Questions on Elie Wiesel and the Sorbonne

Monday, November 15th, 2010

By Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2010 carolyn yeager  [updated 12-5-15]

Is Elie Wiesel lying about having enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris?  Or is he a victim of confused memories?

 Elie Wiesel wrote the following in his memoir (1) published in 1995:

With Francois’s help I enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the Sorbonne. At last I found my vocation.

I have happy memories of my student years.  There were lectures by Daniel Lagache in the Descartes or Richelieu amphitheater, and by Louis Lavell at the Collège de France. (2) I devoured books on philosophy and psychology, Plato’s dialogues, Freud’s analyses. I wandered from bookstore to bookstore, from park to park. I remember the silence of the Sainte-Genevieve Library [not at the Sorbonne] and the chance encounters and inevitable rendezvous in the Sorbonne courtyard. Francois, my tutor, guide, and friend, did his best to initiate me into the life of the Latin Quarter, taking me to hear Sartre and Buber, whose lecture on religious existentialism was an event. The hall was packed, the audience enthusiastic. Buber was treated like a prophet. His listeners were elated, conquered in advance, ready to savor every word. There was just one problem. Had Buber spoken in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, or German, there would have been some people in the hall able to follow his address. But he opted for French, and his accent was so thick no one understood him. Everyone applauded just the same. No matter, they would read the text when it was published. But I was delighted to have seen the handsome face and heard the searching voice of the author of I and Thou, one of the great Jewish spiritual thinkers of our time.

According to the book’s index, this is the only page on which the word “Sorbonne” is found in the entire book of 418 pages—twice on page 154. The above is all Wiesel has to say about his “student years” at this historic and revered institution of higher education.  Yet in spite of its paucity, this paragraph is seemingly all it has taken for the majority of Elie Wiesel’s followers, biographers, interviewers, and promoters to repeat it without question, as I will show further on.

Wiesel gives no dates for what would be something of a milestone in his life, either—as is in keeping with his penchant for “free-floating memories.” The last date he gives that refers to his own actual life at the time, is way back on page 120: “Fortunately, in 1947 the OSE arranged for a young teacher, Francois Wahl, to give me private lessons.” He says more on the next page, 121:

In 1947, as the underground war raged in Palestine, Francois performed important secret tasks for a Jewish resistance group . The following year our paths diverged. Later, much later, they would cross again.

It was in 1947 that Shushani, the mysterious Talmudic scholar, reappeared in my life. For two or three years he taught me unforgettable lessons about the limits of language and reason, about the behavior of sages and madmen, about the obscure paths of thought as it wends its way across centuries and cultures.”

Francois was only one of many revolutionary Jewish “terrorists” Wiesel was associated with during this period. But more important to our theme is that it seems a strange juxtaposition for Wiesel to claim he is learning about the “limits of language and reason” from the most important teacher in his life, by his own admission, while being an enrolled student taking courses at the Sorbonne University. The French Academy has always been known for putting great store in language and reason!  We are left with another big contradiction in Elie Wiesel’s life story.

Other reasons to be skeptical of Wiesel’s claim

Prof. David O’Connell, a professor of French at Georgia State University, has written unambiguously that Wiesel was never enrolled at the Sorbonne:

Despite his claims over the years about having studied philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne and doing a two year internship at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in clinical psychology,(3) he actually never enrolled for any credit-bearing course at the Sorbonne, or any other branch of the University of Paris. Even worse, there is no evidence that he ever earned a French secondary school diploma. Yet, he now earns a huge six-figure salary per year as a Mellon Professor of Literature at Boston University, a position that theoretically requires a Ph.D.(4)

After O’Connell’s article was published in 2004, neither Elie Wiesel nor the Sorbonne University provided any evidence to the contrary.  Searching for a clue on the Internet, I came only upon evidence of the well-known Internet trend (5) of copying from other sites and sources without the slightest direct research being done. What I did not find was anything from Elie himself, in speeches, writings, interviews, about his “happy years” as a student at the Sorbonne, or anything to do with his education. In the examples listed below, the original source from which the information came is not given, nor is it known in most cases, because it was doubtless copied from someone who copied it from somewhere else. In some cases, the 1995 memoir may have been the source, but it was never cited.

Google Search on Elie Wiesel + Sorbonne:

In 1948, Wiesel enrolled in the Sorbonne University where he studied literature, philosophy and psychology. He was extremely poor and at times became depressed to the point of considering suicide.  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Wiesel.html

After the liberation of the camps in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage and in 1948 began to study in Paris at the Sorbonne.  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/holo/eliebio.htm

In 1948, Elie began to study literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/elie-wiesel-13.php

Elie lived in a French orphanage for a few years and in 1948 began to study literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris.  http://www.gradesaver.com/author/elie-wiesel/

Where did Elie Wiesel Study? After the war, he studied at the Sorbonne. http://answers.encyclopedia.com/question/did-elie-wiesel-study-101042.html

Elie Wiesel studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He becomes interested in journalism. http://www.inthefootstepsofeliewiesel.org/about-elie-wiesel.html

In France, Elie Wiesel resumed his Jewish studies, eventually attending the Sorbonne to become a journalist  http://www.inthefootstepsofeliewiesel.org/film-locations.html

Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography by Frederick L. Downing. “With the help of his French teacher, Francois, Wiesel enrolled at the Sorbonne. He took classes on Plato and Freud and wandered through the bookstores.” http://books.google.com/books?id=GzdKZklZ2UIC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=Elie+Wiesel+Sorbonne&source=bl&ots=jADPVye9CO&sig=bCo4TwonO3oMzIGQyp6yxzaGePY&hl=en&ei=Mz_bTLzyMsaPnwfOzskW&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFwQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&q&f=false

ElieWiesel: Spokesman for Remembrance by Linda N. Bayer. “As Elie’s teen years drew to a close, he enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he was quite happy.”  http://books.google.com/books?id=IidC8iab6xgC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=Elie+Wiesel+Sorbonne&source=bl&ots=In97QVm3I5&sig=YDs8oXNhf8gmUpmByHlsUeZQg3A&hl=en&ei=_kTbTLOcGNC9ngfX7IEX&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFoQ6AEwCTgU#v=onepage&q&f=false

After the war, Wiesel attended the Sorbonne in Paris and worked for a while as a journalist. http://www.litlovers.com/guide_night.html

1947  Elie Wiesel enters the Sorbonne in Paris. http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/Night-Elie-Wiesel-Biography-Historical-Timeline.id-89,pageNum-7.html#ixzz14vnm6Bso

1948  Elie Wiesel studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He becomes interested in journalism. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007200

1952 After studying at the Sorbonne, Elie Wiesel begins travelling around the world as a reporter for the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Ahronot.  http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007201

After learning French, Elie studied at the Sorbonne, a famous university in Paris. After he graduated [!! this writer got carried away – cy] Wiesel taught Hebrew and choir. He decided to become a journalist because of his life experiences. http://www.nobelpeacelaureates.org/pdf/ms_EliezerWiesel.pdf

Gary Hart, “Story and Silence” He had learned French and assumed French nationality by 1947 when he entered the Sorbonne. There he studied, among other things, philosophy and psychology. [Wiesel never became a French national – cy]    http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/henry.html

Sent to Paris to study at the Sorbonne after several years of preparatory schools [Wiesel was not educated at a preparatory school –cy], he became a journalist for a small French newspaper, and supplemented his meager income as a translator and Hebrew teacher. http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/index.html  

The Academy of Achievement: Wiesel mastered the French language and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, while supporting himself as a choir master and teacher of Hebrew. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/wie0bio-1

TIME magazine 1986: After the war Wiesel settled in France, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962649-1,00.html#ixzz14wFTUljN

Encyclopedia Britannica: After the war Wiesel settled in France, studied at the Sorbonne (1948–51), and wrote for French and Israeli newspapers.  http://www.britannica.com/holocaust/article-9076939

Oprah! He studied literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-Elie-Wiesel

An analysis of Elie Wiesel’s exact words

 From the single paragraph in his memoir, we can extract only one sentence that describes something unique to being a student.

 I have happy memories of my student years. There were lectures by Daniel Lagache in the Descartes or Richelieu amphitheater, and by Louis Lavell at the Collège de France.

 [Image: Richelieu amphitheater]

First, he says he was a student for “years,” which means at least two. The Descartes and Richelieu amphitheaters are large lecture halls where the professors give their lectures to students enrolled in their course. Daniel Lagache held the chair of psychology at the Sorbonne beginning in 1947; during the war he was active in the Resistance and had been imprisoned. This would make him especially attractive to Wiesel. I believe that one could manage to attend lectures when there was space without being enrolled in the course. Note that Wiesel carefully writes “There were lectures …”, not anything suggesting he was a student of Daniel Lagache.

At the Collège de France, which was not the Sorbonne, lectures were open and free to the public. Louis Lavell was a religious philosopher recognized as a forerunner of the psychometaphysic movement.

Conclusion: If Wiesel were a real student at the Sorbonne for at least two years, it’s a certainty he would have more to say about it than that he remembers lectures given by one professor in the amphitheaters. What was his course of study, who were his teachers, how much time did he spend studying and what kind of grades did he get? Who were his fellow students?

