Doubts about the holocaust have never troubled me, not since a Jewish classmate told me in 1958 that each one of the families in his community had lost someone in the Nazi campaign to exterminate them. As a child I also met a family whom my father had befriended after their escape from Germany in the late nineteen-thirties.
Later I visited Auschwitz and stood on the steps that led down into one of the gas chambers, but the most compelling evidence for me came from a boy I taught. He told me how he had visited the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen where, standing in front of one the displays of victims’ possessions, he was able to identify his grandparents’ suitcase.