The Jewish Journal (North of Boston)
http://www.jewishjournal.org/archives/a ... il3_98.htm
Scroll a third of the way down the page to get "Professor Brown" A professor of Economics and Harvard Phd.
"For 50 years as a Holocaust survivor I did not speak out," Dr. Alan Brown told his North Shore Community College audience. But one month before his retirement as professor of Economics at the University of Windsor, Canada, he received a telephone message that changed his life.
A former pupil asked him to write a recommendation stating that the student hadn't disturbed his class. What a strange request! Professor Brown (no relation to this reporter) learned that the pupil's other teachers refused him because he did disturb their classes by making speeches and distributing pamphlets denying the Holocaust.
That phone conversation was Brown's wake-up call. He decided to participate in the speakers' bureau of the local Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield, Michigan, to share his story so that others would learn from it.
I mean that's strange. I can understand maybe not speaking out about a terrible time of one's life. But what are the chances that a holocaust survivor is going to have some guy ask him to write him a recommendation because he disturbs classes by making holocaust denial speeches and distributes pamphlets! So it's not just a revisionist student who speaks his view publicly in class (which would be incredibly rare on it's own) but one that disturbs class. Would there even be one such student anywhere in any college in California at this moment? I ask myself. And how many former self-titled holocaust survivors are University professors? Maybe one or two at any given University. But this student had a class with one, and asked him for a recommendation!
Then we hear of the evil Hungarian mobs. And maybe they were. But have you ever heard of the evil mobs of the Jewish Hungarian leader Bela Kun, just 20 years before? I don't think so.
His story couldn't just be one where life sucks, nothing particularly interesting, and he barely survived. Instead, like so many accounts, amazing things happened!
One day, Brown's work detail passed a notions store. The storekeeper suddenly distracted the SS guard while she slipped some food into the starving lad's hand. She continued to hide food in an inconspicuous place where Brown could scoop it up while marching to work each day. She risked her life to help the young man and provided him with a second miracle. Her name was Rosa Schreiber.
So he's not really in a "camp." He's working in the community, walking by stores. O.k.
"What happened to Rosa Schreiber?" asked a student. Brown paid homage to his heroine by flying her to Michigan's Holocaust Center to dedicate a plaque in her honor. Rosa, he said, was a freedom fighter who once bribed an SS with marmalade to stop beating a Jew. She claimed she always helped animals so why shouldn't she help people. Rosa felt it was the right thing to do; it was not extraordinary. Rosa Schreiber was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem in Israel as a "Righteous Gentile." A tree was planted along the Avenue of the Righteous in her memory.
So he didn't speak out for 50 years. But when he did they recognized Rosa "posthumously." It's probably easier to wait till the people involved in your story are dead so no one can verify. Somehow it reminds me of all the Christian relics Emperor Constantine and his wife miraculously found when Constantine became the Roman Emperor.
As the Russian Army drew closer, the Germans began evacuating the Austrian camp, taking truckloads of prisoners to a nearby forest to be shot. On the day Brown was to be trucked, the guards fled, a third miracle.
Yeah right!
If anything Brown's story confirms the raucous student's claims, that there was no holocaust. Because his story points that there was no systematic plan to kill the Jews. He and his father both survived. His father dying one day after liberation. Starvation was something many Germans went through, but do you ever hear "I'm a German Survivor of WWII."