Instead, he substitutes that he “devoured books” of an assorted nature, which only means he read a lot. He “wandered” among bookstores and parks. He “remembers the silence” of a library [the Sainte-Genevieve, which is not at the Sorbonne] and “chance encounters” in the Sorbonne courtyard. This all sounds enchanting, but it doesn’t sound like a hard-working student … and he would have had to work hard at that university.

The rest of what he wrote, in spite of his remembering Freud and Martin Buber, is just more open lectures, now in the Latin Quarter. This is the description of a dilettante taking advantage of what was available in the great city, picking and choosing what interested him, not fitting into any strict discipline of real schooling. There is no doubt in my mind, under our present knowledge,  that he was not a student; thus it’s no wonder he remembers his “student years” in Paris as happy; he was basically doing as he wished. Remember, he was a student of the mystic Shushani during this time.

What we find in this instance is totally reminiscent of the single paragraph by which he described in his memoir another important undertaking in his life—the writing of his first manuscript after his 10-year vow of silence [Or was  it actually nine years? He jumped the gun by one year, according to his memoir]. The reason he has so little to say? It’s pretty obvious it is because there was nothing there for him to remember.

But these few lines in his 1995 memoir cannot be the origin of the belief that he was educated at the Sorbonne, because Time magazine wrote in 1986, after Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, that “After the war Wiesel settled in France, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne…”  Where did Time magazine get that information? What is the earliest source of it?  It would be interesting to know this, but it’s not essential because we know that Wiesel’s own brief mention, written in 1995, is not convincing. Thus any earlier mention of it would not be convincing either. I don’t doubt that it’s possible Wiesel may have actually enrolled for one course at the Sorbonne, and maybe even one more course the following year—something like that. But that does not equal an education, or “studying at the Sorbonne.”

Has damage control on the Sorbonne question begun?

Here is another odd fact.

On Elie Wiesel’s Wikipedia page, there is no mention of his attending the Sorbonne University, let alone being enrolled there–or at any school or university. Yet, it was previously there and has been removed.  It currently says:

After World War II, Wiesel taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He learned French, which became the language he used most frequently in writing. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish) [and] L’arche.(6) [Both are Jewish newspapers, the first being Zion in Kamf in English -cy]

But on the previous Wikipedia page found at : http://web.archive.org/web/20080804112451/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel dating  from Aug. 2008, found at a web archive, it was there. [See comment #1 below.] And I think it was there up to 2010; during this year the page was updated. It read:

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned the French language and was reunited with both his older sisters, Hilda and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Why was it removed? Only one reason: Because someone at Wiki, or someone who can direct someone at Wiki, knows that Elie Wiesel did not study at the Sorbonne, and they would like it to appear that they never said he did. This is what is called Rewriting History because it’s done without telling  readers what has been changed, and why.

A serious charge? Or do many of you accept  it without complaint. Many of us know that the life history of Elie Wiesel was partly made up to begin with, so adding and subtracting parts of it, as research into his life uncovers some of the lies, may simply appear understandable damage control.

Yet, what about the “why”? Whose bright idea was it to pretend that Wiesel had “studied” at a famous university rather than tell the truth that he has never been a registered student since he left his hometown in Sighet at age 15. We have to believe that Wiesel himself began saying and implying this to give himself better credentials. He has never disputed it or set the record straight. Therefore, until we hear from him, we have to conclude that Wiesel thinks nothing of committing fraud – while he constantly points the finger of blame to so many of the rest of us.

The Wikipedia page for his book Night still mentions the Sorbonne:

From 1947–1950, he studied the Talmud, philosophy, and literature at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber.(7)

This appears to be taken from his memoir, but is confusingly written, perhaps on purpose. Confusion abounds around the narrative of the life of Elie Wiesel, as this entire website Elie Wiesel Cons The World shows. You’re probably already familiar with the quote of Wiesel to the Rebbe that some things are true that never happened and vice versa. On another occasion Wiesel revealed how his mind works. This is from  Elie Wiesel: Conversations by Elie Wiesel and Robert Franciosi. Wiesel responds to a question about one of his books:

In this book “One Generation After” there is a sentence which perhaps explains my idea: “Certain events happen, but they are not true. Others, on the other hand, are, but they never happen.” So! I undergo certain events and, starting from my experience, I describe incidents which may or may not have happened, but which are true. I do believe that it is very important that there be witnesses always and everywhere. (8)

From this, the reader can judge for him/herself what kind of a witness Elie Wiesel is. We can understand that “certain events” he experienced during the war gave him ideas to “describe incidents which didn’t happen” but could have happened and so are true in his mind. This exactly explains how he can say “every word is true” and “I have a tattoo on my arm.” My judgment is that Wiesel really missed out by not getting an education at the Sorbonne, which might have grounded him in reason and precise language. As it is, he lives in a mystical realm wherein things are true because he says they are … leaving him satisfied, his peace undisturbed.

Endnotes:

1.  Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea, Alfred Knopf, 1995, pp. 154-55.

2.  Collège de France is a separate institution across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Ecoles […] What makes it unique is that each professor is required to give lectures where attendance is free and open to anyone, even though some high-level courses are not open to the general public. The motto of the Collège is “It teaches everything;” its goal can be best summed up by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phrase: “Not preconceived notions, but the idea of free thought.”   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll%C3%A8ge_de_France

3. Updated Dec. 2. Prof. O’Connell says that Wiesel made this statement in his interview book with Brigitte-Fanny Cohen entitled Qui etes-vous, Elie Wiesel?, Lyon, La Manufacture, 1987, p. 63:  “For two years, every morning, I took classes at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and observed the patients.” Please read Prof. O’Connell’s comment  below [#3] and my reply.   A portion of this interview was included in Elie Wiesel: Conversations, ed. by Robert Franciosi, University Press of Mississippi, 2002.

4. “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,” Culture Wars magazine, Nov. 2004. Online at http://www.culturewars.com/2004/Weisel.htm

5.  This phenomenon is not limited to the Internet; historians also quote from the published work of other historians without knowing the truth of it. It’s enough for their source to be from a recognized scholar or writer from a recognized university.

6.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel#cite_ref-11

7.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book) 

8.  http://books.google.com/books?id=Ym8KcrzUZKYC&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=Elie+Wiesel,+Sorbonne&source=bl&ots=nahRgAmiLz&sig=PP17IzP9fhIZMFRfEg0sAWfpwDE&hl=en&ei=eSPbTK3CAZT0tgOfkqSaBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=Elie%20Wiesel%2C%20Sorbonne&f=false

$1000 in Prize Money for Best Essays on Ethical Challenges Surrounding Elie Wiesel

Monday, November 8th, 2010

The following news release has been sent to Boston, MA and Orange County, CA campus and regular media, and to selected Internet sites. It will also be mailed to students at BU and CU, where Elie Wiesel holds positions as a teacher. This is a major effort on our part, and we ask the assistence of our readers to publicize this extraordinary event, with all its hope for the exercise of free speech and the removal of taboos.

“A Question of Ethics” Essay Contest announced for Boston and Chapman University students; $1000 in prizes      

We are pleased to announce the first East Coast—West Coast “A Question of Ethics” Essay Contest for students enrolled at Boston University in Massachusetts and Chapman University in Orange, California. 

The winning essay will be awarded $500; second prize will receive $250; two honorable mentions $125 each. The winning essays will be published on the web site Elie Wiesel Cons The World.

 The essays must analyze one or more ethical issues surrounding Elie Wiesel as they are presented on the pages of the website Elie Wiesel Cons The World. These issues may include [not in order of importance]

• Prof. Wiesel’s refusal to show his claimed tattoo.
• The documents from Buchenwald that do not support Wiesel’s presence there.
• His claim to be in the famous Buchenwald Liberation Photo when, according to his book, he was deathly ill in the hospital at the time.
• His close association with the Irgun terrorist gang in the late 1940’s.
• The questions surrounding the authorship of his first book, Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, allegedly 866 pages written in less than two weeks while on a ship crossing the Atlantic.
• The insistence that his book Night, read by school children all over the world, is a factual account of his experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

 Though the essays must utilize the information made available on Elie Wiesel Cons The World, information from other sources is acceptable as additional material. Our objective is for the essayists to examine the ethics challenges facing Prof. Wiesel in light of the information we have provided at our website.

Deadline for essays to be received is Feb. 1st, 2011. To be considered for a prize, essays must be a minimum of 500 words. Proof of registration as a student at Boston or Chapman University must accompany the essay. This can be a copy of one’s current semester course registration along with a University ID card. Manuscripts should be emailed to [email protected] with the subject line: Ethics Essay Contest.

Contact:

Carolyn Yeager

 c/oCODOH,  PO Box 439016
San Ysidro, CA 92143
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.eliewieseltattoo.com

Wiesel Institute in Romania says it found mass grave of Jews

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

FYI: This is an example of an all-propaganda, no-forensic information “news article” that has been copied by AFP from a “News Release” sent out by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. Photograph and all. They publish it “as is” without checking facts. Notice there is no author for this story; no journalist wrote it. The article below appeared in the Montreal Gazette on Nov. 5.  The Montreal Gazette seems to be a news outlet specially partial to Israel and Jewish propaganda.  I have added my comments ~CY.

