Ethnic profiling, my mother and the Holocaust denier Jack Kemp This past week was the 65th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. My mother and her three sisters survived that place. My grandfather did not. His wife, my grandmother, was transported from there to Bergen-Belsen in Germany where she died two days after the British Army liberated the camp. My three aunts live in Israel and my parents came to the US. In the 1980s, my mother related this story to me about her winter experience one day in Florida. While listening to a call-in talk radio program in West Palm Beach, she heard a young male caller say there was no Holocaust, that it was all propaganda and lies. My mother, who never previously spoke publicly about her experiences in any forum, told me that this got her angry enough to call the radio station where she was put on the air to argue against this young male, a reaction the station no doubt assumed it would get in that part of southern Florida filled with its New York retirees. She never told me the full content of what she said, but I bet it was plenty. The previous time my mother had been called upon to talk about Auschwitz was when she applied to enter the United States in the American Occupied Zone of Germany and she was required to describe and draw the physical layout of the camp on a piece of paper. The man asking her, she believed, was from US Army Intelligence. This makes sense because the US was concerned about Communist agents entering the US under false pretense after WWII. The number tattooed on her arm was not proof enough of her being there: the Soviets could easily create a false tattoo. She did not complain to the German or Jewish newspapers or the ACLU about "ethnic profiling" or discrimination. Such a complaint in the months following the Berlin Blockade and the US Berlin Airlift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_airlift#Berlin_Airlift would have been incomprehensibly arrogant and laughably idiotic - as well as grounds for instant dismissal by the American authorities of her family's application to enter the US. Now, in the 1980s, my mother became the interrogator and asked the young Holocaust denier how did he have the time (and money) to not be at work that day instead of calling into a radio station with his lies. I don't believe he answered her. A later caller to the same station, an Italian-American US veteran spoke movingly of his personally liberating a concentration camp in Germany and what he saw there. There is a video exhibit at the Spring Valley, New York, Holocaust Museum, http://www.holocauststudies.org/pages/exhibits.html , which mentions GIs crying when first seeing the concentration camps and giving out cigarettes to the inmates, which they quickly stopped doing because the inmates ATE them.  Some YouTube videos of testimony from actual liberating GIs can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTKyBm0bhY&feature=channel  and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6UODcjhFD4&feature=channel When my mother retold this story of to me, she said I would have been proud of her, how she stood up to this young Holocaust denier. She was right.