From: Tech_savvy00
EMail: boolwormz_99@yahoo.com
A personal odyssey, a labour of love
A promise to his Polish Jew parents led Black on a five-year quest
FOR Edwin Black, IBM And The Holocaust was a labour of love. It took five years to put together, with research that spanned 20,000 documents in 50 archives in seven countries and the efforts of a team of more than 100 researchers.
His odyssey began in 1993 at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. The first exhibit was an IBM Hollerith D-11 card-sorting machine, with an IBM nameplate affixed to its front.
Black turned to his parents - Polish Jews who escaped from Nazi persecutors - and promised them he would find out more.
As he told Sunday Review in an exclusive e-mail interview: 'I fought lack of manpower, lack of money, lack of translators and lack of sleep. But I never thought about giving up. So many suffered so massively as a result of IBM's lucrative alliance with Nazi Germany, any transient frustration or discomfort I experienced was but a distant observer on the plain of personal struggle.'
Although the Hollerith machine has been sitting in plain sight, few have thought to ask the questions that lead back to IBM. Black said: 'The answer is that we have investigated the methods of physical killing, the course of military intelligence, the flow of assets and the exchange of diplomatic papers.
'But no one has yet explored the field of information technology. The world has been unable to identify the answers because until the advent of the Computer Age, we have been unable to even formulate the questions. Only now do we recognise the pivotal value of information technology to any enterprise of war, peace or persecution.'
He said passionately: 'IBM needs to come clean.'
But the company, having kept its past buried for 50 years, seems determined to keep it that way.
Black pointed out: 'Instead of admitting their history and cooperating and opening their archives, they continue to shuttle small portions of select German subsidiary documents to archives for long-term processing - which keep them closed to inspection.'
But he is equally determined to hold IBM accountable, right down to naming names: 'IBM PR people, principally Carol Malkovich in New York and Ian Colley in Paris, have chosen to talk about everything but the history. These are the same people responsible for blocking my access to the archives in 1999.
'Now they promote spin about lawsuits, try to discredit the publisher and author, and claim simultaneously that there is 'nothing new in the book' and that they 'have not read the book'.'
What is more outrageous, he added, is that IBM has 'chosen this moment to punish the Holocaust community by suddenly withholding promised software to a reparations group - demanding US$1 million. IBM's public relations people have painted the company into a corner it does not need to be in'.
He concluded: 'The best reparation is illumination.'
For readers of his book, he said: 'If there is a message, it is that the phrase 'Never Again' must be more than a slogan for Holocaust remembrance. This phrase must become a mantra for business everywhere that their technology will never again be used to persecute innocent civilians.'
--Ong Sor Fern
Copyright © 2001 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.