Mel Mermelstein dies, a Jew whose testimony led to the recognition of the massacre in the Auschwitz gas chambers as an irrefutable fact

Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of the Auschwitz extermination camp, died last Friday at his home in Long Beach, California, at the age of 95, due to COVID-19. His name became famous in 1980 when, in compliance with a sacred promise made to his father and to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis, took a group of Holocaust deniers to court and won a legal and moral victory in the hard battle against historical revisionism.

Mermelstein was 17 years old in 1944 when he was deported with his parents, two sisters and a brother from their town in what was then Hungary to Auschwitz, the Nazi camp where more than 1 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

In 1980, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) pledged a sum of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

Mermelstein presented a notarized document that narrated his confinement in Auschwitz and how he witnessed Nazi soldiers leading his mother, his two sisters and others to gas chamber number 5, but the IHR refused to pay the amount, claiming that the document was not “sufficient proof”.

Represented by public interest attorney William John Cox, he sued the IHR in the Los Angeles Superior Court for breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, defamation, prejudicial denial of established fact, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and declaratory judgment.

The litigation ended up proving him right. On October 9, 1981, Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Los Angeles Superior Court made the following court note:

“This court takes judicial note of the fact that Jews were gassed to death in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during the summer of 1944. It is not reasonably in dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by drawing on sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It’s just a fact.”

That meant the court considered the use of gas chambers as general knowledge and therefore did not require evidence that they existed.

In 1985, the final judgment determined that the IHR and other defendants must pay $90,000 to Mermelstein and issue a apology letter to “Mr. Mel Mermelstein… and all other Auschwitz survivors” for him “pain, anguish and suffering” caused to them.

After his mother and sisters died in the gas chambers, his father and brother were also killed. Before separating from her father, “I made a promise to him at camp that I would tell him what happened if he survived,” as he told Los Angeles Times years later.

The Institute for Historical Review, founded in 1978 by American far-right political advocate Willis Carto, was once described by the Anti-Defamation League as “perhaps the leading antisemitic in the United States”, since its publications and other initiatives seek to deny the Nazi holocaust during World War II. (I)

Sources: washingtonpost.com, www.smithsonianmag.com.