The Holocaust and Me.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said I’ve been lucky in my life. My luck has taken many forms. Sometimes it was meeting the right girl at the right time or having a job that let me grow at my own pace and rewarded me at every step. I’ve been a witness to auto racing history. And  because I was lucky enough to be born in 1939 I’m a witness to another kind of history. My first living memory is the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii. The last time I saw my Mom and Dad as a young couple in love and dancing was VE Day, May 8^th, 1945.  When I was 10 or so my Mom and Dad  had had an eclectic group of friends. Everybody from University Professors to oilfield hands gathered around our Texas table. We ate BBQ and pot luck, the adults solved all the worlds problems. While us kids set off firecrackers and dug for worms so we could walk down to Buffalo Bayou to catch fish. One of the regular couples was a Cajun guy who was one of the D-Day heroes and his French wife. He wooed and won her with his Cajun French. She bonded with my Mom because of Mom’s sketchy French ancestry, and I began to notice that French girls were pretty, because she was. One night a single guy showed up, don’t have any idea who invited him, he was a Polish émigré engineer who like a lot of people came to Texas to work in the oil business. We ate good food and lots of cold beer flowed. At a point our Cajun friend remarked that he and his wife had just returned from France and Germany. They went to show their young son off to the French grandparents and revisit his charge across France and into Germany with the US Army. He made what seemed like an innocent comment about the speed with which the Germans were rebuilding their country (there were geopolitical reasons for this and the rest of us helped a lot). The Polish guy stood up and said something to the effect of “I’ll show you about your precious Germans”. Then he turned his back and hiked up his polo shirt, His upper back was a mass of scars, Seems he was in a work camp in Poland, didn’t get out of the way of the Camp Commander quite fast enough and was whipped from his calves to his shoulders. Then he had to show up for work the next day and fill his quota or be sent across the road to the gas chamber and the ovens. So he showed up. And worked. He said “I won’t show you the rest out of deference to the ladies but all my back is the same”

Now there are active Holocaust deniers in all walks of life including the Academic community and with the death of Elie Wiesel virtually the last well known witness to this black chapter in human history is gone. I’ve been face to face with some of the deniers and they pretty much run to a type Terminally stupid. They say stuff like “The Holocaust never happened but if it did it was a good idea” or variations on that theme. They ignore the non Jewish victims, in the millions in Eastern Europe and the 350,000 ethnic Germans who were either opponents of Hitler or Retarded. They ignore the Russians who suffered 85% of the European casualities.  And 10% of the Austrians. People like me who saw it second hand will be gone soon enough and the weak kneed among us may well defer to the deniers. If Israel is destroyed it will be the end of Western Civilization and it will go with a whimper. Glad I’m the age I am. And don’t have grandchildren.