MASS GRAVE OF VICTIMS UNEARTHED IN ROMANIA 

AFP November 5, 2010

Human remains are seen after archaeologists uncovered a mass grave of Jews killed by Romanian troops during World War Two in a forest area near the village of Popricani, close to the city of Iasi, in northeast Romania.

Photograph by:  Anthony Cioflanca, Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.

[Comment: Notice that Cioflanca is employed by the EW Nat. Inst. in Romania. He is the only “archaeologist” mentioned and does not seem to be a real archaeologist. If he were, his credentials would be given. Therefore, who are these archaeologists that uncovered the grave?]

  BUCHAREST – A mass grave containing the bodies of Jews killed by the Romanian army during World War II has been discovered in a forest in northeastern Romania, the Elie Wiesel National Institute said on Friday.

[Comment: It’s not been forensically determined that they are Jews; they are being called Jews based on “talking to locals.”]

“So far we exhumed 16 bodies but this is just the beginning because the mass grave is very deep and we only dug up superficially”, Adrian Cioflanca, the researcher at the origin of the find, told reporters during a press conference.

[Comment: They say they have 16 “bodies,” but they claim 100 before they ever find them.]

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and Cioflanca both said they believe up to 100 bodies could be buried in the mass grave.

The find, in the Vulturi forest in Propricani, about 350 kilometres (220 miles) northeast of Bucharest, is “further evidence of the crimes committed against Jewish civilians in Romania”, Elie Wiesel institute head Alexandru Florian said.

“It is another testimony of a shameful period in Romania’s history”, Aurel Vainer, representative for the Jewish community at the lower house of parliament said.

[Comment: Two quotes solely of propaganda value from two political, activist Jews pointing the finger at Gentiles before the evidence can be studied. This is the formula that we have seen used over and over.]

According to an international commission of historians led by Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, himself a Romanian-born Jew, some 270,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in territories run by the pro-Nazi Romanian regime during 1940-1944.

[Comment: Now we come to the blanket statement of distorted historical “truth.” When did Elie Wiesel become a historian? He is not. Where does the figure of 270,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews come from? What “international commission” is being referred to?]

This is the first time a Holocaust-era mass grave has been discovered since 1945, when 311 corpses were exhumed from three locations in Stanca Roznovanu, close from Iasi, according to the Wiesel Institute.

[Comment: No wonder they are trying to make a big deal of it. They need to come up with something after 65 years of nothing but “witness testimony.”]

“For a long period of time, no research was done because the subject was taboo under the communist regime (1945-1989) and also for some years after the return of democracy in 1989″, Cioflanca told AFP.

[Comment: Just think how tough the communist regime of ‘45-’89 made it to get any truth for Germans.  The taboo in place by the Holocaust enforcers up till this very minute makes it very difficult to disseminate any truth for German losses, and who the true perpetrators were. Democracy is of no avail in their case.]

[NOTE: From an updated AP report in the Kansas City Star, we read: “Romania’s role in the Holocaust remains a sensitive and highly charged topic. During communist times, the country largely ignored the involvement of Romania’s leaders in wartime crimes.” If this is the case, it’s very likely the Communists did the killing, not Romanian “Nazis.”  But it is in the interest of the Elie Wiesel Institute on the Holocaust in Romania to blame the “Nazis” and “fascists” in order to bolster “Holocaust” claims, if at all possible. Naturally, the current Romanian regime will go along with that. The Jews will cause them endless trouble if they don’t; Germans and Romanians will not say a word. To get to the bottom of the events that are behind the discovery of these bones would take an honest, careful investigation by neutral scientists — which is not what we’re seeing here.]

Things improved after the Wiesel-led commission’s report in 2004 and in 2006 president Traian Basescu called on his fellow countrymen to face up to the role played by the pro-Nazi regime of wartime Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu.

The mass grave in Propricani was discovered after Cioflanca, a historian, gathered testimonies of local inhabitants who saw the killings of Jews. One of the witnesses escaped after convincing the Romanian troops that he was an Orthodox Christian, Cioflanca said.

[Comment: Now Cioflanca is called an historian; previously he is called a “researcher” and also an “archaeologist.” But his actual credentials are never given. What are they? Because he “gathered testimonies of local inhabitants” – this qualifies him as an historian?]

The victims could be Jews from the northeastern city of Iasi, where Romanian officials and military units, assisted at times by German soldiers, killed at least 8,000 during a pogrom in 1941, according to figures by the U.S. Holocaust memorial museum.

[Comment:  This is another blanket statement.  The USHMM is not a credible, unbiased institution, but the product of Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust Industry, Jewish organizations, and Jewish influence in and on the US Govt.  Their “figures” are meaningless without independent research and scrutiny.]

Many of them are buried in official common graves.

The researchers will now try to identify the bodies excavated.

“We will not be able to use DNA tests because we do not have any contact with potential relatives still alive and, to use DNA, you need to compare samples,” Cioflanca said.

[Comment: No relatives? What about the witnesses who saw what took place – they don’t know who any of them were? What about the one who escaped? Do they not want to use DNA because it could show these are not Jewish bones at all, but Romanian or some other. Notice how they don’t even consider that they might not be Jews. They want them to be Jews. The more dead Jews it can find, the happier the Elie Wiesel Institute is!]

The exhumations are expected to go on after consultations with the authorities.

[Comment: “Consultations” means pressure, bribery, threats of a political and financial nature. In other words, “we’ll destroy your careers if you don’t go along with us, and we’ll do all in our power to blacken Romania’s reputation and standing in the European Union.”]

The military prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.

[Comment: [Will this be a real investigation or one run by the Jewish “archeologists” and “historians”? A necessary question.]

After the find, the Elie Wiesel Institute deplored the fact that some Romanian cities, like Sibiu, Pitesti and Timisoara, “still continue to celebrate the memory of Romanian officials who were war criminals and who took part in the persecution against Jews by giving their names to streets.”

[Comment:  Ah, Elie. His heart still full of revenge for those “war criminals” who dared to lay a hand on a Jew. That a Romanian official should have his name on a street!! Make them all Jewish names as a proper memorial to their unique suffering; then Elie Wiesel might be satisfied.]

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Wiesel to begin fellowship at Chapman University; retain position at BU

Friday, October 29th, 2010

 by Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel will “spend time” at Chapman University in Orange, California beginning this spring and for the following four years, through 2015, according to Chapman President Jim Doti. Wiesel has been appointed as a “Distinguished Presidential Fellow”, which means he will visit classes in Chapman’s Holocaust history minor, and possibly other disciplines, including history, French, religious studies and literature, according to chapmannews. 

Chapmannews reports that complete plans for his fellowship activities are still in progress (as of August) and that he will retain his full-time faculty position at Boston University. As we have pointed out on this website, Wiesel’s duties at BU are light, leaving him time for his extra-curricular activities, now including being employed by a second university. However, Wiesel’s fellowship stay is also described as amounting to only “several days each spring.” My! “Visit” is certainly the right word for it.

“Distinguished Presidential Fellow” may be a newly invented position, meaning that he is appointed by the President (Jim Doti), not hired under academic requirements by a department dean. Wiesel will be what you might call, in diplomatic terms, an at-large representative of the Jewish interests that are no doubt paying his salary. He will be most closely associated with Chapman’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, a unique construction that bridges the Religion and History Depts, and was opened in Feb. 2000 “through a generous gift from Barry and Phyllis Rodgers, [and] dedicated to preparing young people to become witnesses to the future.” Witnesses of the Holocaust? Is this the job of a university? Well, it seems to depend on who offers the money, and what they want it to be used for.

Wiesel offered special words of praise to Dr. Marilyn Harran, who directs the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, for “the way in which the university is teaching and remembering some of the most tragic events in human history, events that have had such a deep influence upon my life.” She and the Center are the reason that Wiesel says he “made the decision to return to Chapman annually as Distinguished Presidential Fellow.”

Dr. Harran is a professor of both history and religious studies at Chapman. She has even stronger words of praise for Wiesel, announcing, “[he] has been the face and voice of Holocaust memory and witness to the world, and an ambassador of humanity and hope for decades.  He has consistently challenged us to learn from the Holocaust and to reject indifference, and – in his words – ‘to think higher and feel deeper.’ We are unbelievably fortunate that he has chosen to return to Chapman and to share with us his knowledge and wisdom.  I am stunned and deeply grateful that he will be with us in this new role as Distinguished Presidential Fellow.  I know our university community will be profoundly enriched and inspired by his presence.”

University President Doti is equally humbled by the presence of the great man, saying “That this remarkable individual, one of the world’s most famous and respected people, one who truly exemplifies the meaning of ‘global citizen,’ should choose to return to spend time with our students is truly a tremendous honor for Chapman.”

