Elie Wiesel imposter?
There is reasonable doubt and there is unreasonable certainty. One is a sign of scientific virtue, the other of dogmatic vice. I accused Mattogno of being unreasonably certain that Elie lied about his number. Others are equally certain that the Auschwitz number 7713 did belong to Elie, their evidence being that he said it did. They are also quite certain that 7712 belonged to his father Shlomo , their evidence being that Elie said it did. They are entirely confident that the brothers Lazar born 1913 and Abram number A7712 are inventions or false memories fabricated by Gruener, so confident that they feel no need to prove it. Why bother to prove something that cannot be rationally doubted, if it is believed only by a few crackpots? It matters not to them that no unproblematic document places Elie in Auschwitz or Monowitz or Buchenwald. It matters not to them that one canot fit these documents to Elie without the noteworthy coincidence that the only surviving camp records of his birthdate are both products of clerical error. It matters not to them that Elie’s present signature seems unrecognisable. It matters not to them that the only known documents assign the number 7712 to a man fourteen years older. It matters not to them that the only known document assigns the number 7712 to a man named Abram - just as the fellow Monowitz survivor Gruener said it did.
As a matter of fact these things don’t matter much for me, the difference being that I have set out my reasons why I don’t think they matter much. To be rational is to give reasons. A crucial coincidence of clerical errors, though unlikely, seems less farfetched than any imposture scenario I have seen. Signatures do deteriorate and evolve. I regard the whole tattoo business as absurd, for reasons given. It is the only presence of an Abram 7712 that leaves me with a twinge of doubt. I am not just saying that this datum is an unexplained puzzle. Unexplained puzzles need not create the least twinge of doubt. Even if scientists had so far failed to explain why a flag appeared to flutter in a windless moonscape (I know they have explained it, so don’t write in) then this and kindred phenomena would remain no more than unexplained puzzles. For me they would not be enough to create reasonable doubt about the moonlanding, because the countervailing arguments are so powerful. The really powerful arguments in history are not technical or forensic but psychological and social. In this case, for example, the argument that the Americans would never attempt (successfully, it is claimed) to hoodwink the Soviet space agencies with tricks that failed hoodwink amateurs who live with their mothers That alone does it for me, but I don’t intend to discuss the matter. Here I intend to discuss only Wiesel.
If the transport lists are merely to count as an unexplained puzzle, what are the powerful countervailing arguments? One can hardly argue, in refutation of Gruener, that no certified and sanctified survivor of Monowitz – which was indeed a place of terrible suffering - would ever need to publish tall tales about it. It would be impossible to demonstrate generally that the only Auschwitz imposters are the ones that have already been found out. It would be even harder to demonstrate that Elie is a man with an unswerving passion for truth and contempt for fame and riches. Has anyone tried? That would for me be a powerful countervailing argument. Character is evidence. It might count for much if it were possible to connect Eli with the trade of locksmithing but as far as I know this has not been done. Monowitz, an industrial plant with 10,000 slaves and a million padlocks, would certainly have needed a locksmith’s workshop. But if he and his is father did land relatively easy work I suspect he is likely to have suppressed the fact in order to maximise his suffering in the camp - as compared with the likes of easy riders like Primo Levi. It might count for something if Elie and Levi could be proved to have had many meetings and talked over old times back in the camp. But any account of such meetings is likely to come from Elie himself and the agenda for such meetings would probably be Elie’s own spiritual journey, which is his favourite topic. However, anyone in a big population gets to know about 150 people or so, and some of Elies Monowitz friends have probably survived to offer a convincing reminiscence of him.
Betrayed by memory, I find that I misrepresented Faurisson. Faurisson’s argument is simply that Elie cannot be regarded as a witness to the gas chambers, because he hardly mentions them and working in Buna-Monowitz he would have been far away from them - even supposing they existed. Faurisson was not making an argument from silence.
Though not a witness to gas chambers, Elie was indeed a witness to a literal holocaust. He claimed on his first day of induction in Birkenau to have seen a lorry load of babies thrown into a fire and so felt an impulse for suicide in order to avoid an agonising death in the flames. It would be unreasonable to doubt this. Burning people alive was a frequent habit of the SS, apparently, as many forgotten postwar trial testimonies show. One English judge got into hot water for refusing to believe it.