Censorship in East and West

An American Refusenik Story

Herewith I alert the Russian people and, specifically, the Russian leadership to one of the most dictatorial events that happened in America. It is an intensely personal story.

For three years, I was happily married to a kind, gentle man with politically incorrect views – until, in broad daylight on American soil, my husband was brutally kidnapped by agents of the American government and taken away in leg irons.

The claim is that my husband was “deported” because he “overstayed his visa.” We have the evidence to prove this allegation is untrue. We intend to prove in court that American law enforcement agencies were used unwittingly as opportune “enforcement squads” for a nasty political lobby with an agenda of muzzling free speech.

Brief Background Information

I am a United States citizen, of German background, born in the Ukraine, having lived in the U.S. since 1967. My husband, Ernst Zündel, is a high-profile activist best known for various highly publicized Free Speech Holocaust trials in several countries. For decades, Ernst Zundel has fought for his right to challenge the orthodox Holocaust tale, which claims relentlessly the “gassing of six million Jews”, allowing no debate.

Ask yourself this: Who is powerful enough to dictate what shall be heard or not heard, spoken or not spoken, written or not written? Truth does not fear investigation. A lie must be investigated and disarmed.

To accept without doubt, to accuse without trustworthy evidence, to intimidate without proof, to lie without punishment, to censor with impunity was unthinkable in the Western democracies in ages past. In the case of the ‘Holocaust’, the “murder weapon” is missing, Jewish casualty numbers are highly inflated, and the tales of the “witnesses” are unverifiable and often grossly bizarre. For instance, Elie Wiesel, by universal acclaim a remarkable Holocaust Survivor deserving of the Nobel Prize, wrote this:

“I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground [of an alleged Jewish mass grave at Babi Yar in the Ukraine] never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.” (Paroles d’étranger, Editions du Seuil, 1982, p. 86.)

In practically all Western countries, self-serving fictionalizing about the Holocaust proceeds untouched by common sense and forensically verifiable science. Why? It is really very simple: Certain enormously powerful interests, Jews and non-Jews alike, benefit handsomely from a simplistic view of history nobody is allowed to question – especially since taxpayers are willingly footing the bill.

World-wide, the ‘Holocaust’ has grown into a secular religion. To question the new dogma makes one a heretic, subject to vicious persecution and even prosecution. Russian-born Israel Shamir, a noted Israeli journalist and courageous critic of the current Israeli government, defined the problem well: “…the Holocaust is not a Jewish religion; it is a religion par excellence for goyim” – a disrespectful Hebrew word for non-Jews.

The ‘Holocaust’ must be examined, and questions must be asked. It is not un-American to want to know the facts and to make known those facts, once found and carefully examined.

Ernst Zündel did just that – for decades! As a German descendant, Ernst Zündel refuses to live on his knees. For his responsible activism on behalf of his forebears’ maligned generation, he has been targeted for assassination – twice by parcel bomb, once by arson, and once by a young woman posing as a journalist who was put on an airplane to Israel by Canadian authorities before she could do mischief with a microphone disguising a gun.

Because of his insistence to check out the ‘Holocaust’ claims, Ernst Zundel has made powerful political enemies at the highest levels of governments in various Western countries. Follow what happened recently:

ERNST ZUNDEL – PRISON MEMOIRS,
FEBRUARY 5 to FEBRUARY 19, 2003

I lived for more than 40 years in Canada. After my marriage to Ingrid, I had applied for my papers so I could live with her in Tennessee. My application had been accepted by Immigration authorities. I had been fingerprinted, given a work permit, a social security number, a medical. I was waiting for an interview with Immigration officials which I understood to be the last step before being granted permanent resident status. Since our first interview had to be canceled due to a time schedule conflict, our attorney requested a new date. We have in our possession a return receipt that our request to be re-scheduled had been received by INS.

