The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Deceit & Misrepresentation
The Techniques of Holocaust Denial

Schindler's List
& "Revisionist Scholarship"


[Continued]

Keneally says that no event is intentionally fictitious; at times he reconstructed dialog - so it is fictitious to the extent that "quotes" are not true quotes. Keneally may be mistaken, or one of his sources may be mistaken or lying, but the designation of the book as a novel does not in this case mean that the events described never happened. Wikoff produces no substantive evidence to cast doubt on Keneally's story, or the survivors who related their experiences to him.

The first Touchstone edition (paperback) of the novel "Schindler's List," which I purchased in March 1994, contains the following: "This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entire coincidental." [11]

This is standard boilerplate in the publishing industry. Again true to denier form, Wikoff reads the title page, but completely ignores Keneally's "Author's Note." Keneally's references to Goeth, Schindler, and the labor camp are *not* coincidental, *not* products of the author's imagination, but the result of interviews with survivors of the camp.

This passage was removed from the second and third printings of the Touchstone edition! Obviously the publishers feel the need to obscure the fact that Keneally's "Schindler's List" is anything but history.[12]

Perhaps they realized that the standard boilerplate was the lie. Wikoff forms a dark conspiracy theory.

Why don't you "holocaust" cultists come up with some real primary sources concerned the alleged crimes of Commandant Amon Goeth? For instance, why don't you quote from the transcript of Goeth's trial? When are you going to do your homework? [13]

The issue is that the deniers didn't do their homework when they attempted to claim that the map and photos *prove* that the incident depicted was impossible. Wikoff tries to distract from this by pretending that the subject under discussion is an attempt to prove that Goeth did commit the crime of shooting a prisoner from the front of a house in which he lived, rather than a failed attempt to prove that he didn't.

3) The burden of proof is upon the accuser. If we are to accept that Goeth really did shoot down inmates for fun or just because his bathtub was not cleaned well enough, then the "holocaust" cultists have to prove it. [14]

This is another classic denier technique: shift the burden of proof (and then adopt an impossible standard of proof). As far as proving Goeth's crimes, he was tried, convicted, and executed by the Poles.

[Continued]


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