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and, I was told, he would die choked by his own organs.
With thick sounds he tried to tell me about his life in French, in Yiddish,
which was a bewilderment to me, in English. He had been a prisoner. There
had been experiments, meshuganehs, making meshuganeh experiments with
knives, no anaesthetics, and he was one who lived. God alone could
understand. Even
God
couldn't understand.
He wanted it to be known. He thought it could be written down.
I listened, but mostly I watched, astonished by the physical process of
his trying to get words past his tongue. It was a stumbling breathless
procedure. His head looked as if it were carved out of a block of encrusted
bone.
The condition is called
Acromegaly.
Couldn't something be done for him?
No, they said. Perhaps his story could be told; perhaps someone could be
found to tell it. But nothing could be done for his body. He was the result ofa
doctor's sport and imagination, and there were no doctors to undo those
games.
There is a story about Claire Booth Luce complaining that she was
bored with hearing about the Holocaust. AJewish friend of hers said he
perfectly understood her sensitivity in the matter; in fact, he had the same
sense of repetitiveness and fatigue, hearing so often about the Crucifixion.
***
A few years ago I was put on the mailing list of a Holocaust revisionist
mystic in Los Angeles. In a long xeroxed letter ("copies to Opinion
Leaders"), he described driving up one of the barren mountains looking out
over the sprawling city, studying the lights below, realizing that many of
those lights represented Jewish houses and businesses, and suddenly being
struck by an insight which he found overwhelming. He was out of a job, and
there were so many Jews out there, living, working, breeding! If there really
had been a Holocaust, why were they there?
He knew, he explained in a series of bulletins, that this revelation
would make difficulties in his life, especially since now he was called by duty
to devote all his energies to the cause of the truth he had discovered one
sleepless night on a mountaintop overlooking a city crammed with Jews. But
the Truth demanded to be told. Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin would
understand. And he had found a little contemporary circle of colleagues,
others who in different fashions had come to knowledge. They would carry
the battle to the enemy and the misled sheep ofAmerica.
Okay, he's crazy, he's paranoid, absurd. But also he had comrades in