We waited for that interview in the belief that we had done everything we knew how to do, according to government regulations. In our lawyer’s opinion, the overwhelmed Immigration and Naturalization Service checking into thousands of illegal immigrants in the United States simply had not come around to looking at the file of two pension-aged Whites setting up residence in Tennessee and bothering no one. We had purchased an art gallery and planned to open it in weeks. One of my handymen was helping me frame some of my water colors, oils and line drawings which I intended to hang that very afternoon. All this came to an abrupt end when a virtual posse of police cruisers and paddy wagons materialized in our driveway at about 11:00 a.m., February 5, 2003.

I was dressed in my work outfit, blue jeans, mountain hiking boots, colorful carpenter’s suspenders and casual flannel shirt. I inquired what brought them there as they surrounded me menacingly. They told me to put my hands on the hood of a truck in the driveway. They said that they were Immigration Service Enforcement Officers who had come to take me into custody because I had failed to keep a court date.

There was no “court date” that we knew of. We were waiting to be notified of our re-scheduled interview. I was stunned – as was Ingrid. The five officers had no arrest warrant. I asked to call my attorney. The request was denied. Ingrid, too, was told no call to our attorney was allowed. I asked Ingrid to get my jacket, passport and medication, since I was not permitted to go back into the house. Ingrid was later told that this was deemed to have been a “civil” arrest and no arrest warrant was needed. There was nothing “civil” about this arrest!

Within minutes, I was in handcuffs and leg irons in a prison van, escorted in a police convoy down our mountain road, past our art gallery, into our little town where Ingrid and I did our shopping, and onto highway I-40 to the Knoxville Immigration Office, where I was processed, finger printed, and photographed. A Polaroid photo was taken of me against the wall of some garage, part of a hollow block-type building. This photo was then trimmed and later on stapled onto a document. I was given some documents to sign, which were lying on the desk of one of the bureaucrats when I came in. They had yellow post-it notes, and one clearly said in someone’s handwriting, “Add today’s date here”. One Immigration officer, not directly involved in my case, had his wall decorated with a 2 × 4-foot large Israeli flag. Needless to say, I found this somewhat of an odd wall decoration in a U.S. Immigration Office!

I was then put again into a prison van in handcuffs and leg irons and driven for approximately 1¼ to 1½ hours through heavy traffic from Knoxville to a nearby jail, a cold, unfriendly place. The processing there took over four hours. I was kept in an ice-cold, all-concrete holding cell – even the seats and floors were concrete – until well after midnight. The medication I had brought with me to jail was disallowed. As a result, my blood pressure began to act up. I was told by the nurses, to whom I was taken – still in handcuffs and leg irons – that it was dangerously high.

I was housed in a two-man cell, in 24-hour lockup, only allowed a brief shower after two to three days and a short call to Ingrid – I don’t remember when. My cell-mate was an engineer in chemistry, a manic depressive who hallucinated, talked to unseen people all day and jumped up and down and out of bed all night long, hollering orders to persons unseen, thinking he was in charge of the CIA and talking loudly to “the President” on his make-believe telephone. He smelled awful, obviously not having showered in weeks. He annoyed the guards repeatedly in the middle of the night by using the in-cell intercom. Finally, the guards came, six or seven of them, and told me to get off my top bunk, grab my mattress and sheets and get out of the cell. I stood in the hallway where I heard hollering, screaming, and punching. I saw blood squirting against the wall as my crazy cell-mate was dragged on one leg across the floor into a different area of the prison. I saw him a few days later. He was bruised, all black and blue over his eyes and head as guards led him past me from the doctor’s office.

I was put into a two-man cell with a gentle, soft-spoken 65-year-old barber who had tried to shoot his mother. He was kind and helpful to me. I was now briefly with the general population, half Black, Mexican and Indian, the rest being Whites, mainly from the Smoky Mountain area. Most were hardened criminals, murderers, bank robbers, car thieves. Almost all were repeat offenders. Many had 25 to 30 year sentences. There was anger, frustration and rage in that place that was palpable.

Guards were unfriendly, cold, abrupt. One guard woke me up in the middle of the night by poking me into the ribs with a flashlight because I had left a book on the window sill.

