With its way-believable plot (six year old girl escapes Holocaust; is raised by wolves; shoots and kills a Nazi along the way), who could have guessed Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years would turn out to be made up? I mean okay – if she’d said she was three years old, raised by aliens, and blew up a Nazi arsenal, maybe we would have become suspicious…
May 27th, 2014 at 12:11PM
How many of these fake Holocaust memoirs have been retracted over the past twenty years? “Fragments” came out in 1999, found to be a hoax, as was the supposed story of a British soldier who was one of the first to liberate a nonexistent prison camp. Same thing with “Angel at The Fence,” and Simon Wiesenthal fabricated his story as well, if memory serves….
May 27th, 2014 at 12:15PM
charlie: Here’s a pretty good round-up.
May 27th, 2014 at 12:57PM
Sounds to me like a genre-in-the-making.
May 27th, 2014 at 1:35PM
Good piece on this by Frank Furedi back in 2008:
“The assertion of trauma as a result of past suffering has become a way of winning public recognition and attention, and of making a claim on resources. Increasingly, the act of remembering has been turned into a public performance, where individuals ‘confess’ through their memoirs to having experienced alleged acts of abuse … Holocaust fantasy is the product of a cultural sensibility that encourages us to celebrate the survival of abuse. These Memory Entrepreneurs who flaunt their alleged suffering are continually rewarded with recognition and moral authority …
Readers and critics usually feel awkward and inhibited about questioning the veracity of such memoirs. Scepticism is discouraged in an era built upon the therapeutic ethos. ‘Believe the child’, ‘Believe the patient’, ‘Believe the abused’ – today, such invocations are used to sacralise the claims of victims.”