Died last Friday (28), at age 95, Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein, who became known in the 1980s for winning a legal battle in the United States against deniers of Jewish genocide.
He could not resist complications from Covid-19 and died at home in the US state of California, his daughter told the American press.
Born in Mukachevo —a city in today’s Ukraine, but at the time part of Czechoslovakia—, Mermelstein was arrested during the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944 and taken at age 17 to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, next to the family. His mother and sisters died in gas chambers at the site, and his father and brothers died of starvation, according to a survey by the American newspaper The Washington Post.
When the Soviet Army freed the prisoners from Auschwitz, the boy was the only survivor of the family and was taken to Germany weighing 31 kilograms and with typhus. In 1946, he emigrated to the United States and even went to the Korean War in 1950, before being hired by the UN as a translator, for speaking seven languages. Then he settled in California, where he started a carpentry company.
Mermelstein made headlines in the US when he won a legal battle against a group called the Institute for Historical Review, which questioned the extent and even the existence of the Holocaust, which they defined as a lie told to attract Jewish sympathy and justify its creation. of the State of Israel.
The group even convened an “inaugural revisionist convention” in 1979 and offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the Nazis did, in fact, use gas chambers to exterminate Jews.
Mermelstein learned of the initiative when he received a form in the mail calling for the challenge — other survivors were also called. Writing about the absurdity of the proposal to local newspapers, the survivor even heard from the institute that he was trying to escape the debate and that his family lived under false names in Israel, The New York Times reported.
To the Canadian daily Toronto Star, Mermelstein told years later that the group “chose to mess with the wrong Jew”.
The survivor devised a strategy to bring the denialists to court. Under protests from friends and advice from a lawyer, he accepted the group’s challenge and handed over as proof of the horror of the Jewish genocide a copy of his memoir, released that year, “By Bread Alone: ​​The Story of A-4685” (nor bread alone: ​​the story of prisoner A-4685).
When the institute failed to pay the offered award of $50,000, Mermelstein went to court claiming the money and seeking damages of $17 million for defamation, breach of contract, moral damages and injury for denying established fact.
It was on the latter argument that a Los Angeles judge gave victory to the Jew in 1981. In the sentence, the judge wrote: “This court judicially recognizes the fact that Jews were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, during the summer of 1944. That is not in question […] It’s just a fact.”
Of the amount claimed, the group paid the survivor a $50,000 prize and $40,000 in compensation, later publicly acknowledging the Auschwitz massacre.
But Mermelstein did not stop there: in 1986, he won a US$ 5.25 million lawsuit against a Swedish editor who had integrated the institute and not only refused to participate in the agreement but also began to persecute the Jew, even sending a letter to what would be the hair of victims of the gas chambers.
Mermelstein’s story was portrayed in an American TV movie called “Never Forget” in 1991. Active in the community of Jewish genocide survivors, he returned to Auschwitz a number of times starting in 1967. He also began to collect objects related to the Holocaust, set up a small museum and founded an association to study the events that took place in the concentration camp.
Source: Folha
