In the face of escalated Israeli atrocities and war crimes against the inhabitants of Gaza this week, is the Zionist Holocaust Remembrance juggernaut losing its nerve? A major publisher has canceled plans to distribute a WWII concentration camp memoir when it was discovered that key elements of the tale were untrue. But that never stopped Holocaust Rememberers before.
Herman Rosenblat had been peddling the fictional details for a decade, details which made his particular Holocaust experience unique. But historians questioned the very premise of his title, Angel at the Fence, and Rosenblat confessed his wife’s part was fabricated. Taking a cue from James Frey, Rosenblat is hoping the film can be distributed as fiction.
This example is not as bad as Belgian author Monique De Wael, writing under the pen name Misha Defonseca, who had to confess that her memoir of escaping the camps to live with wolves was fictional, and that she wasn’t Jewish, but “felt Jewish.”
The original key witness account by Eli Wiesel, the leading patriarch of Holocaust Remembrance, turned out to be inaccurate enough that the memoir Night had to be reclassified as a novel. Despite the inventions, Wiesel’s book remains in the canon of Holocaust literature.
Bolstered by François Mauriac who wrote that Night is “…a book to which no other could be compared.” Wrote A. Alverez, it was “almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism.”
Eli Wiesel made this pitch in 1955:
“…ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.”
