When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the Holocaust a "myth" a week before Christmas, he set off a buzz saw of criticism.
He also triggered an unprecedented effort to teach Iranians the truth.
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CHERYL DIAZ MEYER/DMN
Montyona Johnson is among students from Byrd Middle School in Duncanville who visited the Dallas Holocaust Museum recently. 'Ifeel bad seeing all this stuff. It's hard to believe that the Holocaust happened,' Montyona said.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museu! m used its Web site to denounce Mr. Ahmadinejad in English, A! rabic, a nd Farsi. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles invited in 35 U.S.-based Iranian journalists for a day of Holocaust education, some of which was beamed back to Iran via satellite TV.
"Our goal in terms of Iran is to go over the heads of the mullahs to the population," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean.
In a speech broadcast live on Iranian state television, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, "They have fabricated a legend under the name 'massacre of the Jews,' and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves."
His denial of history came at a time where there has never been more institutional Holocaust education. Museums dot Europe and the Americas-- there are centers in Dallas, Houston and El Paso. There's even one in Nazareth run by Palestinians. Anyone with Internet access can find more reliable and detailed sites than ever, many with multimedia features.
Ironically, the statements by the! president of Iran may represent good news, said Elliot Dlin, director of the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
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HERYL DIAZ MEYER/DMN
'Hidden child' concentra! tion camp survivor Paul Kessler talks about his experiences d! uring Wo rld War II to a group of students from Byrd Middle School in Duncanville at the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
"In a way it's evidence of the success of Holocaust education that it has become part of the political discourse of Iran," he said.
"Twenty-five years ago, he would have had no idea what it was even about."
And yet, Mr. Dlin and other educators say, the persistence of Holocaust denial in Iran and elsewhere make it clear that their work is still important and necessary.
The United Nations observed its first official commemoration of the Holocaust this year on Jan. 27 -- the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. That same weekend, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the University of Texas at Dallas hosted a three-day seminar on the school's Richardson campus. for high school teachers. More than 350 teachers attended or participated via streaming video.
They listened to Holocaust experts! from the Washington museum, other teachers who have taught about the Holocaust, and a Jewish survivor of the Nazis.
"Teaching the teachers is number one," said Henry Greenbaum, who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager. "We go to spread the news."
The Holocaust museum puts on four or five seminars a year for teachers. This was the second to be held in the Dallas area.
Most American students know a bit about the Holocaust.Most have heard of Hitler. A few have seen Life Is Beautiful, the 1997 movie about a Jewish father and son caught up by the Nazis.
And a few come into class denying that the Holocaust ever happened, the teachers said.
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Holocaust fact! s
"I always have one or two who don't know what it was," said Barbara Shappuis, who teaches 10th-grade history at Molina High School in Dallas.
The seminar started with the basics: The Holocaust was the systematic attempt by the Nazis to kill every Jew in Europe, and eventually the world. Some were shot in trenches they were forced to dig. Others were herded into death camps and gassed. Many of the details were preserved in the Nazis' own extensive records of the operation.
The teachers peppered the experts with questions:
Did Hitler really have Jewish ancestry? No. The tale was first spread by Hitler's opponents, who were trying to discredit him in the eyes of his anti-Semitic followers.
Did Americans know what was happening? Oppression of Jews was widely reported from 1938 until the United States joined the war in 1941, but the death camps didn't exist at that point. Once the U.S. joined the wa! r, information from behind Axis lines was hard to get.
Did any Nazis express regret? Only after the war.
Many of the teachers said they use Holocaust education to prod their students into thinking about their daily behaviors.
"I ask them, 'What is going to be your role? If there is a fight in the hallway, what kind of bystander are you going to be?' " said Monica Colson, who teaches English at McMath Middle School in Denton.
The week after the seminar, Sandra Cheshier, an English teacher at Byrd Middle School in Duncanville, took her students to the Dallas Holocaust Center. There, they saw the yellow cloth stars that Jews were forced to wear and the threadbare striped uniforms from one death camp. They listened to Paul Kessler, a Holocaust survivor, describe how he and his mother hid from the Nazis, even as they lost many relatives to the death camps.
