A young American student gave me a pamphlet edited by the Revisionist movement contending that, during the Second World War, the Holocaust did not really take place, that gas chambers were really delousing rooms for the numerous prisoners of war, and that the piles of corpses represented people who had died of plague or hunger because the German transportation system had been destroyed by the allied bombing and it was no longer possible to supply the prison camps with food or the necessary care!

        This young student knew that as an old French man (88 years old) I had been through the war, had been a prisoner (not in an extermination camp), had lived and raised a family in a house occupied by German troops, had been modestly in touch with the French Resistance, had one of my dear friends--fiancé of my sister and head of the Resistance in West France--arrested by the Germans and sent to an extermination camp from which he never returned.

        This young student considered that I would have a valid opinion on that tragic period of human history.

        A man of my age has been young; he remembers how, faced with the conflicting opinions of his elders, he wanted--and it was legitimate--to build his own opinions on world events. The present young generation has conflicting versions of the causes and events of the Second World War and of the Nazi action. It is my generation's moral duty to make available the facts such as they were. It is essential that the young generation understand that if a people like the Germans, who gave humanity so many great men, could fall under the diabolical regime of Hitler and his accomplices, it is a lesson that all democracies must learn, and never forget, so as to react as soon as the first signs of a Nazi spirit reappear. Young people must realize that every nation has its racists and sadists who can take over if that country disintegrates as Germany did after the First World War.

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