The recollections of elderly people can yield insights for students, yet oral history can be hazardous: you need a critical perspective, solid background knowledge, and plenty of pinches of salt. Now we have the internet, there is little excuse for not checking out such word-of-mouth assertions of historical “fact” in more depth - although the salt must still be kept to hand.

Last year while teaching GCSE history I was renting a room in London from an elderly German woman. She had grown up in Silesia in the 1920s. A well-educated and cultivated person who had studied history at university, she seemed ideal for some of my students to interview. They were studying 20th-century European history with a special focus on Nazi Germany.

At the time, Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and her publisher, Penguin Books, were being sued in the High Court by history-writer David Irving, author of, among others titles, Hitler’s War (Focal Point). My landlady took an avid interest in the trial. One day she asked if I had heard of the witness Fred Leuchter, declaring: “He is the man!” Leuchter was appearing to support Irving’s claim that the Holocaust was Jewish fabrication. It dawned on me that my proposed oral-history interviewee subscribed to a view of the Nazi era very different from that in school textbooks.

Fred Leuchter, a self-taught expert on methods of execution, spent eight days in Poland in 1988 taking samples from the walls and ceilings of Auschwitz. He claimed to have found no or very low traces of cyanide. (For a lengthy exposure of this and other Holocaust-denying myths see: http:motlc.wiesenthal. comresourceseducationrevisionindex.html) His findings have been adduced as “evidence” in many Holocaust-denying publications and trials. But my landlady believed Leuchter had proved there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. While she agreed that thousands of canisters of Zyklon B (see www.historyplace.comworldwar2holocausth-zyklon.htm for information on this substance) had been delivered to the camp, these, she insisted, had been used for nothing more than “delousing and pest control”. But see www.spectacle.org 695zyklonb.html on how Zyklon B was used. Leuchter’s assertions were challenged by Robert van Pelt, a professor of architecture, who gave evidence that extermination chambers show less cyanide than the delousing chambers because Zyklon B is much more effective on warm-blooded creatures: it is easier to kill a Jew than a louse with cyanide. See www.nizkor.orgfaqsauschwitz

In his summing up of the case, Justice Gray was unimpressed by Leuchter and concluded that David Irving was “an active Holocaust denier” and “anti-semitic and racist”. See www. channel4.complusholocaustindex.html However, the student trawling the internet would need to be aware there are many websites from racist organisations giving the so-called “revisionist” point of view: beware of anything with “revisionist”, “zundel”, or “codoh” in website addresses.

The verdict did not modify my landlady’s views. She was indignant about the Holocaust being part of the history taught in British schools. All that had happened under Hitler was that “a few hundred thousand Jews” had been “resettled” to “work camps”, where some of them “may have died of typhus”.

Her own experiences of being transported by rail from Silesia to Germany were grim. Food was scarce. She travelled in an open cattle truck, exposed to the rain and freezing cold. Any student would find such first-hand testimony rivetting. She quickly went on, however, to what she believed to be the experiences of the Jews. “They were transported to the camps in closed cattle trucks, and protected from the elements,” she said. “And given plenty of food provisions as well!”

She insisted it was Germans rather than Jews who had been the principal victims of racial violence. The SS, she claimed, had been “forbidden to treat concentration camp inmates with cruelty”. Detailed evidence to the contrary is in Lipstadt’s book and at www.us-israel.org

Her diatribe highlighted how people mix up their memories of the past with their prejudices and beliefs, contrary to the historical analysis which we try to teach in schools. What would an impressionable and poorly informed student have made of my landlady’s statements? Raw oral testimony is not guaranteed to enrich historical understanding. Students need first to appreciate the job of searching for solid historical evidence.

Ivor Morgan teaches at Queen Elizabeth’s High School, Gainsborough, and Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School, Lincolnshire