Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?
Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust? Melissa Katsoulis explores the strangest corner in the bizarre world of the literary hoax
Researching a book about literary hoaxes led me to investigate a sub-section of the misery-memoir genre which often left me reeling in amazement: the Holocaust hoaxers. Special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe, but they have certain duties too.
It is their right to write how and when they want (perhaps many decades later, if they are ready) and, as with Elie Wiesel, with their own definitions of truth and fiction. It was he who said that "Some stories are true that never happened."
However, those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren't ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy. Their motivations were, as so often in life and letters, a combination of pain, hope and greed, and they were emboldened by a marketplace in thrall to the misery memoir.
Why the huge demand for such books? Perhaps what readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution. And they want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else's crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own. All these hoaxers had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.
Misha Defonseca's story began to emerge from her adopted Massachusetts in the mid-1990s and was, like many a hoaxer's tale, one which in retrospect seems ridiculously far-fetched. It also had that great asset of the schmaltzy life-story: the love of a four-legged friend.
She told of crossing the wastes of war-torn Europe as a lonely child and not only being adopted by a pack of friendly wolves, but single-handedly murdering a burly German soldier. She gave inspirational talks about her epic journey, smiled sweetly for the camera at a local wolf sanctuary and eventually published her story in 1997.
Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years was an instant success, embodying the vain hope that belief, endurance (and fluffy animals) could mean something even in the face of Hitler's machine. It was money that brought her down. A falling-out about royalties led her publisher to enlist the help of historians to look into what was beginning to seem like a fishy back-story. When zoologists confirmed that no such wolf-woman love could have existed, and photos appeared of her war-time childhood (smiling, well-fed and out shopping with her grandmother), "Misha" knew the game was up.
Last year she finally confessed, admitting that she was in fact a Belgian Christian whose father's work for the Gestapo left her traumatised by the stigma of being a "traitor's child". She said: "It is not the actual reality – it was my reality, my way of surviving".
Binjamin Wilkomirski, who turned out not to be a Latvian-Jewish orphan but a rather comfortably-off Swiss clarinettist, is the most famous example. His spectacular lies were similarly accounted for by the repentant author. He initially claimed he had escaped to Switzerland after nearly dying in the camps, and in Fragments detailed rats feasting on corpses and Nazis crushing men to death. The book won him a host of literray prizes, but survivors noticed that his descriptions of camp life were unconvincing.
Research revealed him to be a local lad, Bruno Grosjean, fostered during the war after his mother gave him up. In her meticulous exposé in Granta, Elena Lappin concluded that as a child Bruno and his mother might have been indentured labourers, but that he had been conflating this with an imagined ghetto past for so long that he had become a "Man with Two Heads".
His humiliation was complete when it was revealed that one of the girls he claimed to have befriended in the camps, Laura Grabowsky, was a fraud herself – an unhinged American serial-hoaxer who had written not only a fake Holocaust memoir but a phoney one about satanic ritual abuse to boot.
The most recent case is Herman Rosenblat, the twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York. As a young boy in Buchenwald, he said, he strolled daily along the perimeter fence to meet a little girl on the outside. She would toss him a shiny apple and in so doing gave him the hope - and the vitamins - to carry on.
Decades later, as he wrote in Angel at the Fence, which very nearly got published earlier this year, he randomly met a woman in New York who had also fled post-war Europe. As they talked, Herman decided that she must be the apple girl. They went on to fall in love and marry.
When his story came out, via appearances on Oprah, it was easy to debunk: anyone approaching the perimeter fence would immediately have been shot. Rosenblat had been promised a comfortable retirement on the proceeds of his late-flowering career as a memoirist, and his claim that he was only trying to spread a little hope with his story fell on deaf ears.
In fact, he really had been in a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the true story of his and his devoted brothers' survival is far more moving than the one he made up. Only nobody wants to listen to that now.
