Hoaxes, Inc.

Yet another literary hoax has been exposed, which we can add to the list of book scams of note.

This one was pretty rotten since the setting was the concentration camps:

"How sad that he felt he had to embellish a life of surviving the Holocaust and of being married for half a century," said Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum.

The damage is broad. Publishing, the most trusting of industries, has again been burned by a memoir that fact-checking might have prevented. Berkley is an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which in March pulled Margaret B. Jones'"Love and Consequences" after the author acknowledged she had invented her story of gang life in Los Angeles. Winfrey fell, as she did with James Frey, for a narrative of suffering and redemption better suited for television than for history.

The damage is deep. Scholars and other skeptics as well as fellow survivors fear that Rosenblat's fabrications will only encourage doubts about the Holocaust.

The scam was also exposed here:

Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University, first began to doubt the truthfulness of Herman's tale a couple of years ago, when he came across his story while researching his own forthcoming book about child prisoners at Buchenwald and its sub-camps.* Waltzer, who has not read the Herman's manuscript, heard the story through Herman's many print and television appearances. Waltzer's main critique is that the book's central premise--that Roma threw Herman apples over the fence outside the Schlieben camp in the winter of 1945--is an impossibility. Waltzer is one of the first scholars to draw on the recently opened Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives of Nazi-era documents on the camps. He also interviewed many of the survivors who were with Herman at the time. No one from Herman's time in the camps could recall him ever mentioning a girl throwing apples over the fence or their remarkable reunion in America after the war. While, in theory, there is a slim chance Herman was able to conceal these meetings--and the apples he received--from his fellow prisoners, Waltzer concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for either a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence; the only spot where one could access the perimeter at all was right next to the SS barracks. "The story is a made-up story," Waltzer told me by phone last week. "So far as I can discern, it didn't happen."

And more is here. Both articles helped lead to the hoax being exposed and the publication of the book canceled.


Another infamous book supposedly about the Holocaust was the recently exposed Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust where the author, Misha Defonseca, concocted a wild tale of her adventures in Europe, including encountering and being adopted by a pack of wolves. It took ten years for the hoax to finally be exposed, but exposed it was.

More gory details of THAT hoax can be found here.