Does it seem from this that Wiesel will be under any kind of performance requirement at Chapman, or will he be the determiner of his own course of action? It is probably the same at Boston University – the tail is wagging the dog. But Wiesel’s presence at both universities is more a public relations benefit to the school than an educational benefit for students. His fame as a Holocaust icon, including his Nobel Peace Prize, make him a valuable commodity – as opposed to having any pretensions to scholastic stardom.

Chapman University is seeking to transition from a “teaching university” to a “research university.” That means the faculty will be required to “publish” in the field of their expertise, and the more you publish, the higher your pay. Not all faculty think this will be beneficial to the student experience at Chapman; there is a school of thought that values professors as mainly teachers rather than researchers. But others, probably more powerful, think it’s more important to “upgrade” Chapman into a higher-rated university.

Emphasis on the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel’s visiting fellowship may be in accord with those objectives. The Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library opened in April 2005, dedicated to providing a space “where teachers and students may gather to learn from survivors, visual testimonies and printed resources.” At the entrance to this library is a large bronze bust of – guess who? Elie Wiesel!  The library has an exhibit area that currently displays “Themes of the Holocaust” featuring photos and artifacts donated or lent by individuals and institutions. Group tours are also arranged. It’s like a little Holocaust museum right there on the university grounds.

At Chapman, the Holocaust is taught in both the Religion and History Depts., and several of the courses overlap both. It is really quite amazing how much of the History curriculum is devoted to this subject. That Holocaust is taught in the Religion Department—as it is at Boston University—makes sense because it is a belief. It has become an unquestioned, highly enforced belief system that is assumed to be true at its base, but with too little examination of the basic operations it would require.

A difference in approach at Chapman however, as compared to BU, is the emphasis on Holocaust in the History Dept. I discovered six courses containing Holocaust, five of them devoted exclusively to it. This is a lot for a small university like Chapman, perhaps more than at any other accredited university in the United States. The History Dept. offers on an every-year basis:

HIST 307 Germany and the Holocaust

(Same as REL 307.) This course examines the Holocaust within the context of the history of World War II. Topics include the origins of the Holocaust, the implementation of the Final Solution, resistance to the Nazis, survivor experiences, and the legacy of the Holocaust. (Offered every year.) 3 credits. Also offered in Religion 

HIST 365 Topics in the Holocaust

(Same as REL 365.) This course examines selected topics within the study of Holocaust history, such as the roles of doctors, theologians and religion under Hitler, the persecution of non–Jewish groups (including homosexuals and gypsies), and the experiences and choices of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Courses that treat different themes may be repeated for credit. (Offered every year.) 3 credits. Also offered in Religion

HIST 365a Perpetrators, Witnesses, and Rescuers

[Same as REL365a] Within the context of Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust, this course examines the choices that individuals faced and the decisions that defined them as perpetrators or rescuers. Includes the stories of those who survived the Holocaust to become witnesses to the truth. (Offered every year.) 3 credits. Also offered in Religion

Offered every other year, Spring semester:

HIST 365b The Holocaust: Memoirs and Histories

This course explores the complex history of the Holocaust from the perspective of selected memoirs written by survivors and examines the contributions and limitations of memoirs in shaping the historical record. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits.

The following two courses are offered “as needed:”

HIST 356 Modern Germany: From Sarajevo to Stalingrad

This course examines the political, social, and intellectual history of Germany from World War I to the end of World War II. Topics include the Holocaust and the roles of individuals in taking Germany down the path to two world wars. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits.

HIST 297 The Holocaust in History and Film

An introduction to the history of the Holocaust, from initial persecution to the implementation of the Final Solution, including the actions of perpetrators, rescuers, and resisters; the dilemmas facing those targeted for persecution, and major issues in the interpretation and visual representation of the Holocaust. (Offered as needed) 3 credits.

*  *  *

The Religion Dept. at Chapman offers three courses every year that are also offered in History:

REL 365 Topics in the Holocaust

(Same as HIST 365.)

REL 365a Perpetrators, Witnesses, and Rescuers

(Same as HIST 365A.)

REL 307 Germany and the Holocaust

(Same as HIST 307.)

In addition to all of this, there is the extensive program offerings of the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, which is entirely funded by several Jewish groups outside the university. According to the Chapman website, the mission of the Rodgers Center is to increase knowledge of the Holocaust, further discussion of the causes of genocide, and encourage reflection on the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust to our lives today.

As part of its mission, the Center sponsors a Lecture Series each year. For example, on Sept. 21 James Young gave a lecture entitled “Stages of Memory: Challenges of Memorialization (sic) from the Holocaust to the World Trade Center.” Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the U of Mass, Amherst. He has written two books about the Holocaust: one about Holocaust Memorials and one about Holocaust Architecture.  [Isn’t Holocaust to the World Trade Center quite a stretch? -cy]

The  Art and Writing Contest is an annual program that involves “thousands of Southern California middle and high school teachers and students, culminating in an awards ceremony on campus.

Beginning in 2000, the Rodgers Center began a yearly Evening of Holocaust Commemoration to create a “community of witnesses” for the Chapman area.

What more can they think up?!

No one can deny that Holocaust is alive and well at Chapman University. And now Elie Wiesel, the “Grand Poobah” himself, will arrive every spring to energize it even further, and bring lots of media attention in his wake. This is a public relations dream!

But for those of us who care about the truth, it’s more like a nightmare. What do you think, dear reader?

Religion Department reveals interesting insight into Boston University

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

by Carolyn Yeager

 

BU’s Dept. of Religion is extremely over-weighted with Jewish faculty and Judaism courses.

Elie Wiesel, as the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at BU, teaches in both the Depts. of Philosophy and of Religion. Both departments are contained in the College of Arts and Sciences, headed by Virginia Sapiro.

I took a look at the Dept. of Religion after a student at BU informed me in a helpful manner that our Elie Wiesel Cons The World Boston University Project page was wrong in stating that Prof. Wiesel was not teaching any courses during the fall 2010 semester. This student referred me to the Dept. of Religion course offerings which are online and which show Elie Wiesel as the instructor of two undergraduate courses for this current semester. [I have corrected our page.]

The fall semester continues until December and the year-end break. Wiesel is teaching two courses especially designed for him [or by him]: Literature of Memory 1 and Literature of Memory 2. What is interesting about these courses is that they cover solely Wiesel’s own writings.

Lit of Memory 1 “examines the development of Elie Wiesel as a novelist from a selection of his fictional works. Particular attention is paid to the books’ structures, themes, and moral lessons. (It) provides an opportunity to study these works with the author himself.”

Lit of Memory 2 “explores Elie Wiesel’s non-fiction writing. Using his memoirs, Biblical interpretations, and reflections on prominent Hasidic masters, we seek to better comprehend the ethical voice in his work. (It) provides the opportunity to explore these issues with Professor Wiesel himself.”

It is obviously considered a special advantage for BU students to study at the master’s feet. I would certainly like to listen in on one of the class sessions myself! The Spring 2011 course offerings for the Dept. of Religion show no classes taught by Elie Wiesel. Perhaps he will be teaching a course for the Philosophy Dept. in the spring. As of this writing, they are not yet online.

In the BU Dept. of Religion I was amazed to find a large percentage of course offerings devoted solely to Judaism and Jewish culture. I would not have been surprised to find there were more than for any other religion, but the proportion was so wildly unequal one wonders how they get away with it. Here is the breakdown for the current semester. [Note: please see my reply to Dove in the Comments section below (11-13 at 8:55 a.m.) re a more complete listing of Religion Dept. courses for Fall and Spring, 2010-11, which you can find here. I’m not going to redo the article at this time because the ratio of Jewish courses to Christian and others remains essentially the same.]

Fall 2010 offers 24 lower and upper level courses, all 4 credit hrs

8 courses are solely about Judaism and Jews

1. Elie Wiesel, Lit. of Memory 1 [his own fictional writings]
2. Elie Wiesel, Lit of Memory 2  [his own non-fiction writings]
3. Introduction to Rabbinic Literature
4. Jewish Mystical Movements and Modernization
5. American Jewish Experiences
6. The Modern Jew
7. The Holocaust
8. Holocaust Literature and Film

1 course about Judaism and Christianity [Apocalyptic Lit in Early Judaism and Christianity]

1 course solely about Christianity [Gender in Medieval Christianity]

2 courses solely about Islam

1.  Islamic Law

2.  Islamic Theology/Philosophy

1 course about Daoism

1 course about Zen-Buddhism

1 course about Culture, Society and Religion in South Asia

9 courses on Religion—Non-Specific

This is an astonishing 36% about Jews and their culture/religion as opposed to about 25% for all non-Jewish religions combined, and around 39% for non-specific religion topics. And this is not in any way an exceptional semester, considering the same proportion appears in the spring semester.

Spring 2011 [click on “Courses” under Academics] offers 17 lower and upper level courses, all 4 credit hrs

6 courses solely about Judaism and Jews

1. History of Judaism
2. Classical Jewish Thought
3. Gender and Judaism
4. The Holocaust
5. Jewish Bioethics
6. Topics in Judaic Studies: The Zionist Idea

2 courses solely about Christianity

1. Varieties of Early Christianity
2. Theology of Christian Mysticism

1 course on Islam

1 course on Buddhism

3 courses on Religion & Literature from around the world

4 courses on Religion-Non-specific

Here again we see 35% solely about Judaism; about 24% on Christianity, Islam and Buddhism combined; 41% for non-specific religious topics. This seems to be the formula. What does it tell us about BU?

