Learning to question is vital in the education process. The fact that you question “authority” in an non-confrontation manner is admirable.

If you can follow the foot steps of Socrates, you will be a great student and teacher of life.

Listening carefully to statements and arguments of others, and asking probing questions to draw them out more and more will ultimate lead to a very integrated and consistent view of the speaker’s position…or it will reveal the incomplete, disjointed, and inconsistent and perhaps flawed reasoning of the speaker.

You don’t have to “fight” by direct argument/counter argument. Ask for some supporting details in a non-threatening way, “I’m curious, what was the waiter’s name?”, “So does that mean he didn’t want dessert?”, “What was the waiter’s religion?” “So if that accident didn’t happen, are you saying that maybe Hitler wouldn’t have hated the Jews?” or maybe even “Someone told me it was in a tailors shop and that the tailor accidentally stuck Hitler with a pin when the tailor was making adjustments to Hitler’s suit!”

So rather than get drawn into a shouting match over this issue, just remember some key points:

1) Everyone has an opinion, and that opinions are like sex (gender): every one has one, and its not necessarily right or wrong.

2) Arguing, shouting, and fighting draws more energy from emotion than reason and rationale thought and can escalate to wars. Discussions based on verifiable facts analyzed rationally can lead to understanding, consensus, compromise, and agreement (even if the agreement is, enough already, let’s stop for a while and come back to deal with this later….the problem hasn’t been solved, but at least we are not killing each other).

Sorry, I didn’t have a simple answer for your question…I wasn’t there, so I cannot attest to the truth of what happened in that restaurant…long before I was born anyway.

But I think it is much more important to learn how to learn and to strive to better understand how NOT to be mislead by authorities. And the best way to do that is to ask questions just as you did.

Hope this helps. Best wishes in your studies….and by the way, keep up the questioning.

There are many thousands of people still alive today who lived through the Holocaust. There are literally millions of pieces of evidence in museums around the world. It did happen.

People like your summer school teacher are called Holocaust deniers. Holocaust denial is a curious phenomenon, but, as you can imagine, it is fairly offensive to Holocaust survivors and their families. It also has never been accepted by peer-reviewed scholarship or courts of law.