I felt stunned, as if Buck Rogers had somehow come down from the 21st century and zapped me with a beam from his ray gun. I had heard about people like the little man who was confronting me, who deny that the Holocaust happened, but I had never actually seen one.

He was a small, thin, middle-aged man with a white pointy beard, clear blue eyes and a ruddy complexion.

The picture of health. He talked fast (though in a well-mannered, articulate way) as if he were afraid he would lose me.

In the first instant I didn’t truly grasp what he was saying; then I understood that he was telling me that there had been no Nazi gas chambers — none – that the stories I had heard all my life about the gas chambers were meant to gain sympathy for Jews at the expense of Germans. I felt my heart change its beat and pick up speed.

I felt sweat appear on the palms of my hands.

The first thing I wanted to do was to get away. We were on the mezzanine of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles; there were a lot of people standing around and I supposed that he had proselytized the others before I had arrived. The others then had already heard what I was hearing now, and in my imagination each of them had one eye on me, waiting to see what my first move would be, waiting to judge me.

I felt ashamed listening to the man talk about Jews. I felt ashamed holding the photocopied articles in my hand. I could not have repeated anything he had said after his first few words; my brain had closed itself down in self-defense and yet: I was aware that he sounded knowledgeable and sincere.

I felt trapped between his sincerity and my shame. I wanted to get away from him, to hand back his flyers and turn away so that those who were watching would see that I rejected out of hand everything he was saying. At the same time, because of his honest and open manner, I didn’t want to cause him embarrassment by publicly rejecting him. I had never looked into the history of the Holocaust, had never examined any of the primary documents used to support the literature, so in my ignorance I felt I had no right, really, to believe or disbelieve any statement about it whatever. I didn’t feel I had the right to embarrass another man simply because he doubted what I believed. If sincerity isn’t to be taken seriously in human relationship, what is?

In the end the little man with the white devil’s beard and the very blue eyes made my decision for me when he turned to a new arrival and began his spiel all over again from the beginning.

Feeling defiled somehow by the flyers in my hand, I walked toward a large trash can. Even at that moment I knew that the problem wasn’t so much that I was holding the flyers as that I was being observed by others to be holding them. I had accepted the flyers innocently in deference to another’s sincerity. The shame I felt, the defilement, did not come from inside me but from the others, from what I understood to be the standards of my peers.

As I approached the trash can I glanced down at the lead article in one flyer. It was titled, “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or The Rumor of Auschwitz.”

What Rumor?, I thought. What problem? There wasn’t anything that rang a bell for me. The author of the article was a certain Professor Robert Faurisson. I’d never heard of him. Then I noticed that the article had originally been published in Le Monde, the Paris daily. It was confusing. I had no idea at all what the problem of the gas chambers might be, or what the rumor of Auschwitz referred to. It sounded crazy. And I’d never heard of Faurisson. But I did know about Le Monde. My understanding was that Le Monde was one of a handful of world-class newspapers.

What, then, was Le Monde doing publishing an article critical of the Holocaust, or the gas chambers, or whatever? A moment before I had intended to drop the flyers into the trash on principle. In my circle you did not read material that might make Jews feel uncomfortable. It was a principle. It was necessary in my circle to maintain principles about some few things. Not many, but some. At the last moment I folded the flyers and put them in my back pocket. All that day I went about my business, the flyers folded up secretly in my pocket.

That night, alone in my room, like a thief, I took them out and read them, all the while conscious of the fearfulness in my behavior, the lack of self-respect. I was aware that I was reading something that everyone I knew, and all the people I liked best, would think bigoted and dirty, and that I was doing it at a time and in a place where they could not find me out. I had spent years learning to accept the weaknesses in my character, and to stand aside from them, yet there I was, 49 years old, hiding in my room with a newspaper article, fearful and ashamed.

HOW CAN I EXPLAIN what happened to me in my apartment that night? I read a newspaper article written by a professor I had never heard of which had been translated from French by who knows who, given to me on a hotel mezzanine by a stranger who was probably a crank, maintaining a thesis that was outrageous and dangerous because – of what? I didn’t know, but a sense of tension and danger enveloped the thing. I sensed immediately into the reading that if I didn’t reject everything Faurisson was saying that I would be in danger of suffering great losses, though that night I would not have been able to identify what they would be.

Why was I willing to read the Faurisson piece with an open mind? I’ll never know, but the source of its original publication was given, along with the date, so the accuracy of the translation could be checked.

Key statements in the text were referenced; anyone willing to spend an hour or so in a good library could discover for himself if Faurisson was being honest in those instances. I was impressed by the simplicity of his claims and the objectivity of his tone, treating as he did a matter of tremendous significance from such a radical perspective.

Another probably reason was ignorance. Until that time I had not read a history of the Holocaust and hadn’t paid much attention to the stories of Holocaust “survivors.” I don’t know why. There were no heroes in the Holocaust stories I had heard – maybe that was it. Masses of sheep-like people being herded to the slaughter. Helplessness, passivity, pathos, no heroes to create tragedy from catastrophe. Maybe that was it. Ignorance then, a disinterest in suffering unredeemed by heroic action and finally, I suppose, a kind of primary boredom with a wretched story told and retold far too often.

That being so, how is it that I was so stunned at reading Faurisson’s thesis about the poison gas chamber stories? If the stories had not interested me in the first place, why should I have been affected by the discovery that they might not be true? Wouldn’t my fundamental lack of interest in the Holocaust forfeit my right—to a certain extent—to be shocked by the possibility that Faurisson had his finger on something?

But the real surprise might have been my discovery that despite my ignorance and the boredom I professed about the Holocaust, I had believed everything I had ever heard about it. Not the shadow of a doubt had ever crossed my mind. I had believed all the eyewitness testimony related by Holocaust survivors. I had believed what I understood to be the thesis in all the books written by Holocaust historians. Maybe that is why something broke in me that night. Maybe I had believed too rigidly for too long. There was nothing in me that could give a little. No room to bend. Intellectually, psychologically, something had to break. I think it was belief itself that finally cracked that night. My mind welcomed it— but in my heart I felt the awful anxiety that only great insecurity can create.