Has Boston University become a Jewish institution?

As we note on our Boston University page, according to Hillel.org and Reform Judaism Magazine [via Wikipedia; NOTE: the Wiki BU page has been revamped since July and all mention of Hillel House removed], “Boston University … has the second highest number of Jews of any private school [after New York University] in the country with between 3,000 and 4,000 [out of approx. 30,000], or roughly 15% identifying as Jewish.” It is also, according to the latest figures available, approximately “68% white, 15% Asian, 7% international students, 7% Hispanic, and 2% black.” While 15% Jewish is a high number in a country where the total Jewish population is no more than 2 to 2½%—it doesn’t begin to reach to the 35% average of Judaism courses offered by the BU Dept. of Religion.

First we might ask: Why is the Jewish student population at BU so high? One reason is the location in Boston, Mass. and surrounding states like New York and New Jersey, which have a higher than average Jewish population. Another is the culture that has developed there. Again, as we stated on our Boston University page, the school was historically affiliated with the United Methodist Church, but lost its Christian identity somewhere along the way and now describes itself as nonsectarian. However, considering its student body, and its faculty and administrative personnel, not to mention the Board of Trustees, it could very easily—and perhaps more correctly—be identified as a predominately Jewish institution.

When we look at the administrative faculty positions in the Department of Philosophy, we can’t help but notice the abundance of Jewish names. Nine out of 29 professors [31%] are unmistakably Jewish, and others could very likely be. In the Department of Religion, of 31 professors listed, eleven are unmistakably Jewish [35%] and some others are likely Jewish. The Jewish professors teach the Jewish courses, so the percentages fit together.

I’m not going to look into BU in its entirety because I am not on a hunt to discover how many Jews are employed there [although I may be accused of that]. What I am after is to discover whether BU has a Jewish culture and political base, and it appears that it does. The more “Jewish” Boston University becomes, the more Jewish students are attracted to attend this university. And so it builds on itself. I can tell you that if you’re going to major in Religion, you’re going to get a heavy dose of Judaism.

And Holocaust, too. Along with Elie Wiesel as a celebrated professor there, I’d like to acquaint you with Prof. Steven T. Katz , who is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University,  and holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies in the Dept. of Religion. [I didn’t know there was an Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at BU until I read Dr. Katz’ bio. I will have more to say about that in another blogpost.] Katz was also Chair of the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum [in Wash. D.C.] for five years. He still serves on that committee, and is also Chair of the Holocaust Commission of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Not surprisingly, he’s teaching the course “The Holocaust” jointly with the prolific Professor Hillel Levine. Katz is no doubt too busy to do more, as he is also one of the American representatives to the International Task Force on the Holocaust, established by the King of Sweden, now sponsored by the European Union.

Holocaust as part of the Religion curriculum at BU

 It is left to us to figure out why BU is offering courses on The Holocaust in the Department of Religion, rather than in History. Strangely, when I look at the course offerings in the Dept. of History, the word “Holocaust” does not appear once. A course titled World War II: Causes, Course, Consequences is offered in the Spring 2011 semester. That is the only mention of WWII in all the course offerings for both semesters [not to mean it is not touched on in some other courses].

However, there are several courses about Israel and Jews for general students and history majors. Among the undergraduate courses for Fall 2010, there is Jews in the Modern World, Topics in the History of Israel, and Topics in Jewish History. For the Spring 2011 semester, I find The History of Israel: An Introduction, Topics in Jewish History, and The Making of the Modern Middle East [this one taught by Jewish professor David Fromkin]. This is more than it might look considering the entire spectrum of world history of all cultures that needs to be covered in a Dept. of History.  Israel is a tiny state and Jews make up a tiny percentage of the world’s population, yet at BU they are given an inordinate amount of attention.

Is the Holocaust, as it is understood by most professors, an historical event or a religious event, according to Boston University? First let me say that the fact of the History Department remaining aloof from the Holocaust is not surprising at all. Real historians—trained scholars—stay away from the Holocaust because actual evidence for it is weak. It is based on war-time and post-war propaganda; witness testimonies by the alleged victim-survivors; photographs and confessions, many of which have been demonstrated to be fake; and poorly-explained happenings. Yet it is politically verboten to question it; therefore the answer for historians is simply to not teach, write or talk about it, but only to give it lip-service.

However, for Elie Wiesel [and those who surround him], the Holocaust is the mainstay of his entire career. Wiesel treats the Holocaust as a religion, complete with prophecies and forerunners, saints and heroes, highly embellished but un-provable narratives [including his own], and miracles given as explanation for that which can’t be explained otherwise. One of Wiesel’s continuing themes is that the Holocaust cannot be described, nor can it be understood by those who were not there.

Thus, it is in the interests of Professors Wiesel, Katz, Levine, and other Jewish proponents of “The Holocaust” to keep it in the Dept. of Religion. And this is where we find it. ~

 

NOTE (Oct. 27):  On Monday night, Oct. 25, Elie Wiesel, as a Prof. of Religion at BU, gave the first of three lectures on Old Testament biblical themes  to a reported 1000 students and faculty at Metcalf Hall on the BU campus.

The lecture was titled “In the Bible: A Judge Named Deborah,” about a female judge and prophetess of “Israel” who led a successful campaign against the Canaanites, the seemingly eternal enemies of “Israel” throughout the bible. The story is found in the book of Judges.

According to The Daily Free Press student newspaper,  “Wiesel then spoke about Yael, the woman who killed the leader of the Canaanite army by hammering a peg through his head (!), and went on to argue that women played essential roles in the Bible, starting with Eve. […] ‘All the time, women were actually those who made decisions,’ Wiesel said, citing the importance of Ruth, Esther and Rahab in the Bible.”

Most of these biblical stories have been shown by modern archaeologists and biblical scholars to be fictional embellishments designed to hold the Jewish people together as a religious community.  This lecture series is under the auspices of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at BU.

What is of greatest interest to us here at EWCTW is the final paragraphs of the article published in the Daily Free Press:

BU President Emeritus John Silber, who introduced Wiesel, emphasized the importance of Wiesel’s memoir, “Night,” which recounts his experience in the Nazi prison camps.

“In ‘Night’ [Wiesel] reveals the full horror of the Holocaust as an inscrutable evil,” Silber said. “‘Night’ has made millions of young students aware of this tragedy in which all standards of civilization were abandoned.” [see Wiesel’s description of Yael’s tactic of “hammering a peg through her enemy’s head” above -cy]

Silber said since Wiesel’s first lecture 34 years ago, the author has “made it his primary concern to arouse the consciousness of mankind to the realities of the Holocaust.”

Audience members said they were excited about seeing Wiesel at BU.

“I think that Elie Wiesel is a huge character and very, very inspirational to not just the Jewish people but also the whole world,” said College of Arts and Science [Jewish] freshman Ben Fishman.

“Elie is a faculty member who stands out, his name stands out on the paper when you see him on your schedule so when you have that opportunity it’s an opportunity you can’t pass up,” said School of Management freshman Albert Tawil. “That’s why BU takes pride in having him here.”

The second and third lectures in the series are scheduled for Nov. 1 and Nov. 8 at Metcalf Hall. Please see my blog on Opportunities for Activism here.

We Appeal to Students at Boston University

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

 

Robert A. Brown, President of Boston University: “Elie Wiesel is a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.”

With this statement, Dr. Brown replied to my September 23rd email message and postal letter to him, and to those copied, which I am publishing here.

Robert A. Brown
Office of the President
1 Silber Way, 8th Floor
Boston Ma 02215
September 23, 2010

Re:  Prof. Elie Wiesel

Dear President Brown:

I recognize that Boston University has a long and admirable tradition of support for the humanities. One of your most prominent, most politically conspicuous faculty members is Elie Wiesel, who is associated in the public mind with a host of worthy, even noble causes, including being the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Particularly because of the honored position Professor Wiesel holds at BU, the questions that are being raised about his Holocaust testimony bother me, and I think if you were aware of them they would bother you, too. First is the lack of evidence that he has an Auschwitz tattoo, though he repeatedly claims to have one. As recently as last March, at Dayton University in Ohio, a student asked if he still has his concentration camp number, and he said, “I still have it on my arm.” However, his own 1996 video, in which his bare forearms are exposed to the camera, reveals no tattoo on his left arm, where it should be.

This, along with archival documents primarily from Buchenwald that show a Lazar Wiesel born in 1913, not 1928, who was there with his brother Abram, put his entire account of his concentration camp experiences of 1944-45 into question. No documentation for Shlomo Wiesel/Vizel, Elie’s father, or of a Lazar/Eliezer Wiesel with Elie Wiesel’s birth date of Sept. 30th, has been revealed.

