Holocaust Isn't Fiction to Survivors

December 21, 2006— -- This editorial by an ABC News producer was first published by the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 18, 2006.

I wish the participants perpetuating the denial of the Holocaust who gathered in Tehran last week could have met my mother.

Every night, for nearly 70 years, her dream was always the same. A terrified, 14-year-old girl would be on a platform in Vienna embracing her mother not knowing if it was for the last time ... and then, the train would pull out.

Many nights as a boy, and not long ago during a visit, I heard her crying in her sleep, calling out to her mother, "Mutti, Mutti!" She was on that platform, reliving the unbearable pain of that day; a child separated from her mother.

My mother, Anita Sommer Goldberg, was a Holocaust survivor whose journey took her from Austria to wartime London to postwar Mexico City and finally to a small town in Indiana where for more than 50 years she became a pillar of the Jewish community.

Several weeks ago, she died after a long illness. She was 82 years old.

As a dear friend described her, Mom was "Little Bo Peep with an Uzi;" a force of nature with an astonishing memory for everything that happened in her life. Everything.

She would have given the folks in Tehran an earful.

Thanks to Steven Spielberg, she can. In 1998, she was interviewed for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation project, an extraordinary video archive of Holocaust survivors largely funded by the director after making the film "Schindler's List."

After my mother's funeral two weeks ago, I watched all seven hours of the Shoah project. There she was, healthy then, laughing, crying, recalling in astounding detail the smells, sounds and events of her childhood. Gazing at the television screen, it's hard to believe my mother--as the revisionists would claim--was a pathological liar.