If this is a man and The truce Book

"However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed - they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you."

This is such a stunning statement. Levi puts it into the mouth of a contemptuous SS officer speaking to a Jewish kapo some time in 1943. Reading it in the 1980s I was thinking well, at least Primo Levi and all the other great writers and historians have made sure that this greatest of horror stories has been documented and believed. Reading the same speech 20 years later, I'm not so sure. Now we have many people telling us well, you know, the Holocaust was just one amongst many - they happen all the time. Which is not so, and misunderstands, even from well-meaning motives. And tragically the Holocaust is inextricably bound into the DNA of the creation of the state of Israel, so that Israel is accused of using the Holocaust to prop up its own ultra-defensiveness and expansionism. (Remember the "Eleventh Commandment" : "Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories.")And so this infests the whole pro-Palestinian rhetoric which has a vile tendency to shade over towards Holocaust denial (our current but by no means only example being Ahmedinejad).

Just another grand example of the hideous knots us human beings love to tie whilst living on a beautiful little planet on the edge of a galaxy, itself one of millions of others, spinning in the glistering vastness of this universe.