The Jews “looked for help elsewhere, but found a deafening silence, as painful as the torturers’ cruelty” and I "only tried to break" this silence. "I didn’t choose to fight this battle. But now I am honoured I did”. This is how Deborah Esther Lipstadt, director of the Judaic Studies Institute “Rabbi Donald A. Tam” of the US university in Emore, ended the conference, which was held last night in Rome, at the Papal Gregorian University, about "Holocaust: memory and documents. A way to know and understand what happened”. The expert, who is known for filing legal proceedings against David Irving who had publicly expressed the opinion the Holocaust was "a legend", went over the legal case that involved her in the defence of the historical truth and therefore of all the victims of the Holocaust. The "truth" of the concentration camps “cannot be said with words”, she stated, nor can it be completely understood, “but it is worth exploring and recalling”. There’s no shortage of proofs: direct evidence, diaries, proceedings, studies. Although the Nazis had tried to remove all traces of it, including human ones, "it is the most widely documented genocide in history”. “But this concluded Lipstadt was not the only obstacle to the historical evidence of the Shoah. There’s an even bigger one: the reluctance we have in admitting such a savage crime may have happened, and that it may have happened in such a civilised country as Germany”.
