So It Was Indeed!

So it was indeed!

Dear readers!

You might wonder at the strange and unusual title of this book. For an answer, I will quote the words of Herman Goldberg, a boy of fifteen years (see the story “The bathing crew”), who already in the winter of 1943/44 in the Dundaga extermination camp said: “There’s no point staying alive. There’s no need for testimony. When 40 or 50 years have passed, new generations will arise and no one will want to know or hear of what happened. More than that, no one will want to believe that all this really took place…”

Now, fifty years later, we have come to know that there was prophecy in the boy’s words.  For there are today many who are called “scientists”, possessed of honorable degrees, who partake in “historical research” and draw seemingly reasoned conclusions that the Holocaust never was and never happened, that it is a Jewish fairy tale, intended to trick the world, to extort monies from Germany and earn the sympathy of the world and the goodwill of nations. These “men of science” have no shame in printing books and publishing articles in which they not only cast doubt on the dimensions of the Holocaust, but completely deny its existence.

There recently appeared in England a book by a historian and author named David Irving in which he determines that the Holocaust is a fraud, that in reality it never took place. We are witness to similar phenomena also in the United States, the world’s great land of freedom and democracy, and in many other countries.

This falsification has served me as an impulse to contribute my book as an additional weight on the scales of historical justice. I know that the weight of my memories is negligible. But even the proofs intended to verify many great and important events in human history, do they not also consist of countless testimonies and small incidents such as those recounted here?

If only this book of mine could be one of millions of grains of sand in the enormous tombstone that we owe to the Holocaust and to our brethren who were destroyed in it.

1993, Rehovot, Israel

Avraham Shpungin