The Bruners

In 1974, Northwestern University electrical engineering professor Arthur R. Butz would write perhaps the most famous Holocaust revision book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The book’s key arguments revolved around the ideas that the Nazis’ confessions about gassing at the Nuremberg trials had been extracted through torture, that there had never been a single piece of verifiable evidence that anyone was gassed in the camps such as proof of any functional gas chambers, autopsied bodies dead from cyanide poisoning, or corroborating German documents of gassings, and that the pictures of naked corpses being bulldozed into mass graves were the result of a massive typhus epidemic.

A few years later in 1977, British historian David Irving would pen Hitler’s War. Like pioneering revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, Irving made his Holocaust revisionist argument only indirectly: by recasting Hitler as a victim. Irving asserted that Hitler was a rational, intelligent politician who merely wanted prosperity for his people and influence in Europe but was constantly undermined by incompetent and/or treasonous subordinates. It was, in fact, Churchill, not Hitler, who was primarily responsible for the war.

In these books, as well as others of their ilk, Bob found again something Bedelia had once given him and now denied him: a sense of companionship in an isolated existence.

A few months after the accident, Bedelia asked him to take her to the library. He did and once they arrived, she told him he could wait in the car. She had brought an empty tote bag with her and when she came back to the car it looked like it was stuffed with books. When he asked her what books she had gotten, she told him flatly that it was none of his “beeswax.”   He didn’t argue; he was just so glad she was actually taking an interest in something.

He would soon realize how dumb he was.

Bedelia had found a new obsession to replace her old one.

The Holocaust.

Specifically, the camps.

When she was with her German tutor one day, Bob went into her room and found tons of books on the subject with notebooks filled with details of the most hideous tortures. She even had a section devoted to Dr. Joseph Mengele.

He decided to confront her.

When he did, he was surprised she did not seem angry at him for going into her room. Instead, she almost seemed relieved he had found out about her secret obsession.

She explained to him how her history tutor, who it turned out was a Jew, had initially introduced her to the Holocaust a couple of years earlier in a watered-down way. A little after the accident, when they were covering World War II, he began teaching her about the camps in gory detail. It had fascinated her so much she asked him to teach her about it in even more depth and suggest books she might read on her own.

Bob asked her what she liked so much about exploring the Holocaust.

She didn’t, she explained. She hated it. Loathed it. It made her physically sick and it gave her nightmares. But she couldn’t stop herself. The uglier the details were that she would find about the subject, the more she felt compelled to acquire more of them.

Bob knew what he had to do.

He had always told her, as he had told her mother, that his parents had died in a car accident. Now he told her the truth. He also shared with her his newfound revisionist literature.

Though he was prepared for her to be resistant, very resistant, it turned out she found this literature as fascinating and credible as he did. She became interested in remembering all the fine points of every book’s argument, as if she would one day have to defend each and every one of them.

He made it clear to her, however, that this had to be their secret.

Though there were others like them, their numbers were small. Very small. Almost all others would never understand. They would look upon them badly. Very badly.

Bedelia began to improve.

Cathy Rosoff is the author of two novels, ‘Feral Little Gods’ and ‘Ravensbone’. This is the second time The Missing Slate has excerpted the latter novel, which was also partially published in Ginokso Literary Journal. The Blue Lake Review and Unlikely 2.0 published stories that eventually led to the writing of the novel. The Stone Hobo and The Write Room excerpted ‘Feral Little Gods’, the former nominating it for The Pushcart Prize. ‘Feral Little Gods’ also passed through the first round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and is now available on Amazon, as well as the Barnes and Noble and Smashwords websites. ‘Ravensbone’ is still in its final polish stage. Her website is www.cathyrosoff.com.