Still other questions being raised concern his authorship of the original Yiddish version of Night. The brief description he gives of when, where and how he wrote And the World Remained Silent contain contradictions and improbabilities. In addition, there are major factual differences between key passages in Night, the English derivative of the original Yiddish language book, and Prof. Wiesel’s memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea. To mention just one—in the former, his foot is operated on before the evacuation to Buchenwald in January 1945, while in the latter it becomes his knee that is operated on! These are just a few of the red flags that are raised when studying Prof. Wiesel’s testimony with a critical eye.

I realize it is not my responsibility, but rather yours, to maintain the integrity of your faculty. However, I feel an obligation to bring this information to your attention because it is information that is gaining the attention of the world, and more importantly of your students, through various venues and investigations, and may reflect poorly on your great university.

Respectfully yours,

Carolyn Yeager
PO Box 439016
San Ysidro, CA 92143
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/

cc:  David K. Campbell, Provost
Virginia Sapiro, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
Daniel Dahlstrom, Chair, Department of Humanities
Aaron Garrett, Assoc. Chair, Dept. of Humanities
Walter Hopp, Director, Undergraduate Studies, Dept. of Humanities
David Roochnik, Director, Graduate Studies, Dept. of Humanities
Members of the Board of Trustees
Robert A. Knox, Chairman
John P. Howe III, Vice Chairman
Jonathan R. Cole
Richard C. Godfrey
Robert J. Hildreth
Eric S. Lander
Alan M. Leventhal
J. Kenneth Menges, Jr.
Christine A. Poon
Adam. W. Sweeting

On September 27, I received a polite reply, which did not indicate whether Dr. Brown had looked at any of the pages I linked to on the Elie Wiesel Cons The World website.

Dear Ms. Yeager:

Thank you for your e-mail message of September 23, in which you express concerns about the accuracy of Dr. Wiesel’s testimony.  I have no doubt that he is a survivor of the Holocaust and he has, thoughout his adult life, been a most eloquent witness to its atrocities. He is a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Brown
We wanted to give the Boston University administration fair warning of what we are up to, and an opportunity to address the “Wiesel question” themselves.

Having done that, and after sending them a further reply suggesting that they look into the matter, and with no further response, we now turn to the students at BU. We have sent a message to student organizations, student publications and the local Boston media in a major effort to inform, encourage and assist students on campus to ask for answers to these questions. We believe there are individuals and organizations at BU who truly care about the ethical integrity of their university and its faculty, and who want to know the facts about all things, no matter how sensitive—not just accept what they are being taught by a timid, establishment faculty.

We suggest there is a simple request that Boston University students can make of Prof. Wiesel that their administrators are apparently unwilling to make. They can ask him to show his tattoo. He says he is a humble representative of the survivors of the concentration camps. Many Auschwitz survivors prove their presence in that camp by pointing to the number tattooed on their left forearm. Why not Elie Wiesel? Is he not one of them?

We’re urging students at BU, and all our readers as well, to write or call the following persons asking for their cooperation in a search for honest answers. Thank you for your activism.

Department of Philosophy

745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 516
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Phone:617.353.2571 | Fax:617.353.6805
Department e-mail:[email protected]

Department Chair: Professor Daniel Dahlstrom
Phone: 617.353.4583 | E-mail: [email protected]

Associate Chair: Professor Aaron Garrett
Phone: 617.358.3617 | E-mail: [email protected]

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Professor Walter Hopp
Phone: 617.358.4228 | E-mail: [email protected]

Director of Graduate Studies: Professor David Roochnik
Phone: 617.353.4579 | E-mail: [email protected]

Director of Graduate Admissions: Professor Allen Speight
Phone: 617.353.3067 | E-mail: [email protected]

Administrator: Matthew Roselli
Phone: 617.353.2572 | E-mail: [email protected]

Senior Program Coordinator: Lesley Moreau
Phone: 617.353.2571 | E-mail: [email protected]

Elie Wiesel:  University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Religion
E-mail: [email protected]

The full Dept. of Philosophy faculty addresses can be found on our Boston University Project  page.

*   *   *

The Daily Free Press  648 Beacon St. Boston, MA 02215
Tel.: (617)236-4433  Fax.: (617)236-4414
The Daily Free Press welcomes comments and corrections from readers. To write a letter to the editor, send fewer than 500 words to [email protected] . Please include your phone number so that you can be contacted.

Neal J. Riley– Editor-in-Chief ([email protected])

Josh Cain – Managing Editor ([email protected])

Saba Hamedy – Campus Editor([email protected])

Chelsea Feinstein – Editorial Page Editor ([email protected])

WTBU Boston University’s student radio station broadcasting online.

General Manager – [email protected]

News Editor – [email protected]

Programming Editor – [email protected]

The Many Faces of Elie Wiesel

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

By Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2010 Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel has been identified – in some cases has identified himself – in these three photographs. A close examination brings up many questions.

 

#1 – Elie in 1944, age 15

#2 – Elie on April 16, 1945, age 16½

#3 – Elie on April 27, 1945, age 16½

 

Do any two of these pictures look like the same person? You might think that picture #2 or 3 has a vague resemblance to picture #1, but pictures 2 and 3 don’t in the least resemble each other. The man in picture #2 has a sharp aquiline nose, high cheekbones, full lips and looks quite a bit older than 16 years of age, while the round-headed lad in picture #3 has a wide face, short nose and low forehead. He looks younger than 16.

Picture #2 can be recognized as a close-up from the Famous Buchenwald Liberation Photo. [see page under The Evidence]. Weasel has maintained since the 1980’s that this is his face.

Picture #3 is taken from the photograph below. He is the boy in front of the tall boy in the left column of boys leaving Buchenwald, fourth from the front (the third boy in line is hidden from view). He’s been identified as Elie Wiesel by Prof. Kenneth Waltzer on his Michigan State University website. Wiesel has not denied it. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, however, doesn’t claim that Elie is in this picture (see USHMM below).

 

Above:  Children march out of Buchenwald to a nearby American field hospital where they will receive medical care. Buchenwald, Germany, April 27, 1945. — Wide World Photo  [Photo and caption from USHMM website]

Below: From Ken Waltzer’s MSU Newsroom Special Report page

 

 Waltzer writes on this same page:

In “Night,” Wiesel says that when he viewed himself in a mirror after liberation, he saw a corpse gazing back at him. But another picture [the one above] taken after liberation on April 17 [he has the date wrong], when the boys were led to the former SS barracks outside the camp, shows Wiesel marching out, fourth on the left, among a phalanx of youth moving together, heads held high, a group together guided by prisoners who had helped save them.

According to Waltzer, Elie Wiesel had a fast recovery to health, body mass and optimism, which Elie himself has never claimed. According to Buchenwald documents, these youths were not sent to France until July 16, 1945 (Fig. 12.4, 12.5),

Waltzer teaches German history and directs the Jewish Studies Program at MSU which includes courses on the Holocaust. He is writing a book about the orphan boys at Buchenwald titled “The Rescue of Children at Buchenwald.” Will Prof. Waltzer offer an explanation in his book for Elie Wiesel’s fit appearance in this photograph? He also accepts the man in the barracks photo as 16-year-old Wiesel. But then he has to, doesn’t he. How will he reconcile these two faces only eleven days apart?

USHMM

The USHMM features the picture shown below on its website—which Waltzer also refers to—and tells us that Elie Wiesel is among these boys without pointing out which one he is. Failing to find anyone who resembles Elie, I wrote to the USHMM asking them to identify him, but received no reply. [Update – because of a reader and also other pictures of Wiesel in France that surfaced later, I now believe Wiesel could be the darkish face in the 2nd to the last row, looking over the shoulder of the boy in a military-looking jacket and to the left of two boys in light-colored caps or berets. ]

Group portrait of Jewish displaced youth at the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) home for Orthodox Jewish children in Ambloy. Elie Wiesel is among those pictured. Ambloy, France, 1945.  — USHMM, courtesy of Willy Fogel

The U.S. Holocaust Museum dates this picture simply as 1945. It is definitely summer; the boys are dressed in their suits and “traveling clothes,” as if they had just arrived. A large suitcase is being held by a young boy seated in the front row. It fits in every respect the records for the Buchenwald transport that left Germany for France on July 16, 1945.

Wiesel is careful not to give dates for many important events in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea. In this book he writes in detail about his trip to France and his early years with the Oeuvre de Secours. Yet he gives not a single date, until he mentions that he first met his future mentor, Shushani, sometime in 1947.1 He writes of being active with the other Jewish youths – engaged in classes, choir practice, trips and flirtations – but strangely not a single photograph is available.

The next picture of Elie Wiesel I have found was taken in 1949. In fact, it is the first picture of him we can be sure of since the 15-year-old portrait of 1944, prior to deportation (picture #1). Why are there no pictures of Wiesel during all the years he was in the Jewish welfare system in France? We are told his sister Hilda, living in Paris, recognized him in 1945 in a photograph of OSE orphans that was published in a newspaper or magazine. What picture was that? [This question was finally answered. See http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/another-photo-of-young-elie-wiesel-that-is-not-elie-wiesel/  The group photo above? There are no easy or available answers to these questions. It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to consider that it’s because there aren’t any that “fit” the story.

