Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"Nizkor, wash your mouth out with THIS!
"So the soap myths are a straw dog, eh? And a dead one at that, you say? Well, somebody tell that to the New York Times and then try and remove the horrific image this old lie has implanted in thousands of impressionable young minds just from the efforts of this one German-hating propagandist.
"This stuff is sick.
"For those who've been off the planet for a while and do not know the context of the above remarks, an issue that's been raised here several times is the continued use of the false story that the Germans produced large quantities of soap made from fat recovered from the bodies of dead Jews. The bars were supposed to have been marked with initials 'RJF' indicating the proud fact that it was made from Jewish fat, and a number of such gruesome objects did in fact, do in fact, exist.
"They are brought forth in reverential awe to elicit tears, wails, or hushed horror. I mean, for god's sake, you might be holding someone's loved-one in your hand!! There's part of a _person_ in there! (As Herman Wouk put it in The Caine Mutiny, people like Queeg were of value to humanity because they kept Hitler in check long enough to marshall real resistance while Herman Goering washed his fat butt with Barney Greenwald's mother--one of the very many references in popular fiction.) Some bars so marked were given solemn burials, others occupied places of reverence in museum and travelling displays, and there was a hot market for the few that existed on the memorabilia market.
"I don't know who first 'officially' blew the cover on this (not that any reasonable and even slightly skeptical person ever ever found reason to believe it) but it supposedly died for sure when Yad Vashem threw it out with the bathwater and disavowed the story as false.
"Yet, despite the rejection of both academia and the more upscale flame keepers, the story lived on in the media, movies, fiction, and "eyewitness" accounts, wherein the same people who will swear to you that they saw gas chambers proclaim just as shrilly that 'I saw this soap with my own eyes!!!'
"(The way it should be stated is, 'with the same eyes that saw the gas chambers.' That one I'll buy.)
"Now, when this issue has been raised as an example of the lack of good faith of the orthodox soldiers in this group, they won't simply say, 'Yes. That is correct. The soap story was accepted as truth for years, with many eyewitnesses supporting its existence, yet it turned out to be totally false.'
"What is instead offered as a response is as follows:
"(1) 'There were soap making experiments performed in Poland, therefore you can not say 'it' [italics added] is totally untrue. '
"(2) 'Oh, here they come again with that same tired old silly argument which has no bearing on anything. Yes, there were exaggerations about how much was made, but there were soap making experi....'(see text in part 1).
"A response to this has been that 'it' does not refer to the extremely dubious stories about an alleged soap experiment, 'it' refers to the common and still commonly circulated story that the German government engaged in commerical production of soap from the corpses of Jewish murder victims from the camps.
"(The same afterward debunked story that was circulated by the British in WWI to demonize the Hun, with other ethnicities making up the corpse fodder--including the Germans' own troops!!)
"Sometimes after this is said, a great ignorance sets in.
'What story? Show us an example. You're seeing things again, ranting about nothing. That's all these fools can bring up because they have nothing else to offer. . .'
"Well, it's disingenuous at best to pretend not to know what is being referred to. The legitimate concern is that such fantastic dreck serves to foster hatred for Germany and Germans among the people who view it, and it should be roundly and publicly denounced, not just quietly disavowed by a few academics.
"Why isn't it? Because to do so would be to admit to a chink in the holy armor. The moving finger writ, and damned if it didn't writ a mistake in that stone wall there. No! Worse than a mistake, a lie! God forbid, so to speak.
"Why a lie? Because from the same group of 'eyewitnesses' who swear to having seen gas chambers come the ones who swear to having seen the RJF stamped soap as well, and not some isolated bar, but even of having to bathe with the stuff, and lots of other lurid details which are pure fantasy.
"This is not what you call a mistake, folks. It's lying.
"'It' is a lie born of a justifiable sense of having been wronged, combined with unjustifiable and undying hatred, and 'it' is kept alive and kicking by the same support mechanism to this very day.
"Some who support the story indirectly (by refusing to acknowledge its lack of validity simply and directly) do so as a matter of intellectually dishonest principle ('. . . never give the bastards an inch, be they right or wrong!'). Some do it out of unreasoning hatred, and maybe a few do it for the same reasons that motivate the schlemiel/carnival huckster (named Kohn) to drag his sorry piece of forged filth around and show it to children accompanied by its vicious bigoted lie.
"Now, please put this one in the Nizkor file with all the doublespeak already there, and don't bother people again with denials that the lie continues serving its horrific defamatory purpose after more than fifty years, spread by people who not only ought to know better, but do."
(Posted by David Thomas)
Thought for the Day:
"For all of us in Oswiecim, the presence of the camps is like living with a permanent illness."
(Polish businesswoman Miroslawa Nykie of Oswiecim, formerly Auschwitz, when asked how she felt about her run-down town receiving a much-needed face lift)