← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Ed Toner
Thread ID: 6299 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-04-23
2003-04-23 18:58 | User Profile
[url=http://www.rense.com/general33/frauad.htm]http://www.rense.com/general33/frauad.htm[/url]
Holocaust Survivor Memoir Exposed as Fraud
Institute for Historical Review 1-15-3
Note - $1,000 reward (will be paid by RePortersNoteBook.com) to the first person to prove that the essence of this essay is not accurate...
A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.
In Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski describes his ordeal as an infant in the Jewish ghetto of Riga (Latvia), where his earliest memory is of seeing his father being killed. Wilkomirski also tells how he survived the terrible rigors of wartime internment, at the age of three or four, in the German-run concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.
First published in German in 1995, Fragments has been translated into twelve languages. In Switzerland, the country where Wilkomirski lives, the book has been a major best-seller. Two documentary films and numerous personal appearances by the author in schools throughout the country have helped promote the memoir.
The American edition was published by Schocken, an imprint of Random House, which heavily promoted the book with teachers' study guides and other supplementary materials.
Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.
This past summer, though, compelling evidence came to light exposing Wilkomirski's memoir as an literary hoax.
Although he claims to have been born in Latvia in 1939, and to have arrived in Switzerland in 1947 or 1948, Swiss legal records show that he was actually born in Switzerland in February 1941, the son of an unwed woman, Yvette Grosjean. The infant was then adopted and raised by the Doessekkers, a middle-class Zurich couple. Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried, writing in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, also reports that he has found a 1946 photo of the young Bruno Doessekker (Wilkomirski) in the garden of his adoptive parents.
Comparisons have been drawn between Wilkomirski's Fragments and The Painted Bird, the supposedly autobiographical "Holocaust memoir" by prominent literary figure Jerzy Kosinksi that turned out to be fraudulent.
Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.
In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves." Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).
Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful."
Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust." American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998):
Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct.
Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."
-- M. W. [url=http://ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n5p15_Weber.html]http://ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n5p15_Weber.html[/url]
2003-04-24 22:52 | User Profile
Ed: Could you please post a reference to the below?:> Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust**, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful." **
I would like the original to cite in something I am writing up.
2003-04-25 18:50 | User Profile
Hitler's speech at:
NUREMBERG
SPEECH OF SEPTEMBER 14, 1936
I CAN come to no terms with a Weltanschhauung [bolshevism] which everywhere as its first act after gaining power is - not the liberation of the working people - but the liberation of the scum of humanity, the asocial creatures concentrated in the prisons - and then the letting loose of these wild beasts upon the terrified and helpless world about them....
Bolshevism turns flourishing countrysides into sinister wastes of ruins; National Socialism transforms a Reich of destruction and misery into a healthy State and a flourishing economic life....
Russia planned a world revolution and German workmen would be used but as cannon-fodder for bolshevist imperialism. But we National Socialists do not wish that our military resources should be employed to impose by force on other peoples what those peoples themselves do not want. Our army does not swear on oath that it will with bloodshed extend the National Socialist idea over other peoples, but that it will with its own blood defend the National Socialist idea and thereby the German Reich, its security and freedom, from the aggression of other peoples.... The German people as soldiers is one of the best peoples in the world: It would have become a veritable 'Fight to the Death Brigade' for the bloody purposes of these international disseminators of strife. We have removed this danger, through the National Socialist Revolution, from our own people and from other peoples....
These are only some of the grounds for the antagonisms which separate us from communism. I confess: these antagonisms cannot be bridged. Here are really two worlds which do but grow further apart from each other and can never unite. When in an English newspaper a Parliamentarian complains that we wish to divide Europe into two parts, then unfortunately we are bound to inform this Robinson Crusoe living on his happy British island that - however unwelcome it may be - this division is already an accomplished fact.... That one should refuse to see a thing does not mean that it is not there. For many a year in Germany I have been laughed to scorn as a prophet; for many a year my warnings and my prophecies were regarded as the illusions of a mind diseased....
Bolshevism has attacked the foundations of our whole human order, alike in State and society, the foundations of our conception of civilization, of our faith and of our morals: all alike are at stake. If this bolshevism would be content to promote this doctrine in a single land, then other countries might remain unconcerned, but its supreme principle is its internationalism and that means the confession of faith that these views must be carried to triumph throughout the whole world, i.e., that the world as we know it must be turned upside down. That a British headline-writer refuses to recognize this signifies about as much as if in the fifteenth century a humanist in Vienna should have refused to admit the intention of Mohammedanism to extend its influence in Europe and should have objected that this would be to tear the world asunder - to divide it into East and West. Unfortunately I cannot escape the impression that most of those who doubt the danger to the world of bolshevism come themselves from the East. As yet politicians in England have not come to know bolshevism in their own country; we know it already. Since I have fought against these Jewish Soviet ideas in Germany, since I have conquered and stamped out this peril, I fancy that I possess a better comprehension of its character than do men who have only at best had to deal with it in the field of literature.... I have won my successes simply because in the first place I endeavored to see things as they are and not as one would like them to be; secondly, when once I had formed my own opinion I never allowed weaklings to talk me out of it or to cause me to abandon it; and thirdly, because I was always determined in all circumstances to yield to a necessity when once it had been recognized. Today when fate has granted me such great successes I will not be disloyal to these funda- mental principles of mine....
. . .: It is not necessary for me to strengthen the fame of the National Socialist Movement, far less that of the German Army, through military triumphs. He who is undertaking such great economic and cultural tasks as we are and is so determined to carry them through can find his fairest memorial only in peace.... But this bolshevism which as we learned only a few months since intends to equip its army so that it may with violence, if necessary, open the gate to revolution amongst other peoples - this bolshevism should know that before the gate of Germany stands the new German Army.... I believe that as a National Socialist I appear in the eyes of many bourgeois democrats as only a wild man. But as a wild man I still believe myself to be a better European, in any event a more sensible one, than they. It is with grave anxiety that I see the possibility in Europe of some such development as this: democracy may continuously disintegrate the European States, may make them internally ever more uncertain in their judgment of the dangers which confront them, may above all cripple all power for resolute resistance. Democracy is the canal through which bolshevism lets its poisons flow into the separate countries and lets them work there long enough for these infections to lead to a crippling of intelligence and of the force of resistance. I regard it as possible that then - in order to avoid something still worse - coalition governments, masked as Popular Fronts or the like, will be formed and that these will endeavor to destroy - and perhaps will successfully destroy - in these peoples the last forces which remain, either in organization or in mental outlook, which could offer opposition to bolshevism.
The brutal mass-slaughters of National Socialist fighters, the burning of the wives of National Socialist officers after petrol had been poured over them, the massacre of children and of babies of National Socialist parents, e.g. in Spain, are intended to serve as a warning to forces in other lands which represent views akin to those of National Socialism: such forces are to be intimidated so that in a similar position they offer no resistance. If these methods are successful: if the modern Girondins are succeeded by Jacobins, if Kerensky's Popular Front gives place to the Bolshevists, then Europe will sink into a sea of blood and mourning....
[url=http://www.hitler.org/speeches/]http://www.hitler.org/speeches/[/url]