Brett Popplewell talks to Robert Jan Van Pelt, internationally recognized authority on the history of Auschwitz, about his proposal that the death camp at Birkenau should be sealed off and nature be allowed to take over there. I posted about this issue a year ago, giving my own view which is different from his. But on one point I very much do agree with him. Robert writes:
Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove... it has become part of our inherited knowledge. I don't think that the Holocaust is an exceptional case in that sense. We in the future - remembering the Holocaust - will operate in the same way that we remember most things from the past. We will know about it from literature and eyewitness testimony... We are very successful in remembering the past in that manner... To put the holocaust in some separate category and to demand that it be there – to demand that we have more material evidence – is actually us somehow giving in to the Holocaust deniers...