Cover of November 1968 "Esquire": "Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, John Sack--Chicago."

Late literary journalism legend John Sack filed a report for Esquire in 2001 about a California convention of Holocaust deniers, which he was invited to despite being Jewish and having a far firmer grasp on history than his hosts. An excerpt from “Daniel in the Deniers Den“:

“I’m sure many antisemites say the Holocaust didn’t happen (even as they take delight that it really did) but I met none that weekend. The only debatably antisemitic comment that I heard was on Friday night, when I dined in the downstairs restaurant with a prominent denier in a NO HOLES? NO HOLOCAUST! shirt, an Alabama man whose name is Dr. Robert Countess. A gangling scholar of Classical Greek and Classical Hebrew, he had taught history at the University of Alabama and had retired to a farm outside of Huntsville, where he played major-league ping-pong and he collected old Peugeots—he had twenty-two, some dating back to the Crash. While scarcely cranky, he had a cranky-sounding voice, and in the open-aired restaurant he was practically grinding gears as he discoursed on the Septuagint and as I, not Countess, brought up the Jewish sacred scrolls the Talmud. ‘What’s called the Talmud,’ Countess lectured, ‘Talmud being the participle form of lamad, in Hebrew learn, developed in Babylonia as rabbis reflected on certain passages in the Torah. Some of these rabbis engaged in a syncretism, a bringing together, of Babylonian paganism with the religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So if you read much of the Talmud, and Elda will tell you her favorite story—’

‘No,’ said Elda, Countess’s wife, who was dining with us.

‘It’s unbelievable, but it’s in the Talmud,’ said Countess.

‘No no. I don’t want to tell it,’ said Elda, embarrassed.

‘Go ahead and tell it,’ Countess entreated.

‘Well,’ said Elda, blushing, ‘iit’s in the Talmud that if a Jewish man’s repairing the roof, and if his sister-in-law is down below, and if he falls onto her and she becomes pregnant—’

‘He falls off the roof in such a way—’ Countess laughed.

‘Can you picture it? Then the child won’t be a bastard,’ said Elda. The tale would be antisemitic rubbish if it weren’t indeed in the Talmud (in Yebamoth, and again in Baba Kama) and if the Countesses were just amused and not also appalled. ‘You and I laugh about this,’ said Countess, ‘but I sit in stark amazement saying, Jews aren’t stupid people! How can they go along with this?’

‘The answer is, We don’t,’ I explained. By bedtime on Friday, my impression of the Countesses was like my impression of UFO devotees. Everyone in America believes in one or another ridiculous thing. Me, I belong to the International Society for Cryptozoology and I firmly believe that in Lake Tele, in the heart of the Congo, there is a living, breathing dinosaur. Fifteen years ago, I even went there to photograph it—I didn’t, I didn’t even see it, but I still believe in it. Other people believe other things, and the Countesses and the other deniers believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Like me in the Congo, they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, but to say that emphatically isn’t to say (as some people do) that they’re odious, contemptible, despicable. To say that they’re rats (as does the author of Denying the Holocaust) is no more correct than to say it of people who, in their ignorance, believe the less pernicious fallacy that Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. Oh, did I hit a sore spot there?'”