I find it more than ironic that on the page “Elie Wiesel Timeline and World Events, 1928-1951” there are three photographs and Elie Wiesel is not in any one of them!

The next picture I can find of Elie Wiesel was taken in 1949, on a ship heading for Israel. We see here the real Elie – long, narrow face, long nose (but not aquiline as in picture #2 above), large ears, high broad forehead, a slender build. He is 20 years old and a journalist, and has probably never looked better. [Maybe that’s why the picture was released.] We learn in his memoir that on May 14, 1948, when David Ben Gurion read out the Israel Declaration of Independence, Elie Wiesel had been working already for around six months for the Irgun Yiddish weekly newspaper Zion in Kamf (Zion in Struggle)– yes, Irgun, the terrorist gang. He remained with the Irgun until they closed their European offices in January 1949. He was then persuaded to go where the action was—to Israel. Helped by the Jewish Agency, and traveling with a few Irgun veterans, he boarded the ship Negba in May or June (uncertain), crossing to Haifa, Israel.2 This picture must have been taken during that trip.

Elie Wiesel on a boat to Israel in 1949

These are the faces of young Elie Wiesel during his “years of travail” that we have at our disposal—not much. I offer the opinion that too much is missing to accept unquestionably the story of his life, during these years 1944-1950, that has been manufactured for public consumption. Only two pictures: before Auschwitz and after his connection with the orphanage was concluded, are definitely him. The search continues.

Endnotes:

1. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Alfred Knopf, 1995, p 121.
2. ibid, pg. 174-180

Signatures prove Lázár Wiesel is not Elie Wiesel

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

by Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2010 carolyn yeager

What can be simpler than to compare two signatures of the same name to determine whether they are indeed the same or two different individuals? Fortunately, we have available not only the signature of Elie Wiesel, but also that of Lázár Wiesel. The latter is on the “Military Government of Germany Concentration Camp Inmates Questionnaire.” This Questionnaire (Fragebogen in German) can be seen among The Documents pertaining to the Lazar Wiesel/Elie Wiesel question.

The importance of this lies in the fact that we only have one Lazar Wiesel at a time at Buchenwald, according to the records. Lazar Wiesel, born Sept. 4, 1913 arrived at the camp on January 26, 1945, along with his brother Abram, born Oct. 10, 1900, in a large transport from Auschwitz. They both have Buchenwald registration (or entry) numbers.

After the liberation in April, a questionnaire is filled out by a Lázár Wiesel who accents his name in the Hungarian style, giving a birth date of Oct. 4, 1928, and this Lazar is listed on the “childrens” transport to France in July. Neither of these Lazar Wiesel’s fit Elie Wiesel with his birth date of Sept. 30, 1928, and now I find his signature doesn’t match either.

 

On the left, Elie Wiesel’s well-known signature; on the right, the signature of Lázár Wiesel (last name is written first).

 

 

I suggest that this signature comparison leaves little doubt that the two men are not the same person. Elie Wiesel is NOT the Lázár Wiesel who was liberated from Buchenwald, or who traveled to France with the “Buchenwald Orphans.”1 The young Lázár Wiesel, born Oct. 4, 1928 according to these Buchenwald documents, and whose name and birth date appear on the transport list of “orphaned children” sent from Germany to France in July 1945 (see #14 on The Documents page) has such a visibly different style of writing from the Elie Wiesel who falsely claims to be on that list,2 that the two cannot be confused.

DATES OF ARREST DON’T MATCH

There is more evidence that they are not the same person in the form of the date of arrest shown on the same questionnaire. The date of arrest of Lázár Wiesel is given as April 16, 1944. That is the same day Samuel Jakobovits was arrested. Samuel and Lázár gave each others name as one of three references on their questionnaires, suggesting they were probably friends, or at least acquaintances, that had arrived at the same time.

Myklos Grüner’s date of arrest on his questionnaire is also 16 April 1944, from the city or surrounding area of Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. This can raise a question about the use of April 16 as some kind of “standard” date used by the military authorities in charge of the questionnaires. However, in his book Stolen Identity, Grüner does specify that on April 14, Hungarian gendarmes evacuated the entire population in the ghettos around the city of Nyiregyhaza, approximately 17,000 people. Six days later, “we too were driven from our homes” in Nyiregyhaza to a “holding area” leading to a railway track with a large loading platform, whereupon they boarded a “goods train.” Their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they would have arrived sometime between April 24 and April 30, 1944 (depending upon how long they stayed in the “holding area” before starting the 3 to 4-day journey).3

By contrast, we know by the authority of Elie Wiesel’s book Night that his family was not arrested on that date. In the “revised and updated” new translation of 2006, Wiesel gives his family’s date of deportation to the “small ghetto” as May 17, 1944. I arrive at this date because Wiesel writes that it was “some two weeks before Shavuot” (Shavuot fell on May 28 in 1944 4) that the deportation order was announced to his family and neighbors. [Remember, Sighet had 90,000 residents, at least one-third of them Jews, while Wiesel makes it sound like he lived in a little village.] Departures were to take place “street by street” starting the next day. That would be May 15. But the Wiesel family was scheduled to leave in the 3^rd group, which left two days later, on May 17. After being marched to the “small ghetto,” they stayed there “a few days.” On a “Saturday,” they boarded trains.5 The 20^th of May, 1944 was a Saturday

Thus, according to official concentration camp documents and Elie Wiesel’s own testimony, we can demonstrate that Lázár Wiesel was arrested approximately one full month prior to Elie Wiesel being arrested. Elie Wiesel is not the Lázár Wiesel of the Buchenwald documents.

Footnotes:

1. Ken Waltzer will present on his book-in-progress, The Rescue of Children and Youth in Buchenwald, at James Madison College on April 11, 2007. In this book, Waltzer explores why, when the U.S. Third Army liberated Buchenwald, April 11, 1945, there were 904 children and youth still alive to be liberated. Among these were Elie Wiesel, a 16-year-old youth from Transylvania, (later Nobel Peace Prize winner) and also Israel Meir Lau, an 8-year-old child from Poland (later Israel Prize winner. http://www.jmc.msu.edu/faculty/show.asp?id=32
2. It may be that Elie Wiesel has not made such claims himself, but they have been made by others to support the thesis that he is the one referred to. These others include Ken Waltzer, director of the Jewish Studies Program at Michigan State University, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
3. Nikolaus Grüner, Stolen Identity, Stockholm, 2005-2006, pg. 18-19
4. “On the second day of Shavuot, 1944 (29 May 1944)” http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Vamospercs/
5. Elie Wiesel, Night, Hill & Wang, New York, 2006, pg.12-21.

The Shadowy Origins of “Night” III

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

by Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2010 Carolyn Yeager

 Part III:  Nine reasons why Elie Wiesel cannot be the author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (And the World Remained Silent).

 1.  The only original source for the existence of an 862-page Yiddish manuscript is Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel’s 1995 memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea is the first time he mentions writing this book in the spring of 1954 on an ocean vessel on his way to Brazil.

In the original English translation of Night, Hill and Wang, 1960, there is no mention of the Yiddish book from whence it came. Nowhere does it name the original version and publication date. There is no preface from the author, only a Foreword by Francois Mauriac who was satisfied to simply call the book a “personal record.”

In his 1979 essay titled “An Interview Unlike Any Other,” Wiesel declares that his first book was written “at the insistence of the French Catholic writer Francois Mauriac” after their first meeting in May 1955. There is no mention in this essay of a Yiddish book, of any length. By “his first book” he obviously meant La Nuit, published in 1958 in France. 38

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Dec.1986, Wiesel doesn’t mention his books, but refers twice to the “Kingdom of Night” that he lived through and once says, “the world did know and remained silent.” So it’s not like he was unaware of this book title. 39

Thus, All Rivers Run appears to be the first mention of the Yiddish origin of Night. Why did Elie Wiesel decide to finally write about And the World Remained Silent in that 1995 memoir? Could it have been because in 1986, after being formally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, he was “reunited” with a fellow concentration camp inmate Myklos Grüner, who, after that meeting, read the book Night that Wiesel had given him, recognized the identity of his camp friend Lazar Wiesel in it, and from that moment began his investigation of who this man named Elie Wiesel really was?

Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity, “My work of research to find Lazar Wiesel born on the 4th  of September 1913 started first in 1987, to establish contact with the Archives of Buchenwald.” 40 He was also writing to politicians and newspapers in Sweden. This could not have failed to attract the notice of Elie Wiesel and his well-developed public relations network. Grüner tracked down Un di Velt Hot Gesvign as the original book from which Night was taken, and believed it was written by his friend Lazar Wiesel and “stolen” somehow by “Elie.”41

This could account for why Elie Wiesel suddenly began to speak and write about his Yiddish book, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1956. (It was actually inserted into the larger Polish collection in late 1954, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica [see part II], and printed as a single book in 1955, with a 1956 publication date.) 42

Wiesel claims the 862-page typescript he handed over to publisher Mark Turkov on the ship docked at Buenos Aires in spring 1954 was never returned to him.43 (Wiesel had not made a copy for himself, and didn’t ask Turkov to make copies and send him one, according to what he wrote in All Rivers.)

