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Movies vs. Reality

(Wall Street Journal) Claudia Rosett - Mel Gibson's new movie opened last week in the venerable Polish city of Krakow, playing to a rapt audience. Forty miles west of Krakow is Auschwitz. Some places need visiting by every generation, and not solely because there are crackpots at the extreme, such as Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, who would have us believe that the Holocaust was mostly fiction (his logic being, apparently, that the Nazis lacked the fuel to burn the bodies of six million Jews). At Auschwitz and Birkenau some 1.5 million human beings were murdered, most of them Jews. Those not dispatched immediately to the gas chambers served as slave laborers, usually dying within months, if not weeks, from starvation, exposure, overwork, and disease. I must assume Gibson's movie set out to depict what can be felt everywhere in the stark remains and devastating silence at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The writer is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute.
2004-03-11 00:00:00
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