ALAN writes:
You Bet Your Life was a weekly half-hour quiz program on network television in the 1950s. I remember watching it when I was a boy. Its host was Groucho Marx. In the episode shown on NBC Television on January 5, 1956 (but filmed in late 1955), two contestants selected the category “Dictionary Quiz”.
Groucho asked them this question: “What is a holocaust?” They did not know. One of them remained silent. The other, a young lawyer, guessed it was a synonym for catastrophe. No, Groucho said; a holocaust is “a large, destructive fire”. And that was all he said.
Groucho Marx was Jewish. But neither he nor the contestants nor the studio audience gave any indication — in what they said, how they said it, or in the matter-of-fact expressions they wore in response to his answer — that the word “holocaust” meant or suggested anything else to them.
How could that be when Court Historians and their propagandists tell us that “The Holocaust” was perpetrated only a decade earlier than that program? If so, then surely it was prominent in Americans’ awareness in 1955 — especially the awareness of a famous Jewish entertainer and voracious reader like Groucho Marx.
Had they forgotten all about it? How come the word “holocaust” in 1955 did not evoke the standard knee-jerk recognition that Americans in later decades would agree to bestow upon that word and absorb into their vocabulary and frame of mind?
Was it because the myth of “The Holocaust” had not yet been concocted?
