CLEAR LAKE — Friendswood resident Chaja Verveer, a native of The Netherlands and a Holocaust survivor, was only a year old when she was forced into hiding from the Nazi regime.
At 62, “living with and despite the memories” of two concentration camps, Verveer is outraged by those who question the genocide of 12 million people, half of them Jews.
“Words cannot describe what I feel when I hear that,” she said. “I don’t speak 24 hours a day about being a survivor. I live a normal life, but it’s always there.”
Fueled by the Internet, Holocaust denial is becoming a growing phenomenon mainly in the United States and Europe, and lately in Middle Eastern countries.
Deniers run the gamut. Some people claim the Holocaust was a fabrication to favor Jews and Israel. Others accept Hitler’s Third Reich persecuted Jews, gypsies and others, but contend it never could have developed the killing machine portrayed in books and films. The number of deaths was exaggerated, the testimony of survivors skewed, the gas chambers nonexistent, they say.
Researchers disputing the assertions argue that casting a shadow on the Holocaust is like trying to revive the notion that the Earth is flat.
“The crime is so unspeakable,” said Harry W. Mazal, president of the Holocaust History Project. “There’s so much evidence. It’s amazing anybody survived. They’re living proof of what happened.”
Mazal, 65, will discuss the dangers of denying the Holocaust today at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Deniers, he says, are anti-Semites posing as scholars interested in revisionism.
Originally from Mexico, Mazal lives in San Antonio and owns one of the largest — if not the largest — private collection of books about the Holocaust. Although funded with his own money, his library is open to everyone.
“I have 20,000 books and still don’t know everything,” he said. “Until I know all the names of those who died and see their faces, I don’t think my work will be done.”
Among those books are about 500 denying the Holocaust. Keeping track of the lies is also part of the job, Mazal said.
But he has developed a self-defense mechanism. He assigns those books a number ending in 666, which is associated with the devil. Or he simply places them upside down on the shelves.
During a trip to Germany in 1967, Mazal began wondering what members of his family’s fate could have been had they lived in Europe during World War II. Smoke coming out of factory chimneys triggered painful thoughts.
But it wasn’t really until the 1990s, after putting and end to a successful business career and going into retirement, that he became committed to digging out the facts about the Holocaust.
Researching his Jewish roots, Mazal came across chat rooms. Baffled by comments from Holocaust deniers, he decided to prove them wrong. “When you deny the people who died, you deny those who are alive,” he said.
At first he confronted them directly. Then he joined people from different ethnic and professional backgrounds and in 1998 started the Holocaust History Project.
The 35-member group, made of Jews and non-Jews from all over the world, posts essays and links to other resources about the Holocaust and answers questions over the Internet. The latest endeavor is to scan thousands of mimeographed documents from the Nuremberg trials. Both Mazal and his wife have accepted the responsibility.
The site records about 6 million hits a month. Members credit its success to the group’s golden rule: Just the facts.
Mazal’s research has taken him to concentration and extermination camps all across Europe.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau site, in particular, was a moving experience. “It was covered with beautiful birch trees, birds were singing, the grass was green, the sun was shining,” he said. “I couldn’t conceive that any human being could have been so cruel in such a place.”
Barbara Hales, visiting assistant professor of history at UHCL, is teaching “Holocaust: Film, Literature and History” this semester.
Together with the Anti-Defamation League, she organized the presentation to help her students, future history teachers, understand what’s at stake when people with an agenda try to rewrite history.
“It’s a very sophisticated form of hatemongering,” Hales said. “Once they take away a group’s history, it’s a very dangerous thing. It could happen again.”
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What: Harry Mazal, president of the Holocaust History Project, will discuss the phenomenon of people who deny the Holocaust.
When: 7 p.m. today.
Where: University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Bayou Theater, Bayou Building, second floor.
Cost: Free.
Information: The Holocaust History Project is at www.holocaust-history.org.
