“What are you doing?” Ott asked.
“I’m making a documentary proving the Holocaust was a hoax.”
The Pirates scored another run on the television. Sam looked up, but suddenly Ott was no longer interested in the game. “So you’re the one?” Ott said, amazed. “Brian told me he knew somebody making a documentary about the Holocaust, but he wouldn’t tell me anything more than that.”
Sam turned from the television back to Ott and grinned like the player who had just scored the run. “It’s been a secret,” he said, “but now that I’m finished, Holden thought I should talk to you and maybe you could help. That’s why I wanted to meet with you today.”
“Can I see it?” Ott asked eagerly.
“Sure, soon.”
“Are you some kind of filmmaker? How many documentaries have you done?”
“No,” Sam said. “I was just finishing my Ph.D. in history at Juniata, actually-as a recipient of the Mijares Fellowship. The documentary is my first; it was supposed to be part of my dissertation, but the head of the history department is a Jew and, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t too happy with my subject or my conclusions. He gave me the option of picking a new topic or leaving school without the degree. I left. Holden heard about it and he and The Eleven have been funding the project for two years. Now all I need is some money to get it distributed.”
“Wow,” Ott said. “I give you credit for taking on one of the most controversial issues in the world. But it’s going to be pretty tough convincing people the Holocaust was a hoax. Don’t get me wrong…nothing would make me happier than finding out it was a lie, but I’ve seen the pictures and read the histories. I’ve been to some of the camps too. My family built the incinerators. There’s a lot of evidence out there to disprove.”
Sam frowned. “But you don’t really believe your family, or your countrymen, would murder millions of their own people in cold blood, whether they were Jews or not, do you? It doesn’t make any sense; the Germans weren’t barbarians, they were Europeans. I’m a student of history, Ott, and as a student of history, I’ve learned that the men who leave a mark on this world are the ones who turn black into white and white into black; it’s along the border between opposites that we find the energy to create and to destroy.” Sam crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the table as if illustrating his point. “Atoms split and fuse into world-changing bombs; tectonic plates shift and new continents are formed; politicians make peace into war and war into peace; religions turn sinners into saints and saints into sinners. Have no doubt: the actions of men are good or evil depending upon which quality we choose to see.”
The beer was hitting Ott now, and he was beginning to enjoy himself. He felt a warm tingling in his lips and forehead. Sam wasn’t the extremist he feared after all; he was a rational thinker, a man who used logic and reason. Ott liked philosophical discussions, and the challenge of talking to educated people; he believed he could do well in college, and he was even thinking about going, maybe to a university in Germany. He hadn’t done much of anything in the year since he graduated from high school, except hang out at the mansion in Buffalo or at The Eleven’s training compound in the woods near Huntingdon. Most of The Eleven were just disgruntled local men, unemployed or underemployed; they drove pickup trucks, drank beer, loved guns, and hated Jews and blacks but couldn’t tell you why. Although Hurley was an extremist, he had taken Ott into his confidence and shown him how to use The Eleven’s sophisticated satellite telephones, encryption technology, and remote computer servers that would ensure secure communication when the race war Hurley dreamed of finally started. Maybe, Ott thought, he would study computers in college. He liked the precision and unambiguousness of math, and computers gave him the unconditional acceptance he craved.
“Think about all the great men,” Sam continued. “Einstein demonstrated that mass is energy and energy, mass-that’s turning black into white and white into black. Galileo demonstrated that the earth orbits the sun. Columbus demonstrated that the earth is round. Moses demonstrated that the Law is the only way, then Jesus came along and demonstrated that love is the only Law, and later the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, came along and convinced the world that the Law is the only love. All black into white and white into black. In the entire history of the human race, of all the billions of people who have lived and died, we remember only a few thousand at most. These are the men who demolished prevailing beliefs and formed new worlds using contradiction as their chisel. That’s why they’re remembered… and that’s how I want to be remembered.”
“Interesting,” Ott said. “I agree with you, but that still doesn’t prove the Holocaust was a hoax.”
“Two outs,” Sam said, glancing up at the television. “I know you, Ott,” Sam said. “I know what you want. I’m just like you.”
Ott looked down, embarrassed.
“I’m not a religious zealot, and neither are you” Sam continued. “We’re practical men. My mother was a Roman Catholic, and that’s how I was raised; I converted to Islam purely for authenticity. The simple reality is this: In 1948, the Jews evicted Arab families from their homes and re-created a state that didn’t exist between the year seventy and nineteen forty-eight. Think about that. There was no Israel for one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight years. What happened to the Jews in the nineteen forties to change all that?”
“The Holocaust?” Ott said.
“See, I told you we think alike,” Sam said. Ott smiled. “Now, the Jews base their claim to Palestine on a four thousand year old legend of self-serving hearsay-an alleged oral promise supposedly made by God to Abraham. There’s no writing, no deed, no nothing; just a single Hebrew man’s claim that God told him the land was his and his descendents’. God didn’t tell the rest of the world about the deal; he didn’t say a single word about it to the other people living there; he supposedly just whispered it to one man, who happened to be a Jew, who happened to want to live there. If that happened today, and this guy showed up in court to claim his land, he would be laughed out of the place; but since it happened four thousand years ago, and one of the guy’s ancestors wrote it down in the Bible, some people believe it must be true. Amazing. That’s a pretty thin reed to build a country on, but it’s not by any means unprecedented. Every civilization, and every conquering power, has claimed their land as a matter of Divine Providence; that’s what leaders need to say to motivate their people to kill other people, and that’s what leaders and their people need to say to each other to soothe their consciences.
“Now think about this: For nearly two thousand years, this alleged promise from God wasn’t enough to restore Palestine to the Jews. If God really wanted the Jews to have that land, don’t you think he would have made sure they had it? He is, after all, God. So, again, any rational human being would conclude that the claim that God promised the Jews a home in Palestine is a fabrication, pure and simple. But the Jews have been clinging to it for two thousand years, because they really want that land. Then, in 1948, they finally get their chance.
“There’s no dispute that many millions of people were killed during World War II; it was an ugly, horrendous war. And there’s no doubt that the Nazis, like the Soviets, had prison camps and they did their share of mass killings of all sorts of people for all sorts of despicable reasons. It’s also true that your grandfather’s incinerators turned thousands of bodies at those camps into ash. But the big question everybody’s eager to overlook in indicting an entire nation for genocide is what kinds of bodies were processed in those incinerators, and how did they die?