These three had at least been born in or near the theatre of war. But what would make an Australian born in 1972 fabricate a Holocaust story? The case of Helen Demidenko is the most peculiar of them all. Demidenko - real name Darville - was a right-wing student in Brisbane who in 1993 published The Hand That Signed the Paper, about the wartime experiences of the narrator's Ukrainian father and uncle. However, they were not victims of Nazi violence but the perpetrators, having joined the Einsatzgruppen after being terrorised by Russian-Jewish "commissars".
Florid accounts of their life as merry Jew-hating death squad members flowed enthusiastically from her pen, and when she won the Australian/ Vogel Literary Award she began appearing in Ukrainian national dress and speaking in a funny accent. Her unmasking was aided by the ire of the international Jewish community at her sideline as an anti-Israeli journalist. Interviewing David Irving was not her finest hour.
But unlike the other hoaxers, she remained unrepentant, blithely speaking of the "wog accent" she put on and her annoyance at a politically-correct culture whose prejudices she despised.
Darville's case may not be typical of Holocaust hoaxers, but it fits exactly into the mould of the Australian literary hoax. All of them, even the harmless-sounding Ern Malley poetry hoax, whose victim was a radical Jewish poetry editor despised by the young fogies who made up Ern's oeuvre, are characterised by a combination of racial anxiety and anti-intellectualism.
Darville is more than just a juvenile postscript to the strange canon of the Shoah-fantasists. She would never have committed her distasteful hoax had she not picked up on and wanted to subvert that dangerous concept of the "Holocaust bore".
That idea is perpetuated by people – like Defonseca, Wilkomirski and Rosenblat – whose output contributes to the notion of an unregulated Holocaust "industry", where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.
Yes, the notion of absolute truth in life-writing is notoriously fraught. But when a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.
Melissa Katsoulis's 'Telling Tales: a history of literary hoaxes' is published this week by Constable
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited


Comments
http://gawker.com/5330138/lying-holocau
We live in an age of vulnerability. Holocaust deniers ply their mendacious poison everywhere, especially with young people on the Internet. We know from captured German war records that millions of innocent Jews (and others) were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany - most in gas chambers. Holocaust books and films help to tell the true story of the Shoah, combating anti-Semitic historical revision. And, they protect future generations from making the same mistakes.
I wrote "Jacob's Courage" to promote Holocaust education. This coming of age love story presents accurate scenes and situations of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps, with particular attention to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It examines a constellation of emotions during a time of incomprehensible brutality. A world that continues to allow genocide requires such ethical reminders and remediation.
Many authors feel compelled to use their talent to promote moral causes. Holocaust books and movies carry that message globally, in an age when the world needs to learn that genocide is unacceptable. Such authors attempt to show the world that religious, racial, ethnic and gender persecution is wrong; and that tolerance is our progeny's only hope.
Charles Weinblatt
Author, "Jacob's Courage"
http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com/
so, when talking along these lines, please dont forget to mention the plight of the palestinians and the ongoing incarceration and genocide they also face on a daily basis. it would give your post the credence it deserves.
of course, you wont do that though.
vertical jump
A Because it is profitable.
Sometimes you just don't need to over analyse things.
'Brits'(English, Irish, Scottish), 'Israelis'(Jews) & 'Palestinian'(Arabs), 'Americans'(USA), 'Australians',
'New Zealanders' that 'Germans' have been substituted with Nationalist, written the same in German, and pronounced Natzionalist?
The UK has murdered many millions of innocent lives throughout the 20th century, non for its actual defense, since Germany never intended to invade the UK, never could and actually sent Rudolf
Hess to plea for peace? yet he was imprisoned for life, till murdered in 1987, when it became clear the impending collapse of the DDR/GDR(an allied prison country) would set him free?
It seems quite likely that before long the whole gas chamber anecdote will be uncovered as the lie of the century.
Unjustly throwing historians in prison will not ultimately achieve the Zionist goal which is suppression of facts.
Imprisonment has been used throughout the ages by those in power who wish to suppress the truth yet truth usually manages to escape.
Lady Renauf has asked the EU to provide just one document providing proof, I doubt it will be forthcoming.
