COMMENTS
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that Anne Frank's diary was flawed. Now this book has served to
introduce several postwar generations of teenagers to the story of the
Holocaust. The demonstration that Anne Frank's diary is a forgery
would, for Faurisson, increase any suspicion about the existence of
the Holocaust itself.
Revisionism: why now?
It
is probably not accidental that the revisionist claim of the
nonexistence of the Holocaust gains an audience at exactly the time
when there is a growing search in France for a genuine renewed
Jewish identity, and when in the worldwide Jewish community there
is an immense revival of the memory of the Holocaust, epitomized
by the recent gathering inJerusalem-"the first and the last"-ofthe
survivors of the Holocaust. For many years, the events of the Holo–
caust were passed over in silence, except by scholars and a few in–
domitable spirits, such as Elie Wiesel. A sort of amnesia, half delib–
erate and half unconscious, seemed to have overtaken everyone.
The survivors remained silent either because no one would listen to
them (as many today confess), because they were unable to convey
the horror, or because they (we) again had to learn to live normally.
Feelings of culpability (for having been passive or impotent to
prevent anything) served to enforce a censorship on memory as well
as to encourage anti-Semitic tendencies. Today, forty years later,
the Holocaust is just a part of history. The release of memory among
the survivors, who are now all well over forty, offers the last chance
to bear witness to what really happened. But as time helped reacti–
vate memory, by the same token, it loosened the censorship against
anti-Semitism, and created an opening through which revisionism
could creep in.
Parallel to these psycho-social processes one also has to consider
the historical and political climate of these last few years . Indeed, the
growing strength of revisionism does not occur in a political
vacuum. France, in particular, from 1977 on was suffering from
growing unemployment and economic crises. Until the recent elec–
tion, the left had been in a moral and political decline. The right, the
"Nouvelle Droite,"
was growing. Racism was on the increase. The im–
punity with which neo-Nazis and other (sometimes unidentified)
groups were able to operate, bears witness to the kind of freedom
that existed for the right. At the time of the bombing of the syna–
gogue on the Rue Copernic, there were well over 200 unpunished
attacks.
