IN a May Day article in The Nation (“History and the Holocaust), you state: “As the latest incarnation of a paranoid tradition, Holocaust deniers are by nature impervious to fact.”

On November 10, 1988, The New York Times carried carried an article to mark the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Time ‘Too Painful’ to Remember,” Ari L. Goldman). It included this recollection by Morris Hubert, a onetime Buchenwald inmate:

“IN the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. “Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.”

  “But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor.

  “It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, “but it happened.”

And here again we see him: The “paranoid” denier “impervious to [the] fact” that the Nazis installed a cage at Buchenwald containing a bear and an eagle who worked in tandem to serially murder Jews.

If only there was a pill that could be administered to cure such doubt, to quash this recalcitrance to admit to material truths. Not yet, alas.

Sincerely yours,

Orest Slepokura
Strathmore, Alberta