Open Letter to BeWise

22 August 1995

Open Letter to the Webmaster(s) of the BeWise Web Site
(http://www.pixi.com/~bewise/)
bewise@pixi.com

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jamie McCarthy; I'm the Webmaster of the Nizkor site (http://www.almanac.bc.ca/).

While browsing your Web site, I came across the following promise:

If you find or have information to refute the hard evidence presented here, please let us know immediately! Be prepared to offer *EVIDENCE*, emotions and or opinions *ARE NOT* evidence.
http://www.pixi.com/~bewise/revision.html

I do indeed have information to refute a great deal of the evidence, hard and otherwise, which you provide on your web site. I would like to begin the process of refuting your evidence with one particular, easily-disproved piece of information:

Shmuel Krakowski - In an Aug. 1986 Jerusalem Post article - "[Yad Vashem director] Krakowski says that many survivors, wanting "to be part of history" may have let their imaginations run away with them. "Many were never in the places where they claim to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on second hand information given them by friends or passing strangers" according to Krakowski. Over half of 20,000 survivor accounts were found by Yad Vashem to be "unreliable" and "Inaccurate."
http://www.pixi.com/~bewise/hololie4.html

This is a blatant lie which was refuted on the alt.revisionism newsgroup almost two years ago.

Krakowski was blatantly misquoted in the interview mentioned here; on the same day it appeared in the "Jerusalem Post" (August 17th, 1986), he sent an unequivocal protest, which appeared in the letters to the editor section a few days later.

A poster to alt.revisionism, Danny Keren, spoke at that time on the phone with Krakowski. He was rather upset about being misrepresented and slandered by Nazi propagandists.

Krakowshi's retraction reads:

To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post

Sir, - I was deeply astonished to read Barbara Amouyal's front-page article of August 17, which is based in part on an interview with me.

Many hundreds of the 20,000 testimonies held in our archives were extensively used in Nazi war criminal trials, contrary to what Amouyal wrote.

I told Amouyal that survivors wrote their accounts for the record of history. I cannot understand why she made of it that survivors wanted "to be part of history".

I said there are some - fortunately very few - testimonies, which proved to be inaccurate. Why did Amouyal make them out to be a large number?

[...]

Shmuel Krakowski,
Director,
Yad Vashem Archives
Jerusalem.

You have now been given "information to refute the hard evidence presented [on your Web site]." What you do with this information, of course, is up to you. If you have any comments, I would like to hear them. You may reach me by posting publicly to alt.revisionism, or by emailing me at jamie@voyager.net; if you contact me in email, I will assume that your reply is intended to be a public response unless you indicate otherwise.

Thank you.

This open letter is being posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.revisionism and emailed to bewise@pixi.com. An HTML version is also being made available at http://www.almanac.bc.ca/other-sites/correspondence/bewise/cor-0.html.

The original email text and original article text are available for reference.

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