There has been a recent battle in the Irish Independent's letters to the editor over the Holocaust. Some thinly disguised Holocaust denial, as well as Nazi apologetics, along with countering arguments have thus been published in a national newspaper. Far be it from me to suggest the Indo revamp its letters policy, but I've always wondered if it is a common practice to omit any fact-checking of such letters. Certainly that seems to be the case in the Oregonian; perhaps it is a journalism tradition that the editors should not edit what for a long time was their readers' only access to the broad forum.

So I just want to point out a brazen lie in one of those letters of which we speak, committed by a person called Christie Walsh, of Henry Street in Galway. If that is really his or her name and address. We will stick with just one of the calumnies written:

"As for Premo [sic] Levi, another miraculous survivor who tells us that in Auschwitz 24,000 people were gassed on a daily basis; strange how it took him thirty years to remember that."

Primo Levi published his Auschwitz memoir, Se questo è un uomo, in 1947, with a very small print run. A larger publishing house reprinted it in 1958, and it was translated into English in 1959, as Survival in Auschwitz.

Primo Levi did not wait thirty years to "remember". Christie Walsh is either a liar or an ignoramus. Holocaust deniers are generally both.

At any rate, I believe I have read all of Levi's works. He is one of my favorite writers, and an inspiration, both as a human being and an author.