STEVE MARBLE ---- Notebook

The road to hatred ends at a P.O. box on Newport Boulevard.

It’s from here that the Institute for Historical Review does its

business, peddling its long-running rant that the Holocaust is a myth.

Once an in-your-face rallying point, it has now emerged again -- glossed

up as a scholarly issue, a quest for historical correctness.

But it remains a place of hurt, a place of ultimate insult, a place where

hatred grows.

The group, its offspring and its brothers-in-arms have been poking at the

Holocaust for years. They tumbled headfirst into the headlines a decade

ago when they booked a conference room at the Red Lion Inn in Costa Mesa,

their chosen spot to gather and debate the credibility of the Holocaust.

But when hotel execs caught wind of what was up, they bounced the group.

So they trudged off to Huntington Beach, where they found the reception

warmer at Old World Village, a Bavarian-themed shopping center whose

owner was once accused in a lawsuit of playing Nazi songs on Hitler’s

birthday.

The Holocaust conference drew a knot of angry protesters and the

gathering -- such as it was -- dissolved into an ugly confrontation, with

the protesters shouting out “Nazi” and several of the attendees snapping

back with “Jews.” So much for intellectual debate.

The latest salvo comes from a man named Bradley R. Smith, who lists

himself as the director of something called the Committee for Open Debate

on the Holocaust. He is also a champion of the Institute for Historical

Review.

Smith successfully placed an ad in the campus newspaper at Orange Coast

College. The ad -- “Holocaust Studies: Appointment with Hate?” -- asks

students to challenge the Holocaust and the survivors of the World War II

concentration camps who have passed along their eyewitness accounts.

The ad, which Smith has managed to place in hundreds of college

newspapers, is designed to have a quasi-intellectual appeal, as though --

two generations removed from World War II -- it’s OK to second-guess the

nightmare that was the Holocaust or to rethink the number of Jews who

were put to death in the concentration camps.

A few years back, the Institute for Historical Review published a

challenge -- and put up a cash reward -- to anyone who could prove that

the Holocaust took place, that Jews were gassed in the Nazi death camps.

It was the sort of taunt the group seemed to revel in, a cruel game that

masqueraded as a history exercise.

And someone took the group up on its challenge. His name was Mel

Mermelstein, a Huntington Beach businessman and an Auschwitz survivor.

The ad was an affront. Mermelstein had lost his mother in the

concentration camps. He’d lost his father. He had lost a brother. And he

had lost both of his sisters.

That some right-wing group would have the audacity to make a contest out

of the misery of the Nazi concentration camps was more than he could

stand.

So he took the group to court and -- as if it was even necessary -- won a

court order stipulating that the Holocaust was real and that Jews were

put to death in the camp’s gas chambers.

When the Institute for Historical Review balked at paying up, Mermelstein

took the group back to court. It took four years, but the group paid him

$90,000 in annual installments. And, just to drive his point home,

Mermelstein took the group back to court again when it was six days late

on one of its installment checks. The group was forced to cough up

another $38 in interest.

Mermelstein has made a life cause of preserving a record of the

Holocaust. He lectures in schools, he has built a museum at his business,

he has written a book on his own experience and considers it his moral

obligation to fight those who “chisel away at our remembrance of the

past.”

But they won’t go away.

Smith, the man who placed the ad in the Orange Coast College newspaper,

even names Mermelstein in the ad, dismissing him -- along with Simon

Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel -- as “problematic eyewitnesses.”

And on Smith’s Web page, Mermelstein is brushed off as someone who sued

the Institute for Historical Review because he “lost sleep.”

His name tumbles into a laundry list of supposed Holocaust myths,

everything from the Institute’s claim that Hitler never ordered the

extermination of Jews to his revisionist arithmetic that as few as

300,000 Jews actually died in concentration camps.

Is this a history lesson? Is this a stimulating intellectual debate? Is

this something we hope intrigues young college students half a century

removed from the Holocaust? Is it somehow academically challenging that a

man who lost his entire family in the Nazi death camps be taunted and

mocked?

Or is this just hatred, hatred with an attitude, even?

Mermelstein remains vigilant, but takes it in stride.

“Do I really need people like this to know that my mother and sister and

my family died in the gas chambers?”

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News. He can be

reached at o7 [email protected] .