I'm concerned about the deniers. Their numbers are building. So I've been reading what they are saying and what evidence exists since the Holocaust. I only have a little from personal experience, what has been told to me by survivors. I went to a Holocaust Memorial at a Jewish synagogue in about 1990. It was a lovely service. Various survivors would tell their stories and concluded with "it really happened."
I found myself getting angry that they had to be on the defensive about unspeakable horrors. The next day I went to my neighbor who had fought in Europe in WWII (may he rest in peace). I told him what people were saying and asked him if it really happened. He said he liberated one of the camps (and I wish I'd asked him more specific questions) and that (emphatically) "you could SMELL it from miles away". He was kind of a harsh, bitter person and maybe was incapable of having much affection toward anyone, just saying this to say he would have no particular ax to grind about the Jews.
All I have would be considered hearsay or second hand. It's just important that as much evidence is preserved as possible. I'm reading a wonderful series of books by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal, telling of amazing coincidences and how the very few were saved among many other indicents not all involving the Holocaust. One involved 911 and Jews who needed a quorum to pray before going to work in the towers. They needed 10, and finally an old man appeared. As he said the prayers too slowly, the others were late for work, they heard the first explosion. When the initial shock subsided, they looked for the tenth old man. He had disappeared and they never knew who he was or where he went.
These are Orthodox Jews but the books include stories of Christians or no faith at all. Anyway, they have prayers they say for certain occasions. I always thought God had abandoned the Jews but that is not so. They pray for their dead. Some amazing results have come as a result of the prayers of observant Jews. It's refreshing and inspiring.
One of the stories gives the details of how Steven Spielberg came to produce Schindler's List. With the proceeds he started a Shoah Foundation which may be worthwhile. He had to be cajoled and persuaded to make that movie as he had little knowledge of the Holocaust nor interest in it initially. An Oscar for his movies had eluded him. One of the Jewish man who persuaded him to produce the movie (a book had already been written) predicted he would win an Oscar for it and so he did. Multiple ones.
My father’s cousin dug into our past and so I came to find out my great 3x or whatever grandfather changed the surname when he arrived here from England (originally from Hungary.) Anyways, I tried to do some more research myself armed with the information cousin passed down and the original name is Jewish origins and there were some listed as having perished at concentration camps. Wish I could hear their stories.
The Holocaust happened . It was not a ‘’Jewish hoax’’. The Wansee Conference happened. It was there, in January of 1942 that Reinhard Heydrich, acting on orders of his boss Heinrich Himmler organized all levels of the German government,, the military, including the Wehrmacht and of course the SS and Gestapo , the German railways, and the many levels of Nazi bureaucracy to begin concentrating Jews not only in Germany but Jews in the occupied territories to be put into central locations, ghettos, so as to begin their eventual ‘’resettlement’’ to the East to ‘’work camps’’. It’s certainly far easier to kill people if at first you can beguile them into believing they were going somewhere to be doing something useful. It was at this time that construction of gas chambers and crematoriums began at Auschwitz, Treblinka , Majdanek, Sobibor and other camps. This was done because the mass shooting of Jews had proved to be too time consuming, it was difficult because their victims knew right away what was happening and the German soldiers, the ‘’Einzatgruppen’’, mostly reservists , men in their late thirties and forties found this method of killing Jews, ‘’distressing’’.