Ms. Cheshier said she hoped the museum trip would help her students understand t! he Holocaust as more than dry history.
"Sometimes, I! wonder if they think it was really real," she said.
Sandra Runyon, who teaches English to eighth-graders in Cleburne, said that after attending the seminar, she made the Iranian president's statements part of her "current events" instruction.
Some Western commentators have suggested that the Iranian's rhetoric is mostly politics -- part of a campaign against Israel and the United States.
"Many in the mainstream Arab world have embraced Holocaust denial as a form of psychological warfare on their enemies," said Rabbi Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center.
But while politics plays a role, Mr. Ahmadinejad almost certainly believes what he says, said Mohsen Sazegara, a visiting scholar at Yale University.
In the 1970s, Mr. Sazegara was a co-founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In the 1980s, he served in the government, but was disillusioned. He was briefly imprisoned in 2003.
The early leaders of the Iranian revolution would not ha! ve bought into Holocaust denial, he said. But now, Holocaust denial is taught by some professors in Iranian universities and supported by influential Iranian religious scholars, he said.
It's part of a worldview that says, "the world has a board of directors and this board of directors are Zionist and Jewish people," he said.
And so Iranians are told that the Holocaust was invented by the "board of directors" to help the Jews. They are even told that the "board of directors" was behind Hitler's rise to power, Mr. Sazegara said.
This point of view is easy to find in the Muslim world. The charter of Hamas, for instance, cites the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as proof of Jewish efforts to control the world.
But examples of Holocaust revisionism crop up outside of the Middle East: a Ukrainian university grants American neo-Nazi David Duke an honorary doctorate. A Holocaust revisionist in France is! quoted in a local newspaper. A "white power" band in Sweden ! attracts headlines.
Countering those kinds of lies is one purpose of Holocaust education centers, their leaders say. They face a particular challenge getting their information into a country like Iran, where the media are government-controlled.
The Wiesenthal Center,named for famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, was unusually well positioned to take the case directly to Iranians.
Half a million expatriate Iranians live in the Los Angeles area, supporting an active Persian media. As many as 26 satellite radio and TV stations connect the expatriates in the United States directly with their homeland -- literally over the heads of the government.
The day of Holocaust education for Iranian journalists included copies of an Oscar-winning documentary, Genocide, that the center produced in 1981.
"We told them, 'Translate it into Farsi and broadcast it,' " Rabbi Cooper said.
One station has taken them up on the offer so far, he adde! d.
A huge challenge in teaching people about the Holocaust is providing them with the context of the times -- enough information to understand the enormity of the evil, said Steve Feinberg, director of national outreach at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was in Dallas for last month's teacher seminar.
Not long ago, he said, his colleagues at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam were thrilled that her diary was being translated into Korean.
The famous diary tells of the girl's years in hiding before being betrayed to the Nazis. (She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.) Parts of it deal with her burgeoning relationship with Peter, a boy from another family in hiding.
The North Koreans used it, but not for Holocaust education, Mr. Feinberg said.
"They taught it as a love story between Peter and Anne."
E-mail jweiss@dallasnews.com
MOVE DOWNTOWN IS BEARING FRUIT FOR DALLAS MUSEUM
A year ago, the Dallas Holocaust Museum was moving downtown. After almost 21 years in the basement of the Jewish Community Center in a residential neighborhood of North Dallas, the museum's supporters hoped to give it a higher profile in the local museum scene.
They have.
The new site, about a block east of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza, has been a success, director Elliot Dlin said this week.
The old museum attracted about 30,000 visitors a year -- its capacity.
In its first year, the new location will draw more than 50,000, Mr. Dlin said.
The old location, on Northaven Road just west of North Central Expressway, was hard to find. Most visitors were busloads of students. The museum drew fewer than 4,000 walk-ins a year.
The new location is seeing more than 1,000 walk-in visitors each month.
The current site, at 21! 1 N. Record St., is an interim home. The museum has bought property just north of the Sixth Floor Museum for a permanent building. Fundraising is just beginning. Mr. Dlin estimates that it will take more than $18 million to design and build the new structure.
Jeffrey Weiss