What Holocaust deniers do

A nice little piece on Jews getting beyond the Holocaust, by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. What is keeping them from doing so? Holocaust deniers, like David Irving, play a role. So do things like this:

But this desire to emerge from the Shoah shadow runs into constant obstacles. For one thing, it seems to loom larger the further we get away from it. The flow of books and films on the Nazi era does not slow; switch on any of the TV documentary channels and it's a good bet you'll come across archive footage of goosesteppers and brownshirts. Other than Henry VIII, Hitler may be the only historical figure children in British schools ever learn about.

And there is a larger, sadder problem. No matter how much time seeks to heal this wound, there are those determined to reopen it. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran may be too ignorant to realise what effect it has when he strives again and again to question the veracity of the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. He has, in the six short months since his election, variously called for Israel to be wiped off the map, branded the Holocaust a myth, suggested a Tehran conference for the world's Holocaust deniers and, most recently, told Europe to brace itself to take in millions of Jewish refugees from Israel.

Coming from a man apparently bent on building a nuclear bomb, how does he expect all that to sound to Jewish ears, except like a warning of a terrible calamity to come, one with the most painful historical echoes? The rest of the world may look at Jews and see a well-established, secure community, and they may look at Israel and see an armed occupier and regional superpower. But when a man like Ahmadinejad starts talking, Jews and Israelis look in the mirror and see something very different: that famous image of a frightened child, his arms in the air, cowering from Nazi guns. It may sound like a form of collective madness, but remember: the gas chambers were in operation only 60 years ago. If the Jewish psyche is still wounded, that should hardly be a surprise.