited a group of French and Belgian Holocaust survivors to join them for dinner. By the end of the dinner, the two groups of survivors had bonded so strongly that the elderly survivors took the young Rwandans under their wing, invited them to their homes, introduced them to their families, and began to build personal friendships.
One afternoon I sat with some of the Rwandans outside of Yad Vashem looking out over the Judean Hills. They told me of their experiences during the genocide. They also related that now certain Rwandans, particularly those associated with the murderers, were denying that the genocide had taken place: “They claim this was not genocide. They argue that it was simply an expression of age-old rivalries. Just a tribal spat. They deny and dismiss what was done to us.”
When the conversation turned to the training the Rwandans were receiving at Yad Vashem, I was again reminded that one of the most potent antidotes to the denier is the voice of the survivor. One young man, whose entire family had been murdered, said to me: “I want to tell my story and help my fellow Rwanda survivors tell theirs. Just like the Holocaust survivors. I want people to listen to me as they listen to them. It is the only way the world will believe.”
Despite the inherent contradiction in his next statement, I understood what he meant and recognized the passion with which he said it. I had heard it many times before from Holocaust survivors: “Pour les genérations à venir—ceux qui n'étaient pas là—sont obligés de se souvenir. Et nous qui étions là, doivent leur dire.” “Future generations, those who were not there, must remember. And we who were there must tell them.”
I dedicated my book about Eichmann to Officer Johns and to the two officers who prevented the shooting from assuming greater proportions. Their sacrifice and heroism, I realized, are part of the story I was telling about evil and the necessary response to evil that we forget at our peril. Though we might wish to see the Shoah and the hatred from which it emanated relegated to the past, they are, in fact, very much part of the present. The events of June 10, 2009, remind us of that fact.
