Mel Mermelstein Survived Auschwitz, Then Sued Holocaust Deniers in Court
Fed up with the lies and anti-Semitism, a California businessman partnered with a lawyer to prove that the murder of 6 million Jews was established fact
By Patrick Sauer
August 27, 2018
In October 1981, Judge Thomas Johnson made an announcement. After deliberation, he had accepted a fact into judicial notice—a legal term for a fact accepted in a court as true without the need to produce evidence. The Holocaust, said Johnson, was an indisputable fact.
The pronouncement seems slightly ludicrous given the weight of evidence that has emerged since the extent of Hitler’s “Final Solution†was revealed at the end of World War II. But for the plaintiff in the case, Mel Mermelstein, it was nothing less than a triumph—a critical moment in a decades-long struggle to tell the world that what he experienced in the Holocaust happened.
In 1944, Mermelstein, then 17 years old, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was not alone: Despite the attempts of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy to prevent it, the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to camps kicked off within weeks of Germany’s occupation of the country in spring of that year.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mel-mermelstein-survived-auschwitz-then-sued-holocaust-deniers-court-180970123/#7u7QVsLlb4zk862j.99