Come Sunday, I heard dogs barking. We were all ordered into our cells while black-uniformed SWAT teams with dogs went systematically from cell to cell, threw us on the floor face down, hand-cuffed, arms twisted behind our backs. They dragged us outside the cells like sacks of potatoes while helmeted, visored, New World Order-type cops hollered commands at us. They searched our pockets, beds and plastic bins. The dogs, dripping saliva from their snapping jaws, were mainly Dobermans and German Shepherds and were kept on chain leashes two feet away from our bodies and faces. Young, pretty women in skin-tight uniforms and tightly-fitting flak jackets, all black in color, kept climbing over the men who were curled up, face down, shaking, frightened out of their wits. Some had tears streaming down their faces. The women filmed these hapless prisoners with mini-camcorders close up, laughing and joking, having themselves a ball. Why were those videos taken?

I was there on two weekends, and this terrorizing of the prisoners happened on both weekends. I was lucky to miss it the second time because my American attorney, whom Ingrid had in the meantime engaged, had come to see me and I was in the visitor meeting area of the prison. He had found out by the grapevine that I was going to be deported from the USA to Germany where I was born, even though I lived in Canada for over four decades.

This lawyer filed a request with the District Court that I be permitted to see a judge to tell him what happened – a request that was denied the same day. We challenged that decision the very next day in the Cincinnati Sixth Circuit Court where a law suit is still pending. According to procedural court rules, I should not have been taken out of that prison and deported without having seen a judge – yet that is exactly what happened a few nights later, February 17, 2003 – a national holiday in America, “President’s Day”.

I was awakened by pounding on my cell door at 2:30 a.m. and told to get ready. By 4:30 a.m., the guards came to get me for “processing out”. I was given a shower, ice cold, and changed back into my civilian clothing. Because of the holiday, the guards could not let me have my medication and the U.S. $400 I had brought with me to prison. To this day, that money has not been returned.

I was taken to the Knoxville Airport without a single cent in my pocket and without my medication. We boarded a plane to Atlanta, Georgia shortly after 7:00 a.m., landing there after 9:00 a.m. I was not told where we were going, but I saw a sign at the airline counter: Buffalo, New York. I realized they were shipping me to Canada, not to Germany.

I had had no opportunity to let Ingrid know where I was and what was happening to me. To this day, not one agency has contacted Ingrid – either by phone, letter or visit – explaining, much less justifying the arrest.

We arrived in Buffalo, New York at 11:30 a.m. in a bad snowstorm. There I was told I was banned from the United States for 20 years, which meant Ingrid would be 87, and I would be 84 years old before I might have my first chance to see her again. I was taken across the Canadian border and kept in a locked room at Canadian Immigration offices at the Peace Bridge. There was lots of gesticulation and loud talking. The end result was that I was taken back across the U.S. border, still in a snowstorm. We seemed to slide and slither for hours until I finally spotted a sign saying “Attica, New York, Maximum Security Prison”. Luckily, the vehicle turned into Batavia and we finally arrived there at dusk.

That prison was way out in a wind-blown farming area. It was a flat-roofed facility, surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and search lights with a small guard hut and a barrier, reminiscent of the Dr. Zhivago film. A huge six-foot guard, dressed in a Russian-type fur hat and a dark green greatcoat, came to check papers and cargo. It was a seemingly new, very clean, well-organized facility. Unfortunately, I was only there for not quite two days before I was taken back to Canada, this time for good.

I was deported via the Peace Bridge at Fort Erie on February 19, 2003. I was interrogated for about seven or eight hours off and on. I was allowed to call Ingrid, my lawyer and, within two hours, some Scottish friends from Hamilton, Ontario. They came to bring me some much-needed money.

I was “arrested” again – I thought I had already been arrested! – and taken to Thorold, the Niagara Region Detention Center where, a few weeks later, I was “arrested” for the third time, this time right in my cell.

I have been labeled a “security risk” for Canada by ministerial decree – NOT for what I have done in 42 years of responsibly living in that country, where I have no criminal record, but for what somebody else in the future “might” do by reading what I have discovered about the murky business called the ‘Holocaust’.

