Anne Frank exhibit at Griffin Museum of Science and Industry underlines the widespread appeal of denialism

"Holocaust deniers say that her diary was written with a kind of ballpoint pen not available at the time," said Eric Strating, the consul general of the Netherlands in Chicago.

We were standing in the entrance of Anne Frank The Exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the doomed Dutch teen's handwriting projected on the walls around us.

I chewed on that information.

Give credit to haters. The mental gymnastics they go through. Of course Anne Frank had to be a fraud, because ... why exactly? ... nobody died in the Holocaust? Because it's impossible for a Jewish teen to be sympathetic?

And the detail of the pen ... genius, with its implication of thorough historical rigor. "We'd like to believe this Frank lie. But our extensive knowledge of the history of pens and ink reveals the hidden hand of the octopoid conspiracy straddling the globe..."

We need to teach denialism in school. Right now. Not only Holocaust denial — that's just one popular brand of the best-selling denial line of faux intellectual products: climate change denial, medical science denial, humanity of whoever you are given permission to hate denial. People will cling to the most ridiculous suppositions to explain away anything that chafes against their cherished biases.

If you hate Jews — and who doesn't nowadays? — it can be awkward to have this enormous atrocity, the fruit of that hatred, just sitting there, staring at you out of the pages of history, complete with films, photos and those meticulous German records carefully accounting for every gold filling pried out of the mouths of their victims. So much easier just to say the whole thing never happened.

"Don't argue with Holocaust deniers," I told the consul general. "It's not intellectual pursuit, but a form of hatred. Nothing you can say is going to make them slap their forehead and go, 'My God, you're right, it did happen!"

Facts are meaningless to such people. Did you see how Donald Trump reacted to the midterm blowout? A day of rational acceptance. Immediately followed by "it's rigged!" denialism. Followed, when that was hooted down ("Just stop," said Megyn Kelly, of all people) by whatever is coming next. Mutating fantasy in a consequence-free world.

Actually, lies have consequences. As Anne Frank reminds us. I didn't plan to see the show at the GMSI, which opened in May. I'd already toured the secret annex itself, visiting Amsterdam in 2023, and taken away its grim lessons — totalitarianism rises, innocent, ordinary people are caught between the gears and crushed, thanks the genius of their friends and neighbors at denying their humanity based on lies.

Plus, I have complicated feelings about Frank, which I expressed last month in a column about Polish poet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski:

"Over the years, we’ve seen the Holocaust transformed into entertainment, especially on social media. Once there was one Anne Frank. Now there are 6 million. The Holocaust has been retrofitted into a bracing tale of courage, resistance, and redemption. The Holocaust is not a tale of courage, resistance and redemption. It is an epic of cruelty, obedience and horror."

This was seen at the Netherlands Consulate General in Chicago as perhaps throwing shade upon their national heroine, and they invited me to accompany Consul General Strating through the exhibit. He was generally silent, as diplomats tend to be — but not as mum as another Chicago consul general I had lunch with last week. Though he represents a small Middle Eastern nation currently being grilled on both sides by the flames of international opprobrium, he said nothing on the record and nothing off the record of any value except for creating the general impression that his superiors really don't understand the predicament they've dug themselves into. Denialism comes in many flavors.

The Anne Frank show runs through Jan. 31, and is comprehensive and excellent, a must-see, particularly for those who won't find their way to Amsterdam eventually.

After touring the show, we went in search of the Dutch national Christmas tree, one of more than 50 trees in the GMSI's "Christmas Around the World" extravaganza. We found it.

The placard told about the feast of Sinterklaas, Dec. 5 in the Netherlands, and how "On this day, children put out shoes filled with hay and carrots for Sinterklaas' horses hoping to find them filled with treats in the morning."

"Santa Claus only has one horse," said Strating, relating how, as a child, he had a gray horse, and was pressed into the Sinterklaas role. I smiled, thinking of the ball point pen canard that began our conversation. People are so punctilious, under most circumstances. Unless the facts cut against their biases. Then they untether the slavering beasts of their imagination and let them roam free. The results speak for themselves.