The Bruners

He talked to her awkwardly about what was happening to her body and what do about it. Then he told her he had decided it would be best if she started sleeping in her own bed again.

This was met with at first shock, then tears, and then anger. She ended up screaming more than she had since she was a young child. Eventually, however, he threatened to deny her use of Unicorn for a week, which succeeded in calming her down. She moved into the bedroom she hadn’t slept in for five years. This didn’t mean she didn’t make him suffer.

Over the next week, she refused to speak to him except when absolutely necessary. He felt as if he were on a desert island whose only other inhabitant had abandoned him, not by leaving the island, but by usually hiding herself from view and treating him as if he were invisible when she did present herself.

As one week turned into two, the pain remained, but sometimes, just every once in a while, it would be replaced by something else: relief. As much as he liked being with her, talking with her was another matter. She would often go on these long minutia-filled monologues about horse breeds or lengthy rambles that he would quickly lose the ability to follow. He would try to sound interested, and then just not aggravated, but he always failed in the end. Still, she could never take the gentle hints he would try to give her and he never had the heart to flat-out tell her he wanted her to stop.

On week three, she forgave him, or at least surrendered, and things went back to normal.

When she was fourteen, she got into a terrible riding accident that left her with an inability to ride and a limp. The doctors said both impairments would probably be lifelong.

This was the first time Bob regretted having her move into her own bedroom. She now used it as a fortress she never left. He could go days without seeing her only to finally spot her shuffling like a zombie into the kitchen to get some food. Sometimes he even left trays outside her door, just to make sure she ate daily. He and Bedelia had had a dream of expanding the ranch into a horse-breeding farm, where he and eventually she could both breed the horses themselves. On the rare occasions when she would talk, or at least listen to him, he told her they could still do that. They could get started now if she wanted. She showed no interest, however, and one of the few times he made it into her room, he found all of her horse books ripped up and defaced.

He found himself going on long drives to escape the house, which felt haunted. The longer the drives the better. Sometimes there would be moments, just flashes of unacknowledged nanoseconds, where he would ask himself, What if I just kept on driving?

It was during one of these drives that he first heard the AM radio show of Reverend Henry Goode.

From him, he would learn that he and Mr. Smith were not alone.

Others, many others, scholars even, also believed the Holocaust was a lie. Some had even written literature about their beliefs. There were people, learned men, asking questions right after the war, just as he and Mr. Smith had. They just weren’t fortunate enough to have known about them. How much pain he, and even Mr. Smith perhaps, might have been spared if they had!

As early as a few years after the war, former French Resistance member and history teacher Paul Rassiner, who had been a Nazi concentration camp prisoner himself(!), was questioning the world’s version of events, becoming the father of Holocaust revisionism with his 1949 book, Crossing the Line and his 1950 one, The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance at the Literature of Concentration Camp Inmates. The former book focused on his experience at Buchenwald, where he claimed the brutalities were mostly committed not by the S.S., but by the Communist prisoners who, in practice, really ruled the camp and ran its internal affairs for their own gain. While this book was a lauded commercial and critical success, his next book, The Lie of Ulysses, was controversial and considered the first true Holocaust “denial” book. In it, Rassiner examined what he considered to be representative accounts of the camps. He criticized other authors who had written about the camps as writing exaggerations. He also described his visits to Dachau and Mauthausen, noting that in both places, he received contradictory stories about how the gas chambers were supposed to have worked and expressed his doubts about whether not only the gas chambers, but the whole Nazi policy of extermination had ever even existed.