Condanna

I watched this film some time ago because I've always had an interest in Holocaust studies. This film left a truly bad impression. Basically, they use the docudrama genre to play with facts the way Oliver Stone does. There is slanderous innuendo and other misrepresentation. If you take it with a grain of salt, you might be okay, but it is a good example why this kind of movie should rarely be made.

I know William Cox who is portrayed here by Dabney Coleman. After watching the video with him he told me that it was an accurate account of the events that took place. Mr. Cox suffered significant financial losses taking this case but felt a personal need to continue. The concept of using "Contract Law" to establish other legal precedents is now taught to first year law students as a result of this case. Perhaps someday the video will be more widely available.

True story of concentration camp survivor Mel Mermelstein excellently played by Leonard Nimoy-of Mister Spock fame-fighting the good fight against the holocaust revisionist IHR-Institute of Historical Review-who challenged Mel to either put up or shut up with his stories of his life as an inmate in a number of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz & Buchenwald in WWII. Told by the Jewish ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center that he went for help to ignore the IHR's challenge and not give them any publicity by doing it Mel instead went full tilt on his own snapping at its $50,000.00 offer by it in proving that there were gas chambers and crematories at the camps he was incarcerated in, for being Jewish, as well as later getting another $40,000.00 in damages for the pain and suffering that the IHR caused him and his family!

Mermelstein first caught the eye of the IHR by going around telling school children as well as their parents of the horrors that he suffered at the hands of the Nazis in WWII losing his entire family in what was called the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi occupied Europe. Trying to shut him up the IHR planned to call his bluff in making his plight or accusations public thinking that he's really full of it and unable to prove what he's saying only to have him win in court a libel action against It. And also by it having to pay out almost 100 grand to him, not to mention the court costs, he brought the holocaust revisionist and in many cases denial organization to the point of bankruptcy! It also had its wear-house in California fire bombed three times by outraged citizens that destroyed most of its anti-Holocaust as well as anti-Semitic material that it was, in many cases free of charge , handing out to the public.

As big as a victory it was for Mel Mermelstein at the time it may well have turned out to be a "Pyrrhic Victory" for him in the long run. That by giving the IHR free and undeserved publicity that has now, some 30 years later, spawned scores of like wise holocaust revisionist sites on the internet that are still around-Like IHR-with us now and unfortunately still growing all over the net or cyberspace. This makes me feel that if Mermelstein listened to both the ADL & Simon Wiesenthal Center to just ignore the slings and arrows being thrown at him by the IHR it as well as it fellow websites would have died an lonely and ignominious death or never would have come into existence in the first place!

This film was created after a $17 million lawsuit alleging "injurious denial of established fact." The IHR settled out of court, and signed an apology. The apology was to Mermelstein, for extending the IHR gas chamber reward offer to him in full knowledge that Mermelstein was traumatized by the Concentration Camp.

The IHR gas chamber reward (which requires hard evidence) was never pursued by Mermelstein. The IHR gas chamber reward is no longer offered, since it proved to be more of a lawsuit magnet than PR tool.

The judge ruled: 'Under Evidence Code Section 452(h), this Court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944,' and 'It just simply is a fact that falls within the definition of Evidence Code Section 452(h). It is not reasonably subject to dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.'

In 1988 Mermelstein brought another suit against IHR, which he lost.

I watched this drama on television and was numb afterwards. You hear of flat-Earthers and 'lunar landings were fake' conspiracy theorists and just say to yourself "well - they pays their money... that's their beliefs and they're entitled to them..." Then 'Never Forget' shows you, through drama, the lengths the stuck minds and morally blind will go to to deafen themselves and others to the truth. We have our own paranoid denialists in Northern Ireland, who only see the wrong done them never the wrong they've done. They spout the kindred of the poison Mel Mermelstein had to put up with. A good portrait of a man driven by his convictions: Leonard Nimoy certainly deserves praise for telling Mel Mermelstein's story, let alone turning in a fine performance in the lead. Despite any dramatic licence taken I'd set this TV movie as course text for history at Ordinary Level: it is quite clearly still needed.