I came to Canada in 1958 – a nineteen-year-old kid in search of a productive life. I will be judged at age 64 by secret hearings where neither I nor my attorneys will know what is being said about me, much less who the witnesses are. No way can I defend myself – except by raising public awareness.

Can this be happening in America – the Land of the Free and the Brave?

Since my husband’s arrest, six months have gone by. He is still in maximum detention. He is not allowed a chair, a pillow, or a pen. Yet there are no criminal charges.

With this ad, I am pleading for public awareness.

If somebody smashes my window, I can go to the police and complain – and can expect that someone will investigate. If somebody smashes my life, is there no recourse because my husband holds politically incorrect views backed up by solid research about the so-called ‘Holocaust’?

Holocaust Revisionism is not a cult or a subversive ideology. It is a scientific methodology to sort out truths from falsehoods. Research has shown the ‘Holocaust’ is not “self-evident” – yet it is shielded by practically all Western governments. The term has the power to hurt, and it has the power to silence. It is the central taboo of our time.

I say the ‘Holocaust’ has grown into a cult and a subversive ideology!

Recently, I paid for an ad in one of the major American papers. The question I put to my country’s elected officials is simply: Exactly, what is meant by ‘Holocaust’? HISTORY? OR DOGMA?

• If the Holocaust is history, it MUST be open to investigation, like any other historical claim.
• If, on the other hand, the Holocaust is a religious dogma, it has no place in law enforcement training manuals, supported by taxpayers’ money.

In my young years, I lived under four dictators – Stalin and Hitler in Europe, Peron and Stroessner in South America. When I came to America, I thought that I had entered paradise, where there was justice, where there was law and order. I willingly and proudly became a US citizen. I’d like to think that this is still America where dissident views have a place.

Or am I wrong?

Does my own government approve of American law enforcement officers to act as hit squads for alien interests, dragging a law-abiding man of retirement age away in handcuffs and leg irons to be dumped in maximum detention for months on end with no relief in sight – because he questions claims that demonize his people, the Germans of the World War generation?

A taboo has bitten into America’s soul – a taboo that is pose and pretense. It seems to get a free pass from the American government. And yet its claims have no foundation in reality. Those claims must be checked out. It’s time to check them out. It’s time to ask hard questions.

I will ask the members of my Congress and my Senate to take swift, concrete steps to have my husband be returned to me, replete with his politically incorrect views. I ask that men of principle and courage stand up to the abuses of the Holocaust Lobby – and do so with verve and conviction. I ask that men of honor, elected to serve the American people, not dive for the politically correct fig leaf the moment the Holocaust Lobby says “Boo!”.

But I will do more! I am asking the Russian President, Wladimir Putin, to take a stand, condemning this abuse by government – exactly as America, in past years, condemned the dictatorial actions in Soviet Russia. I ask the Russian people to cut out the letter below and send it to the Kremlin. Please do that for a man who has done nothing wrong – who merely followed his conscience!

Dear President Putin:

You probably are not aware of my husband, Ernst Zündel – but hundreds of thousands of people all over the world know his name. Ernst Zündel is the man who, under vicious siege by a powerful political lobby, sent an investigative team from Canada to Auschwitz in 1988 to test forensically if “gassings” really happened – and found that they did not. Science does not lie, and scientific findings can be verified. His evidence must stand or fall in the free market of ideas. My husband has pleaded for a safe, impartial global forum ever since to make his findings known.

The Canadian Holocaust Lobby has never forgiven Ernst Zündel. Recently, he was arrested on US soil – allegedly because he missed an interview with Immigration and Naturalization Services officials. No judge. No hearing. No recourse. Instead, leg irons and handcuffs – and brutal incarceration in four maximum detention prisons, first in America and now in Canada. False news was spread in mainstream media that he had “overstayed his visa”. Not so. He was married to a U.S. citizen, and we have irrefutable documentation that he was legally entitled to be here. His “punishment”, just for a starter? Banned from the U.S.A. for 20 years!

My husband’s brutal treatment by government officials in what many vainly hope are still two of the West’s most law-abiding democratic countries is reminiscent of the darkest days of Soviet Russia. I know whereof I speak. At the age of five, I lost my father in a very similar arrest in 1941 – never to see him again!

