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Documents refuting Holocaust denial

2.) Smith writes, "Elie Wiesel claims in All Rivers Run to the Sea, 'I read [Immanuel Kant's] The Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish.''' Smith continues, "Kant's Critique has not been translated into Yiddish. Here again, EW did not tell the truth. " But selections from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason had been translated into and published into Yiddish in pre-war Warsaw — I have a photocopy of the title page before me as I write. After the passage of 50 years, Wiesel misnamed the Critique he had read in 1945, but his minor slip hardly justifies Smith's claim that "EW did not tell the truth."

3.) Smith writes. "EW claims that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, 'geysers of blood' spurted from their grave for 'months' afterward." Wiesel's words are these: "Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses." Nowhere did Elie Wiesel claim to see geysers of blood, only that he heard these reported.

4.) Smith claims, "Elie Wiesel as an authority on 'hate' " and Smith says he counseled "on how to perpetuate a loathing for Germans." No fair-minded person can read Wiesel's "Appointment with Hate" and reach that conclusion. Rather, it is a penetrating analysis of his own reactions as he visited Germany for the first time following the war. He entered Germany hating Germans and ended his visit finding it was impossible to hate. In that article, he went on to explain why Jews are not inclined to hate and why they did not engage in acts of vengeance against the Germans.

Moreover, following his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Peace Elie Wiesel has used the substance of his prize to sponsor conferences in the United Stales and Moscow and elsewhere on "The Anatomy of Hate:" His consistent theme at those conferences, and I have participated in two, has been to denounce hate as a corrosive, destructive element in human nature that must be replaced with understanding and hope.

The quotation cited by Smith doesn't even support his libel. In the quote, Elie Wiesel does not say that every Jew "should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy virile hate " for Germans. Rather he said they "should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the Germans." As the Nazi generation has passed from the scene, what Germans personify and what persists in the Germans has changed. What Germans personified in 1945 is not what a different generation of Germans personify today.

Elie Wiesel was invited by the President and Chancellor of Germany to speak in Berlin on January 27, 2000, the day of the remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz. That address was notable for the absence of hate and the plea for remembrance and forgiveness on which reconciliation between Germans and Jews can be possible In that address Wiesel commented