Why do so many people lie about their suffering in the Holocaust? Because there’s money and prestige to be gained from claiming victim status. These liars aren’t the only sick ones here. We’re sick for giving people the incentive to make up stories about their suffering.
Chaim Amalek This is a variant of “Stolen Valor”, whereby people falsely claim to have done something brave or to have been victimized in some infamous way. Which the perp chooses – to have been a war hero, or a victim – I suppose reflects both the culture and their personal pathology. I had to deal with quite a bit of this in my own life when I got back from ‘Nam.
Susan Williams Really you were in Nam..
Give me dates, experiences names…
Chaim Amalek I don’t like talking about it, but yeah. Gulf of Tonkin, Battle for Hill 9021, Tet offensive, Arclight, Escape from Hanoi Hilton, made it back to Saigon in time for its fall in ’75. Mayaquez Incident. I was deep in the shit.
Susan Williams I hope you didn’t leave any half caste behind
Chaim Amalek As I said, I hate to talk about it. I maintained the purity of my instrument just so I would not leave behind any mischelungen. And after the war, I was so messed up, I served in the Carter Administration as head of counterterrorespionage directorate for extra-terrestrial matters. It was a wild time.
The Guardian: Joseph Hirt said he fabricated story of being sent to camp and meeting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to ‘keep memories alive’ about history of the Holocaust.
A Pennsylvania man who claimed for years to have escaped from Auschwitz, met track and field star Jesse Owens and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, confessed on Friday that he had fabricated the entire story.
“I am writing today to apologize publicly for harm caused to anyone because of my inserting myself into the descriptions of life in Auschwitz,” Joseph Hirt, 86, wrote in a letter sent to his local paper, LNP, this week. “I was not a prisoner there. I did not intend to lessen or overshadow the events which truly happened there by falsely claiming to have been personally involved.”
“I was wrong. I ask forgiveness,” he added. “I determined at that moment to do everything in my power to prevent the loss of the truth about wartime life (and death) at Auschwitz.”
For years, Hirt gave public speeches about his experiences in the second world war, including his Jewish family’s flight from Poland to Belgrade. But he also told people that he was arrested by the Nazis, sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and met Mengele, the SS physician who tortured prisoners of the concentration camp. Hirt claimed to have escaped under an electric fence at the camp.
He added an extraordinary prologue and epilogue to the story, saying that he saw Adolf Hitler turn his back on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and that he met Eleanor Roosevelt and Owens after his arrival in the United States.
In his letter, Hirt said that he realized “it wasn’t about me”, and that he was motivated to lie by his fears that the history and horror of the camps would be forgotten. He said that he was shocked to find that Auschwitz, now a museum and memorial, had become a “clean and polished tourist destination” where visitors laughed and joked about “propaganda”.
“Flagrant denial and ignorance of the truth made me determined to keep the memories alive,” Hirt said. “I used poor judgment and faulty reasoning, risking a sullying of the truth I was trying to share.”