Before I learnt about Ernst Zundel and other people imprisoned for so called holocaust denial I truly believed in the holocaust as told by many films and phony history.
I do not believe any longer, I also made sure my teenage children and their friends researched this subject rather than falling for a story as I and countless others did.
Those trying to suppress facts are not winning as this subject is now a favourite in many circles with historians generally being believed.
These people and free speech deniers who support them should be punished. Traffiking in the Holocaust is the real crime.
But it seems Holohoax stories are written for political and economic advantage by constantly slandering the German people into shame and thus very profitable guilt money payments.
The least that could be said is that these stories are very mischievous for the reasons mentioned above as anybody else slandering an entire people would be ostracized from the world community.
Not only the jews suffered during this time.
Some may be surprised to hear that many Germans suffered as well as did many, many others. It is too simplistic to attribute the entire blame on one people when precisely the people who claim sole ownership of suffering and pain during that time, were instrumental in creating the situation. It is an easy matter to do a little honest research to verify this claim on the internet alone.
I was born after the war, so I, like most people today, can only learn from written material and , fortunately for me, eyewitness accounts from that time.
Therefore to cloud the issue and create tales of imagination with real consequences is unacceptable.
I can only conclude that history does not seem to be the way it is narrated and accepted today. I find it problematic when researchers who differ with historical dogma are immediately publicly ridiculed, their careers destroyed and their reputation destroyed and finally silenced through long prison terms.
To then claim sensitivity and accuse any enquiry with "not respecting the memory of the dead" is pure opportunism and breath taking hypocrisy .
I am all for historical research but not for opportunistic dogma. I don't know what the truth is but I am suspicious of people who will use all methods at their disposal to silence historical enquiry on a topic that touches so many people and hurts many people to the present day.
Most of the victims of the holocaust died as soon as the German cities were destroyed and the nearby camps then ran out of food, water, medicine and sanitation. This truth, however, does not help the common narrative spread by the victors that they have used to justify a totally unjustifiable war and their criminal, barbaric destruction of Germany. Nor does it justify, if that is the word, the war against the Palestinians.
Hence we have had the hoax and the hoaxers, the movies, the books, and the holocaust laws against trying to figure out what really happened. These hoaxers and the wars against Iraq, Vietnam, Laos, Yugoslavia, and the soon to be war against Iran make me wonder why the public continue to believe such lies.
there are too many loose ends that need tying up.........pronto.
Unmasked when his book finally appeared in Poland after the fall of communism, Kosinski did try to make amends at the end of his life - when asked "What did the Polish do for the Jews" he shot back "What did the Jews do for the Poles?"
They killed them. The pictures most think of as nazi dead, of bodies all laying everywhere, were the result of the Poles being killed by guess who.
http://www.impactplan.com/bio_holt.php
That’s the question the humanity dying in the new holocaust asks you!
The writers and readers of toady will have to carry the burden of today’s holocaust that is being played in open sight and yet ‘you’ the readers and writers have chosen to support & ignore – you cant just walk away from the holocaust of your generation.
Your conscious will prick you one day when your persona of denial will fall apart and the aggressor will manifest with a forceful rupture of truth – you will wish you had ‘stopped” the holocaust with your writing, speaking or taken action but it will be too late. But, by that time You will have lost you power to act – all you will be able to do is live a life of sorrowful memory
Your grand children will question your role in silently supporting this genocide and holocaust.
Writers of the human race – where is your humanity – can you see, can you hear, can you write, can you speak?
Jews have occupied the land called Israel since the exodus from Egypt, more than 3,000 years ago. This predates the Muslim religion by 1,500 years and the Palestinian people by more than 2,000 years. Jews occupied the land before Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians and they have a right continue to sojourn in their land. The Jewish kingdoms of David and Saul predate any Muslim or Arab claim. So, why do Palestinians suggest that they have a claim on this land?
Charles Weinblatt
Author, Jacob's Courage
http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com/
BTW, did you hear about Larry David pissing on a portrait of Jesus on his HBO show last week? WHt do you think would happen if a non-jewish comedian pissed on the Menorah? ALl hell would break loose is what would happen. But all the media claimed Mr. David was a comic genious for doing what he did and anyone complaining is an....you guessed it! ANTI-SEMITE!! LOL.
ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTIETH DAY - Friday, 21 June 1946 Page 529
Mr Justice Jackson to Albert Speer:
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew about it. The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised. A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them; that it developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of from 400° to 500° centigrade and destroyed them without leaving any trace at all.
Seems the Iraq WMD porky was not the only WMD porky we've all been fed.
Jewish religious text mention two Jewish Holocausts carried out by Romans. According to Jewish holy book Talmud (Gittin 57b): “Four billion Jews were killed by the Romans in the city of Bethar – While Gittin 58a claims that sixteen million Jewish children were wrapped in scrolls and burned alive by the Romans. The Book of Esther tells the story behind Jewish festive holiday of Purim, which is based on the slaughter of 75,000 non-Jewish Persians on the order of King Ahasueros (Xerxes) on the advice of his Jewish Queen Esther and Jewish prime minister Mordecai.
After entering Jerusalem on July 15, 1099 – the Christian Franks under the command of Godfrey of Bouilion slaughtered the entire Muslim and Jewish population (over 70,000) during the next three days...........
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/0
Always talking about yourself, always dredging up the past, get a life and stop writing books about something that has been lied about for decades. Find me the bodies in the mass graves? they don't exist because they never existed. Remember Dresden, 500,000 Germans aswell as the rest died, more germans then jews died during the war at the whim of a dictator, not because the germans were evil, on the contrary we know who the real evil parties are, perhaps you would like to look in the mirror at yourself bloated greedy self. Have a nice day.
After three years of daily Holocaust research in preparation for my book, I realize that there can be no doubt that millions of Jews, including my ancestory, dies at the hands of Nazi Germany. Holocaust books and films help to tell the true story of the Shoah, combating anti-Semitic historical revision. And, they protect vulnerable future generations from making the same mistakes. That is why I wrote Jacob's Courage.
Israel and the Jews will never be measured by the same standards as the rest of the world community. There is still too much hatred and animostiy towards Jews, much of it visible here. In every generation, Jews have been degraded, persecuted, expelled, brutalized and murdered. But, in a nuclear world, Israel and the Jews no longer can turn the other cheek.
Because of the Holocaust, virtually all Jews now agree that there must be one safe place in the world. Israel must continue to exist. And, while Jews continue to tell the world that religious, racial and ethnic and persecution is wrong; and that tolerance is our progeny's only hope, the words do not seem to have any effect.
Israel reveals the triumphant spirit of humankind and demonstrates how ordinary people can perform extraordinary acts of courage when the lives of loved ones and their religion are in danger. Yet, despite this triumph, Israel is denigrated and Jews are victimized.
In the end, sadly, Israel must prepare for the worst. Surrounded by 1.5 billion enemies, who deny the veracity of the Holocaust and vow to "wipe Israel off the map," the nascent Jewish state lives again on the knife's edge. One cannot help the nagging doubt that the suffering of the Jews is not nearly over. Yet, each new generation rises like a phoenix over the ashes of the Shoah; marching through the travesties of injustice and surviving.
Charles Weinblatt
Author, "Jacob's Courage"
http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com/
You have been asked before and I will ask again, where are these non-existent nazi documents?
AND do not repost that list of urls you have already posted. The first one I looked at had a serious historical error in the first line, repeating the debunked 6 million dead jews myth.
Where are those nazi documents you claim exist? NOT the hearsay from the captives.
You must mean the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Or how about the murder of upwards of 50 million innocent people by your bolshevick communist forefathers. Then of course there's the self appointed global thought police who intimidate and imprison instead of allowing open debate. And the wallowing victimhood of those that are consistantly threatening, brutalising and occupying their neighbours. All the while decrying racial and religous intolerance around the world while indoctrinating their own children with the very same 'chosen people' precepts. Hypocrites, I call them.
The truth does not fear investigation, only lies and liars resort to the courts to impose their dogma.