I realize that I’m the type of person who dots their i’s and crosses their t’s ad nauseam, and I thus never fail to stand amazed when I hear about the uncovering of major lies, such as those by Herman Rosenblat, who fabricated part of his Holocaust survival story in a memoir that was endorsed by Oprah, and also inspired a children’s book.
I assume that these grand-scale lies are at least partly attributable to the Hollywood-like desire to create a better, more marketable story, but as a former psychologist, I also wonder whether this fabrication isn’t so surprising in the context of major tragedy and post-traumatic stress. At some level, people often want to (and do, in the regaling…) improve the circumstances around their personal history (who you first slept with, how the engagement really happened, whether you really were the hero in a given scenario, etc.). Perhaps Rosenblat’s fabrication is an example of this on a grander scale, reflective of his fervent desire and need for a prettier, more romantic meeting amidst a period of hell.
I’m not excusing the falsification (maybe it does just boil down to a calculated, fame-grubbing ploy), but I’m sympathetic to the potential psychological underpinnings.
Image credit + story lead: Associated Press via Yahoo News
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:15 am
How awful that the Rosenblats lied about their story and that the publishers and movie makers fell for it. Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was a great book and now movie, never pretended to be true. The Rosenblats, like Madoff, are harming the good Jewish name and it’s terrible.
I read a New York Times article about Stan Lee and Neal Adams the comic book artists supporting another TRUE Holocaust love story. There was a beautiful young artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. Dina’s art became the reason she and her Mother survived Auschwitz.
Painting the mural for the children caused Dina to be taken in front of Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he decided to make her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber as long as she was doing painting for him.
Dina’s story is true because some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. Also, the story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also a fact.
I wish Oprah would do a story about Dina and her art not about the Rosenblats who were pulling the wool over all our eyes.
[Reply]