The advantage of using things like the Holocaust or cancer, for example, is that they are big taboo areas. People don’t question your story

Is this true, though? I'd have thought one thing about the Holocaust is that it having been such a huge process, involving so many people and written abvout so much, that if you write stuff that doesn't stand up, people will notice and will say so.
Justin | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 9:16 am | #

Yes but that didn't stop the ones named by the JC, and there was one other whose name I can't remember now, attaining critical acclaim by holocaust literateurs until holocaust scholars, or those who have had their personal id or story stolen come forward with their magnifying glass. I agree that lying about your own place in the holocaust is a very high risk strategy.

I'm not sure if "literateur" is a word. My spell checker suggests among others, "illiterates". Perhaps I should accept that!
Mark Elf (aka levi9909) | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 10:01 am | #

The word you are looking for, Mark is feuilletonieres, if that's the word you want.
It's the only one which has the proper espieglerie, worthy of a Shoah bull-shitter.
mooser42001 | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 3:55 pm | #

I remember the case of Laurel Rose Willson who managed two of these: first, as "Lauren Stratford", she published an account of suriving a Satanic cult which was a best-seller among Christian fundamentalists (and was endorsed by Christian Zionist guru Hal Lindsey); when that scam came to light she became "Laura Grabowski", survivor of the Holocaust, eventually hooking up with Binjamin Wilkomirski. The tale is told here.
Bartholomew | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 4:04 pm | #

The same thing happened with Anna Andersen, the woman who said she was the murdered Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanoff, who had putatively survived the execution of the rest of the Czar's family by the Bolsheviks. They made a 1956 movie about her, "Anastasia," starring Ingrid Bergman. Some years after her death they did a DNA comparison of the woman and both the Romanoff family and a relative of a Polish woman whom she was suspected of really being. And BINGO! she was the Polish woman. The Romanoffs were very relieved, because they had never believed the woman to be genuine--score one for aristocratic noses. What's interesting is that partisans of the woman's fraudulent claim were quite willing to accept the DNA verdict until it was revealed that she was a fraud. Then they insisted that the DNA test had somehow been incorrect, because they KNEW she was Anastasia. She was a very "plausible rogue."

The point is that Andersen's motives for posing as Anastasia were probably the same as the Holocaust poseurs, to become important and to have a sense of belonging to a family.
Montag | 03.11.08 - 6:10 pm | #

And what a family!

And thanks for that Bartholomew. I've just been reading about Jerzy Kosinski...
Mark Elf (aka levi9909) | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 6:27 pm | #

Also see "The Tichborne Claimant".
Justin | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 7:03 pm | #

But, you know, there's just a bit of fake Holacaust memory in all of us. It's almost an ethnic affliction.
mooser42001 | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 8:25 pm | #

mooser42001,
Yes, you too can become a Holocaust Survivor in 10 easy lessons in your sleep! Order our CD today and the first 100 callers will receive a free lawsuit--operators are standing by. Not old enough? Not even Jewish? Not a problem! At this low price it would be a Crime Against Humanity not to order immediately.
Montag | 03.12.08 - 4:32 pm | #

How many times have I told you, Montag: I'm working this side of the street!
mooser42001 | Homepage | 03.14.08 - 3:45 pm | #

Now here's an interesting question: is fake holocaust memoir writing any different from holocaust denial? Yes, yes, I know that the two are in theory opposite in content, but are the wellsprings similar? A need to mythologise the Jew and the self's relationship to the Jew. In the fake memoir, it's an attempt to be a part of what appears to be (in western holocaust fetishism)an attractive status because it elicists sympathy..."please please can I be someone like that eliciting sympathy from others..."
Holocaust denial often seems to come from a notion that the Jew is an allconquering allpowerful mystic force and 'we' are the real victims of the Jews..."Please, please can't you see it's me and us who need sympathy, not the fucking Jew."

Partly to blame in all this is that the modern mass media portrays victims as inert. It can only very rarely show the oppressed and exploited resisting their exploitation or the powers that be will say that the programme makers are revolutionaries or subversives (which they might well be!). So all you can do is show oppression and exploitation as producing victims and indeed sometimes rendering the exploiters and oppressors invisible. 'Oh look here are some dying Africans. They're dying a lot. All over the place. And back to you in the studio." (sorry no time to show you that the country in question is still paying off 1970s debts and no longer grows foodstuffs but tries to sell beach space and trinkets instead.
MichaelRosen | Homepage | 03.14.08 - 6:33 pm | #

An immediate difference I can think of is that holocaust fakes tend to be believed whereas deniers are still considered a bit of a flat earth society though the latter are gaining credibility because of the holocaust industry's overstatement of survivor numbers and Israel's invocation of the holocaust to justify its atrocities and racist structure. Making holocaust denial illegal hardly helps either.
Mark Elf (aka levi9909) | Homepage | 03.14.08 - 7:18 pm | #

I hope you don't mind if I use an empirical observation to explore the equation posed, does a holocaust memior faker = a holocaust history denier?

Well,
I know this well-known ex Jewish-Israeli who used to be a zionist.

And as we all know,
zionists are antisemites.

This ex Jewish-Israeli has formally shed his/her outer skin of zionism - now the underlying antisemitism is exposed and there for all to see.

So,
given the exploitation of the holocaust by zionists -
- and given that zionists concerns for Jewish suffering are about as genuine as a spray on tan -
- then surely it must follow, that zionist holocaust fakery and ex-zionist holocaust history denial spring from the same root, which is antisemitism.

Therefore,
holocaust memoir fakery (or zionist hyper-realism, as I'm sure somebody will end up calling it) and holocaust history denial are..eh,...are cries for help...or cheap publicity stunts...em, can anybody help me out here, Im a but stuck?
joe90 | Homepage | 03.14.08 - 8:43 pm | #

Faked Holocaust memoirs are a bit of both, though you can't discount either (a) the thrill of forgery, or (b) the money and fringe benefits that go along with authoring such books. It's a wild ride `till they catch you, which they will certainly do.
Strelnikov | Homepage | 03.15.08 - 8:25 am | #