Bob Somerby's
Daily Howler column of 01/06/09 alerted me to a story that hadn't registered on my consciousness before. But it's the kind of story that particularly interests me because it involves the effort to get the facts of a story right and the possible negative consequences of failing to do so.
I grumped in a number of posts back in 2007 about Ken Burns' PBS documentary
The War, about Americans during the Second World War. The subjects of the interviews were elderly. Anyone old enough to vote in 1945 (at age 21) would have been at least 81 in 2005. And they were relating events from six decades before. The documentary provided little if any information on whether the stories had been individually verified in some way. One woman seemed downright dingie, even though she was presented in a very sympathetic light. Another guy told a story that had the feel of "too good to be true" about staving off his imminent execution in a POW camp by a bluff involving a claim about an evil spirit, a story that could have been checked at least to some degree.
I checked one account myself, of a guy talking about the motivations of kamikaze suicide pilots late in the war. From a view minutes researching in my home library and in the digital
Encyclopedia Britannica, I concluded that what he said on that subject was very unlikely. And the
motivation of the kamikazes was not a matter of which he had any direct wartime experience. He had seen a kamikaze plane crash into a ship, but he had not (so far as the film told us) been involved in interrogating would-be kamikaze pilots. It would have been helpful to know whether some of these stories had been vetted through normal historical research. (There was one story the film followed that
did have contemporary documentation in the form of a diary kept by the girl they were describing.)
I've often said something to the effect that the only type of story I know of that's possibly less reliable than men bragging about their sexual accomplishments would be women bragging about theirs. People make up stuff. Even when we're not consciously confabulating something, we misremember things, mix up the details, embellish the story get the dates wrong, forget some of the participants, doctor the story to avoid relating something embarrassing that someone did or said at the time (usually ourselves), and so on. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fallible. And as time goes on, it becomes more so.
The story that Somerby mentions is a case of an elderly Jewish man who was in the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, as a boy. His story was about a little girl that brought him an apple every day - during the winter - by tossing it over the fence of the camp. The girl was the daughter of (apparently) Polish slave laborers who had been brought there to work. They were Jewish but were passing for Christian.
Years later, after the war and after emigrating to America, he went on a blind date with another Jewish immigrant. After talking for a while, they discovered that they were the same boy and girl of the Buchenwald story! They married and lived happily ever after. Or at least stayed married for a long time.
The story got a lot of publicity, was featured on
Oprah, and became an e-mail chain-letter favorite. The guy had a book of his story about to be published, a movie was set to be made.
But what I've related of the story already should have raised a few questions. Apples in the dead of winter? Did the concentration camp guards routinely let visitors stroll up the fence? Were prisoners allowed close enough to the fence to chat with outsiders and get food from them? Is it plausible that a Jewish family trying to pass for Christian in Nazi Germany during the middle of the war would let their nine-year-old daughter stroll down to the Buchenwald camp every day?
The story of what happened with the book is discussed in these two articles:
The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold by Gabriel Sherman
The New Republic 12/25/08; and,
False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled by Motoko Rich and Joseph Berger 12/28/08,
Historian Deborah Lipstadt has posted about it several times on her blog, obscurely titled
Deborah Lipstadt's Blog. This
post of 12/31/08, for instance, reproduces an article of hers from
The Forward that describes her issues with the story. The book has apparently found another publisher, even though the accuracy of the story has been effectively debunked. The title of the book, the first run of which the previous publisher had ready to release when it was cancelled, was
Apples At The Fence by Herman Rosenblat.
Some basic research by an historian who knew what he was doing was what eventually killed the book's publication, though the publisher and prospective filmmaker were initially very defensive over any such criticism. As the
Times reports:
The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.
When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.
In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben [a sub-camp of the main Buchenwald camp] where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.
Dr. Waltzer also learned from online documentation that Ms. Radzicki, her parents and two sisters were hidden as Christians at a farm not outside Schlieben but 210 miles away near Breslau.
Lipstadt's criticism focuses on how fabricated account can affect the general understanding of the events of the Holocaust and on how Holocaust deniers exploit erroneous, careless or falsified accounts of events. In her
Forward article, she explains:
There are various lessons to be learned from this: Facts about the Holocaust must be checked. Historians should never build their understanding of events based on one story from one person. But Rosenblat had enablers. His publisher, agent and movie producer pounced on his story. Reporters never bothered to check it out. They all seemingly wanted a story that made the Holocaust heartwarming, even though, as Waltzer aptly put it, the "Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending."
[Harris] Salomon [who is still planning to do a film of the story though designating it as fiction] believed that this kind of "candy-coated message” would reach “Middle America” and “do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done." Jewish sources also allowed themselves to be co-opted. Aish HaTorah featured the story on its Web site. A Chabad rabbi, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, was swept off his feet by this phony tale and arranged a belated bar mitzvah for Herman, garnering even more publicity for the Rosenblats and himself.
I have spent much of my academic career studying Holocaust denial. But the much greater danger to our collective memory of the event is posed by Holocaust trivialization and romanticization. What the Rosenblats and their enablers did was create yet another obstacle for the remaining survivors to convince others that their stories are true.
Rosenblat claims that all he wanted to do was make people love each other more. The Chabad rabbi probably thought the story would inspire faith. Salomon wanted to teach Middle America about the Holocaust.
These may be worthy goals. But the Holocaust should not be reduced to a means for trying to fulfill these or any other ends. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the use of it to fulfill something else, is the ultimate degradation of the event. If Holocaust deniers were smart, they would sit back and let the Rosenblats, Salomons, Berkley Books and the like peddle their wares. Within a short time, no one would know what was truth and what was fiction. [my emphasis in bold]
It's probably too much to expect that the Holocaust won't be instrumentalized. People have a huge need to draw meaning and lessons events. And when someone settles on what they take as "the lessons of the Holocaust" or "the lessons of Munich" or whatever, they are sorely tempted to use it to justify their own arguments.
But, as a specialist in the field, Lipstadt may be applying a more precise academic meaning of "instrumentalization" that I would. There are whole volume written on the nuances of the "representation" of the Holocaust and I can't pretend to be extensively acquainted with it.
In the
New Republic article, Lipstadt explains how Holocaust deniers exploit false or mistaken claims:
Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1994 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, says she first heard Herman's story while on a research trip to Auschwitz about the same time Waltzer started examining the narrative. Someone had read her an email chain that they had printed out that recounted Herman's amazing love story. "I said, 'I don't believe it,'" she told me, recalling the episode.
Lipstadt, who wrote the 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, is troubled by the possibility that Herman's love story is fabricated, because she believes it could be co-opted by the Holocaust denial movement. "If you make up things about parts, you cast doubts on everything else," Lipstadt told me. "When you think of the survivors who meticulously tell their story and are so desperate for people to believe, then if they're making stories up about this, how do you know if Anne Frank is true? How do you know Elie Wiesel is true?"
In addition to the impossibility of being able to approach the fence, Lipstadt disputes other details of Herman's story. "Based on what I have seen thus far, I would say that this story is not exactly a shining example of verisimilitude [i.e, accuracy]," she wrote on her blog on December 15.
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