Soon no one will be left to speak out against those who deny the reality of the Nazi death camps, says colin bostock-smith |
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It's disturbing to watch those madmen as they gather in Tehran, eager to deny that during the late 1930s and early 1940s there was a determined attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.
Those invited to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative two-day conference - Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - include David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the revisonist author David Irving, in jail in Vienna for Holocaust denial.
More disturbing is the realisation that the people who actually witnessed the death camps, who freed the skeletons, who bulldozed the corpses into pits... those people are now dying themselves.
Before too long, the only evidence that the Holocaust ever took place will be found in |
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| The people who witnessed the death camps, freed the skeletons . . . are now dying themselves |
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records. Then the Holocaust-deniers will come into their own; there will be no witnesses left to refute the claim, made by Duke and Irving and others like them, that it was all a lie.
My godmother, Nancy, was one such witness. She was a pretty and charismatic woman, and she was an ambulance driver in the first British army convoy to enter Belsen.
Before the war, Nancy was something of a free spirit. The youngest daughter of strict parents, she resisted the dual attractions of marriage and a proper career, and instead went on the stage. She was, apparently, not much good on it. But she had fun. Late nights. Loads of men. She was a bright young thing. She revelled in life. She sparkled.
When hostilities broke out, she joined up, she drove her ambulance, and in the spring of 1945 she drove it into Belsen.
That much I knew as a child. I wanted to know more. But Nancy wasn't telling.
By the time I came to know her, in the early 1950s, she was, to my disappointment, no longer the flighty young thing whom the family remembered. 
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