Bring it on - Holocaust tales
- Thu 24 Dec, 2009 12:27 pm Post subject: Holocaust tales"We live in a time where we need hope and a positive outlook in life, and Herman's story reminds us that goodness will always overcome badness, and light will overcome darkness," Rabbi Anchelle Perl said after the service.
"When you listen to the story of Herman, he was always bar mitzvahed inside and today just brought it out."
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"His life story and his bar mitzvah today is giving us hope that ultimately the destroyers won't have the last say," the rabbi said. "Good people of all faiths will overcome."
In a statement issued today through his agent, Andrea Hurst, Rosenblat, 79, said: “I wanted to bring happiness to people.
“I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”
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Days earlier, Berkley had offered a qualified defence of the book, saying it was a work of memory, a story whose truth was known only to the author.
But Ms Hurst released her own statement, saying that Rosenblat had acknowledged to her “that part of his memoir was not true. He’d invented the crux of this amazing love story – about the girl at the fence who threw him an apple”.
Poor rabbi. But hey, Rosenblat only romanticized (or trivialized) the "greatest man-made tragedy"? He was always bar mitzvahed inside. Right, rabbi, it was a "love"ly story alright.
- Thu 24 Dec, 2009 12:29 pm Post subject: Re: Holocaust talesDeli Strummer, a (former?) Holocaust celebrity, survived the gas chambers five times...because the soldiers turned on water instead of gas.
YOU NEVER SEE THE SCARS. But she talks about them once in a while and you see them in your mind's eye--smooth white burn marks on her flesh, old as the Holocaust.
She offers the scars as desperate testimony when she's tired of talking facts--too much "nitty-gritty"--and wants to talk emotions instead. She's leaning back in the pink vinyl restaurant booth of a Baltimore diner: gold sweater, beige jacket, her hair a fluffy white helmet. Big glasses propped on a little nose.
How long were you in Auschwitz?
And what was your prisoner number?
She sidesteps the questions and speaks of the scars: indisputable, horrible.
"I could take off my sweater and could show you still my cigarette marks," she says, motioning to her top, as if you'd say yes and allow an elderly woman to take off her sweater right here in the diner and show where the Nazis stubbed their cigarettes out on her skin. As if that would gain back her reputation, quiet the doubters, turn the clock back to a time when she was loved and admired instead of shunned.
For better or worse, it's too late now.
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Unlike some Holocaust survivors, Strummer, a retired research associate from Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, is not reticent in public. She began lecturing around 1980. At first she had to be coaxed into speaking but quickly discovered she was a natural. In lectures she speaks with dramatic ease, her voice hardening at important lines, her finger wagging, her fist sweeping the air for emphasis. She achieves a heightened emotional pitch, invoking God, blessing her audience, offering thanks to America, the country she says saved her. (She long ago declared July 4 her adopted birthday.) Of the 20 or so area survivors on the Baltimore Jewish Council's list of Holocaust speakers, Strummer was among the most frequently used.
"I was the golden girl of the council," Strummer says one afternoon at her dining room table, in her sharp Viennese accent. "Rain, snow, ice--Deli never said no. Because I committed myself."
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Some suggest there was a quality of self-aggrandizement to Strummer's account of the Holocaust. Instead of dwelling on details of her daily life in the camps, she focused on having been plucked from the jaws of death time and again. Five times she entered a gas chamber but came out alive, she claims, because guards turned on the water instead of the gas. Holocaust historians say this scenario is logistically impossible: In concentration camps the gas chambers had no water hookups.
Another tale. But you do feel sorry for these victims of invented reality.
- Sun 21 Feb, 2010 5:00 am Post subject: Re: Holocaust talesWeb Of Deceit: Lady Mowgli is in fact Spiderwoman
On Holocaust Memorial Day this Thursday, there will be fewer eyewitness testimonies than the year before. Within the lifetimes of most people reading these words, there will be none. That is the work of time, and unalterable.
Each passing year brings greater and greater reliance on memoirs, therefore — written memories of atrocities, unspeakable crimes, incredible survival stories by those who experienced them. The vast majority are the sacred truth. But some, we are learning, are the work of frauds who would alter history for their own benefit.
The latest revelation came as a personal shock, because I had been an unwitting accomplice.
In 1997, in one of my first author profiles as books editor, I wrote about Misha Defonseca, of Millis, Mass., and her then-new book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. I had heard her speak before reading the book, and had fallen under the spell of her story.
As she told it, she was seven years old in 1941, living in Brussels, Belgium, when the Nazis came to her home and arrested her Jewish parents. Misha had been hustled off to live with another family, but instead she set off on foot, alone and with only a tiny compass to guide her way eastward, to find her parents.
“Thus began a terrible odyssey,” I wrote 11 years ago. “Wandering alone on her hopeless quest for four years, clear across occupied Europe, through Germany, into Russia and back again, Misha witnessed greater horrors than most soldiers experienced on the front lines.” She wrote of entering and then escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto; living for days in midwinter without food or shelter; stabbing a Nazi soldier to death; and, perhaps most incredibly, living with a pack of wolves.
It was a wonderful story, and in fact I wondered. It “strains credulity,” I wrote, adding: “Misha offers no proof. There is none, she says. Perhaps, she says, one of the nameless people she encountered in those years will see her book and remember, and get in touch with her. She hopes so.”
That brief caveat having been delivered, I turned back to the absorbing “facts” as Defonseca related them into my tape recorder there in the living room of her modest house outside Boston.
"But they were Catholic, not Jewish, and Defonseca was raised, uneventfully, by relatives, not wolves."
The book, produced on a shoestring by tiny Mt. Ivy Press, had modest sales here, despite a glowing endorsement from none other than Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor and scholar. It achieved a new life in Europe, however, where it sold more than 30,000 copies in France and Italy, was translated into 18 languages, and turned into a film, Survivre Avec les Loups (Living With Wolves), which opened in Paris in January.
Suspicions were raised almost from the first, but Defonseca had covered her tracks well. Not until the film was released did experts on wolf behavior and the Holocaust in Belgium publicly question details. Meanwhile, a genealogist in Massachusetts, working with colleagues in Brussels, found the smoking-gun evidence about her parents that finally prompted Defonseca to confess.
It was all a lie, she told the Associated Press last month. Her real name, until she married her husband, Maurice Defonseca, was Monique De Wael. She was, indeed, orphaned when her parents, who were in the Belgian resistance, were put to death by the Nazis. But they were Catholic, not Jewish, and Defonseca was raised, uneventfully, by relatives, not wolves.
In a statement released through her lawyer, Defonseca said, “The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality — it was my reality, my way of surviving. At first I did not want to publish it, but then I was convinced by Jane Daniel.”
The story of her relationship with Daniel, who published the book more or less single-handedly, is nearly as depressing as her own fraudulent account.