I am a Russian-born, German-descendant, award-winning novelist, best known for an early novel, “The Wanderers”, a fictitious account of the life of my Russian-born Mennonite grandmother. More recently, I wrote a trilogy, spanning seven generations and 200 years and all the major political upheavals of the last two gruesome, bloody centuries.

My people, living peacefully in the Ukraine since 1789, were ethnically cleansed in the political purges of 1938-1941, and only a handful of us could save ourselves, escaping with the retreating German Army in 1943 to Germany and, then, in 1948, to South America.

I grew up in the jungles, functionally illiterate and knowing little of the political realities of dictatorships that transformed and decimated countries like Russia and Germany. As an adult, I emigrated to Canada and then to the United States, always thinking of the country of my birth, Russia, as a place out of the depths of hell – until I learned about an intellectual movement called Revisionism.

My now imprisoned husband is globally known as a Revisionist pioneer. Ernst Zündel has a profound geopolitical understanding of the moneyed interests setting brother against brother, causing rivers of blood and tears for the gains of a handful of oligarchs who fattened themselves on our pain. Today I know that Russia was as horribly victimized as Germany was. Russia suffered as much as Germany did – and as America will suffer, unless America wakes up and comes to understand today’s events in light of what was done so cruelly to law-abiding people yesterday.

Referring to my husband’s brutal arrest, one of my Russian Revisionist correspondents called Ernst and myself “America’s Refuseniks” and pledged his intellectual solidarity. It is an apt description of who we are and what we do. We refuse to believe in historical lies. We refuse to be dictated to and told who are our friends and who should be our enemies. We refuse to surrender our Freedom of Speech. We refuse to swallow manufactured history such as the “Holocaust by gassing” – a lie that has become an intellectual stranglehold on every Western country. If our findings are deemed “wrong”, then let’s have a civilized debate in a respectable national forum where both sides can offer arguments and evidence – and let the people judge!

Recently, I read an essay by Russian General Anatoly Wolkow, titled “People, Listen To The Signals!” Here is a former enemy of Germany who stretches out a hand of friendship to soften the political mistakes of the past and bring long-needed healing to both Germany and Russia. I believe there are millions of Russians who would identify with what he says. I know there are millions of Germans all over the world who would like nothing better than to bury the hostilities of World War II and once again be known as Russia’s partners, friends and scientific benefactors. America would benefit from such a reconciliation. America is not in need of yet another war.

We need to find ways to each other!

I plead with you to send a message to those millions, Germans and Russians alike, as well as millions in America and Canada, that we are kin, not enemies. A Russian leader of courage and vision could tell the Western world that the Russia of today has finally become autonomous, living by democratic principles, abhorring censorship.

There is a way to shame short-sighted Western bureaucrats for their repressive laws – and wake up people globally to the realities of vested interest power plays that move us ever closer to a frightening abyss. A simple gesture, even if only symbolic, would telegraph around the world that Russia, emerging out of decades of repression, has thrown away her dictatorial shackles:

Declare Ernst Zündel, Prisoner of Conscience, in broad daylight kidnapped “legally” by his nefarious enemies on U.S. soil, to be the West’s most notable “Refusenik” – and offer him asylum and a passport.

Sincerely,

Ingrid Zündel, Ed.D.

Aftermath

Letter to the Editor, The Washington Times, Sept. 10, 2003:

It is amazing how so many lies can be packed into such a short letter to the editor. In the context of his own society, “Holocaust denial” is not “a crime”, but the prosecution of such “deniers” would be of crime; Zündel’s message is the message of love for his German people and his fatherland, which people like Mr. Marans might hate, but that does not make Zündel’s views hate. Most outrageous is the claim that Zündel “supports the extermination of not only Jews, but blacks and any other members of so-called inferior races.” This is one of the most evil lies I have ever heard about Ernst Zündel. If the Washington Times would objectively follow Mr. Marans demand to not publish anything from persons spreading hateful messages, Mr. Maran would be the first censorship victim. For he does not know what he is doing…