Evidence is overwhelming

I WAITED with interest the responses to Mr John Mortl's letter disputing the facts surrounding the butchery that came to be known as the Holocaust (South China Morning Post, January 9).

Given the emotions that the Holocaust stirs I was very impressed with Mr Dennis Leventhal's calm and sensible response (Post, January 11) and with Naomi Price's restrained rebuttal that appeared in Friday's paper.

Mr Mortl writes a lucid and articulate letter and is evidently an educated man.

This makes it all the more surprising that he would wish to bury his head in the sand and refuse to recognise the mass of overwhelming evidence for the Holocaust; from survivors' testimonies, to mounds of archived documents prepared by the military department responsible for the rounding up, registration, transportation and killing of Jews, political dissidents, resistance members, gypsies and a whole host of others that the Third Reich deemed sub-human.

My family spent three years living in Israel and during that time we made friends with many people who had their own harrowing stories of the Holocaust to tell.

For many they were the only survivors of large families and had only escaped the slaughter through extraordinary luck and, perhaps, the hand of God.

Anyone who has heard similar stories, or who has visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the museum dedicated to those that died during the Holocaust, does not need mounds of paper to know that the Holocaust undoubtedly happened and that it was the most insane, abominable and incomprehensible episode of this century.

SIMON McCRUM Central