I see everything! The mothers, their babies at the breast, the little naked children, the men and women, naked. They enter into the death chamber, pushed by the leather whips of the SS. Pack well, that is what [the] captain ordered. Seven to eight hundred persons on twenty-five square meters. More than half are children…

For forty-five years, the Confessions had been the laughingstock of the Holocaust deniers. What? Seven to eight hundred people on twenty-five square meters? Thirty people on one square meter, three people on one square foot? "Impossible," "Incredible," "Nonsensical," wrote the jeering deniers. "It is feasible if one uses a scrap press, but in that case gassing would be superfluous." Even believers in the Holocaust fudged the Confessions’ figures, writing at best inaccurately and at worst unscrupulously of 170 to 180 people or of one hundred square meters. For forty-five years, no one had troubled himself to see if seven to eight hundred people could fit on twenty-five square meters until Provan, in Monongahela, read these words in the Confessions: "More than half are children." Well, if I’ve got one thing, thought Provan, it’s children, and he put down the Confessions and took his five children and one big baby doll into an upstairs bedroom. "What are you doing?" asked Mrs. Provan.

"An experiment. How many kids can fit in a gas chamber."

"You shouldn’t use the kids like that. It’s sorta gruesome."

"Aw, it won’t hurt them," said Provan in his down-home voice and had the kids strip to their underwear. He packed them into a corner, then with two dressers corralled them into a square of sixteen by sixteen inches. Then, setting them free, he used an electronic calculator to calculate to his astonishment that he could fit 891 children into the gas chamber at Belzec. Tears came to Provan’s eyes, for he saw the Confessions differently now. Its author, he saw, wouldn’t say something so impossible, incredible, nonsensical, something no one would believe for one half century, if he himself hadn’t witnessed it. Gerstein, the SS man, had seen Jews die at Belzec ("One hears them weeping, sobbing") and the Holocaust had indeed happened.

Provan did two more experiments even as Mrs. Provan, a sort of Cesare Cremonini, the colleague of Galileo’s who wouldn’t look into Galileo’s telescope, told him, "You shouldn’t." In one he used five kids, three manikins, and one doll, in the other five kids, three adults—a printer, a minister, and an Italian woman who said, "You’re nuts, but I’ll do it," all with their clothes on—and the doll, and he calculated that seven hundred fathers, mothers, children and babies would fit in the chamber at Belzec. And this year in March, he used the same scientific method on the "No holes? No Holocaust!" hypothesis, going with some of his children (he had nine now) to one collapsed chamber at Auschwitz. The witnesses there had said the holes were alongside the central columns, and Provan used a $40 metric measuring tape to find where the columns had been and find, well, whaddya know? those celebrated holes. No longer were they twenty-five by twenty-five centimeters, as the witnesses had said. Now, with the roof blown up, they were larger, and Provan photographed them, came home to Monongahela, wrote up a monograph, printed it at his print shop, and printed a cover that, in gold letters, with the exclamation point demoted to a question mark, said NO HOLES?  NO HOLOCAUST?  He then flew to Orange County and appeared at the palm-filled hotel on Saturday afternoon.

Not even washing up, he sat with childlike delight on a flowery lobby love-seat by the Kentia palm handing his two dozen spiral-bound copies to the illuminati of Holocaust denial. If he expected encomiums he misunderstood human nature, which clings to our established beliefs as though to a life preserver without which we’d sink to the jet-black depths of the Mindanao Trough. "You have a bent towards evil," the chief denier from Australia, a man of German ancestry, told Provan. "You slander the German people. You believe in the Holocaust." "But Charles, if I may call you Charles, bring me the pudding," said the chief denier alive, a Frenchman and the man who coined the "No holes?  No Holocaust!" motto. "Bring me the holes of twenty-five by twenty-five centimeters."

"Oh, I can’t," said Provan.

"Where do you see a square of twenty-five by twenty-five?"

"Oh, not anymore. But this hole is big enough to have held it."

"But you don’t have a square of twenty-five centimeters."

"I admit that."

"This cannot convince me," the Frenchman said. The angriest denier was David Irving, the British historian, the man who’d said in London that a photograph of a hole would drive such a metaphorical hole in his case that he couldn’t defend it. Irving, who isn’t allowed at Auschwitz and may have been jealous of an amateur’s access, sat at the open-aired downstairs restaurant in front of a Caesar’s salad. On spotting Provan, he turned black, and his words came like chisel chips. "I’m hopping mad," Irving said. "If I were an SS man and somebody said, ‘Knock some holes in that ceiling, will you? We’re going to start putting cyanide in,’ I’d make those holes in the middle of some empty area. I wouldn’t put them bang, bang, bang, bang, next to the load-bearing pillars. What were the load-bearing pillars for? Just cosmetic purposes?" Provan, twenty years younger, stood like a boy called down to the principal’s office, looking abashed, and Irving continued, "The Germans spend God knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds building this? And then they allow some jerk with a sledgehammer to punch holes next to the load-bearing pillars? I’m having lunch," said Irving abruptly, and he attacked his salad without a whit of his ardent convictions voided by Provan’s photographs. Of course, the deniers would say it’s Provan and I whose convictions weren’t voided by Irving, and it may be a hundred years before we know whose views prevail. "We have won," an SS man told Primo Levi at Auschwitz. "There may be suspicions, but there will be no certainties, because we’ll destroy the evidence together with you."