A knock on the door startled me. It was the fall of 1993, and I was in my office at the college, reviewing my lecture notes for the day. When I opened the door, I didn’t recognize any of the four students standing there. One young woman was crying, and the other woman and two men looked angry. I motioned for them to come into my office, and I asked them what had happened. Their answers came out in a torrent of words: “Professor Stein? Can we talk to you? Our professor questioned how many Jews died in the Holocaust.”
They showed me a handout written by the professor: “The media theme that six million Jews died in concentration camps has been dropped to about 1.5 million. Given the technical questions surrounding air photos and the transportation and crematoria capacity, a figure between 700,000 to 800,000 appears more realistic.”
The professor, they said, had argued that the blockade by the British and American armies was responsible for the deaths in the camps. He said that the Germans did not have enough food for themselves, so they could not feed the Jews. He concluded that it wasn’t Germany’s fault. I was stunned.
“Did any of you challenge him?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t let us ask him anything.”
I knew their professor was a fan of Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini; he had their photos in his office, and he even organized a “Day of Appreciation for Mussolini” at our college. Now it seemed that my colleague was also a Holocaust denier.
I wanted to know more. Apparently, the professor was lecturing on films and television that distort the truth. His example was Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, which had just been released. Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jewish men and women by employing them in his factories. The professor asserted that the film was mostly fiction—an assertion that made all four students angry. One student’s grandmother had miraculously survived Auschwitz. Over the years, she had told her granddaughter about the horrors of that place. When the student tried to tell the professor about her grandmother, he cut her off, saying hers was only one person’s story and that he needed much more data before making a conclusion.
The four students, all of them Jewish, were very concerned that some other students might not realize their professor was distorting the truth. They asked what it would take to get him fired for lying to students. I reassured them that the Holocaust had indeed happened and that six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. I also mentioned the extensive evidence and scholarship documenting the atrocities of the Holocaust. I suggested looking at information at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And then I told them about my own relatives who were murdered and about my father, who, like the student’s grandmother, had survived.
Another student wanted to know why the professor did not let them speak. He asked whether academic freedom applied only to faculty but not to students. I said that academic freedom is supposed to protect the right of professors to express their views on topics in which they are experts. Then I added that academic freedom should also protect students’ rights to challenge professors. Academic freedom does not mean professors can ridicule students or impose their own personal or political views. A college classroom should be a safe place to express ideas.
I mentioned Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who asserted that the most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. My gut feeling was that their professor sounded like a Holocaust denier: a person who believes the Holocaust never happened or wasn’t so extensive, who questions how many Jews were killed, and who distorts history.
That disturbing day in the fall of 1993 changed the direction of my personal and academic life. The incident upset me deeply, and I realized I had a responsibility to act. I needed and wanted to learn more about the Holocaust, its victims and perpetrators, and about my own family’s experiences. Mostly, I wanted to have more conversations with my dad, but he was no longer alive. I wished we had shared his experiences and the tragedy he lived with following the killing of his mother, his siblings, and other relatives during the Holocaust.
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