The only other person reported to ever have had the typescript in his hands was Mr. Turkov, but there is no word from him about it. We can only say for sure that he published a 245-page volume in Polish Yiddish titled Un di Velt Hot Gesvign by Eliezer Wiesel. The book has no biographical or introductory material—only the author’s name. Eric Hunt has made this Yiddish book available on the Internet 44 and is seeking a reliable translator.

There is practically nothing written about Mark Turkov. You can read about his accomplished family here. He was born in 1904 and died 1983. There is no direct testimony from Mark Turkov, that I have been able to find, that he ever received such a manuscript. Since Turkov lived until 1983 to see the book Night become a world-wide best seller, I find this inexplicable. Did no one seek him out to ask him questions, ask for interviews, take his picture? But at the same time, that becomes understandable if Night was not connected with Un di Velt until after 1986, when Miklos Grüner entered the picture and began asking questions.

We’re left with asking: was there ever an 862 page manuscript? And if not, why does Wiesel say he wrote that many pages?

2.  Wiesel could not have written the 862 pages in the time he says he did.

 According to what he writes in All Rivers, Wiesel’s voyage lasted at most two weeks. Spending all his time in his cabin, cut off from all sources of information, seemingly on the spur of the moment (not pre-planned), he types feverishly and continuously on a portable typewriter (even though he’s written all his other books in long-hand, by his own testimony) and produces 862 typewritten pages without re-reading a single one. That comes out to an average of almost 62 pages daily, for 14 days straight. Is there anyone who could accomplish such a feat?

The scrawny Elie Wiesel is not a superman; he is not even the intense type, but more of a spaced-out thoughtful type. What’s more, he was not even tired out by this marathon effort, but immediately upon the ship docking at Sao Paulo, he became the active spokesman for a group of “homeless” Jews.

Here is a picture of a Yiddish typewriter from the 1950’s.  Notice the red/black ribbon in front of the roller where the paper is inserted.

A point to consider about the typewriter: He would have used up a lot of ribbons typing that many pages. Ribbons are those inked strips of fabric that the metal characters hit to make the black or color impression on the white paper. This is something the computer generation doesn’t know anything about. The ribbons did not last all that long; the characters on the page got lighter as the ribbon was hit again and again; thus he  would have been installing a new one with some regularity. As I recall, replacing the ribbon was not a very fun thing to do. Did he plan on writing day and night, and bring plenty of ribbons with him? Was he able to purchase more ribbons for his particular machine in Brazil?

Another point about the typewriter brought up earlier by a reader: Was Wiesel a fast or slow typist? Many journalists were, and are, two-fingered (hunt and peck) typists because they never took typing classes. Where would Elie Wiesel have learned to type? In the newspaper office? If he was not a full-finger typist, it’s even less likely he could have churned out all those pages. Not to mention that these old typewriters did not allow the ease, and therefore speed, of  our modern keyboard. These are practical questions that help us to ground ourselves in reality.

In addition, this manuscript is said to have been written in the style of a detailed history of the entire process of deportation, detention, people and places, punishments, liberation, yet Wiesel has no reference materials on board ship—only his memory. And since it was nine years since the events had ended, certainly some dulling of his memory had occurred. This simply could not be accomplished in the kind of mad rush Wiesel describes in All Rivers.

3.  Wiesel’s motivation for attempting to write his concentration camp memories when he did is not given and is not apparent.

It’s astonishing that Wiesel gives only one paragraph in his memoir to the entire process of writing this book. He doesn’t write of thinking about it ahead of time. In fact, just at the time of his trip to Brazil he is carrying on a love affair in Paris, as well as being very busy, enthused and ambitious about his journalist assignments. Hanna, his love interest, had proposed marriage to him and he records in All Rivers that it “haunted me during the crossing,” during which time he “was worried sick that I might be making the greatest mistake of my life.”45 Yet, as though a kind of afterthought, he then tells us he spent the entire crossing holed up in his cabin, feverishly writing his very emotionally traumatic “witness” to the holocaust, even though only 9 years of his self-imposed 10-year vow of silence had passed.

In over 100 pages prior to the trip, Wiesel does not mention wanting to write about or even reflecting on his concentration camp year. The only explanation he includes in that paragraph is: “My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation.”46 Then, just as suddenly, when he steps on land in Brazil, he is fully engaged in journalism and Hanna once again. He has given the typescript away and seems to have totally forgotten about it.

4.  Wiesel had no opportunity to edit the 862 pages of And the World Remained Silent to the 245-page published version, yet he says he did.

Wiesel writes in All Rivers, “I had cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition. French publisher Jerome Lindon edited La Nuit down to 178.”47 The time is 1957 and Wiesel is pleased a French publisher has been found for the manuscript he gave to Francois Mauriac—his French translation of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, of which Wiesel says of the latter, “I had already pruned and abridged considerably.” The publisher, Lindon, now “proposed new cuts throughout, leading to significant differences in length among the successive versions.”

He repeats something similar in his Preface to the new 2006 translation of Night:

Though I made numerous cuts, the original Yiddish version still was long.48

He can only mean the 245-page book as the “original Yiddish version”—thus he “made cuts” from the longer version. But Wiesel could not have done it because he never saw the manuscript again after he supposedly gave it to Mark Turkov. He writes of his extremely busy life following the Brazil trip—covering world events as a journalist, spending time in Israel again before considering moving to NYC. He sounds underwhelmed when he reports receiving a copy of the Yiddish book in the mail from Turkov in Dec.1955, and devotes only a couple sentences to it. 49  

Another time he refers to reducing the 245-page Yiddish version into a French version. Speaking of Mauriac:

He was the first person to read Night after I reworked it from the original Yiddish. 50

It is just these kinds of comments that cause the confusion remarked upon by Naomi Siedman in her essay commenting on Jewish rage in Wiesel’s first book. She writes that certain “scholars,” such as Ellen Fine and David Roskies give conflicting reports on the length of Wiesel’s original book, and it’s not clear just which book they are talking about. In my opinion, the reason for all the confusion is that they take Wiesel at his word as an honest witness … perhaps with some memory lapses. They won’t entertain the idea that this is part of a cover-up, the details of which Mr. Wiesel has a hard time keeping straight.

5. Wiesel’s recognized “style” and the style of the Yiddish book are noticeably different.

Not enough is known as yet to non-Yiddish readers like me about the content of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign to make the strongest case for the above statement, but a Jewish critic has provided some passages from the Yiddish book and I will quote from her (except for one passage from Joachim Neander). Naomi Siedman, in her long essay cited above, says this:

For the Yiddish reader, Eliezer Wiesel’s memoir was one among many, valuable for its contributing an account of what was certainly an unusual circumstance among East European Jews: their ignorance, as late as the spring of 1944, of the scale and nature of the Germans’ genocidal intentions. 51

In other words, holocaust narratives had already developed a “Yiddish genre” and the Wiesel memoir fit in with them. She explains:

When Un di velt had been published in 1956, it was volume 117 of Turkov’s series, which included more than a few Holocaust memoirs. The first pages of the Yiddish book provide a list of previous volumes (a remarkable number of them marked “Sold out”), and the book concludes with an advertisement/review for volumes 95-96 of the series, Jonas Turkov’s Extinguished Stars. In praising this memoir, the reviewer implicitly provides us with a glimpse of the conventions of the growing genre of Yiddish Holocaust memoir. Among the virtues of Turkov’s work, the reviewer writes, is its comprehensiveness, the thoroughness of its documentation not only of the genocide but also, of its victims.

[…]

Thus, whereas the first page of Night succinctly and picturesquely describes Sighet as “that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood,” Un di velt introduces Sighet as “the most important city [shtot] and the one with the largest Jewish population in the province of Marmarosh,” and also  “Until, the First World War, Sighet belonged to Austro-Hungary. Then it became part of Romania. In 1940, Hungary acquired it again.” 52

The Yiddish book has a different “feel” to it from Night; not only a different style, but a different personality is behind it. Ms. Seidman told E.J. Kessler, editor of The Forward:

The two stories can be reconciled in strict terms,” she said, “but they still give two totally different impressions, one of a person who’s desperate to speak versus one who’s reluctant.53

Here is a translation by Dr. Joachim Neander of a key passage in the Yiddish book, which he posted on the CODOH  forum. It reveals an informal, talkative style, totally different from the spare, literary style used by Wiesel in all his books, even though the storyline is basically the same. Wiesel says he edited this book to its published form, but it doesn’t sound like him.

On January 15, my right foot began to swell. Probably from the cold. I felt horrible pain. I could not walk a few steps. I went to the hospital. The doctor examined the swollen foot and said: It must be operated. If you will wait longer, he said, your toes will have to be cut off and then the whole foot will have to be amputated. That was all I needed! Even in normal times, I was afraid of surgery. Because of the blood. Because of bodily pain. And now – under these circumstances! Indeed, we had really great doctors in the camp. The most famous specialists from Europe. But the means they had to their disposition were poor, miserable. The Germans were not interested in curing sick prisoners. Just the opposite.
If it had been dependent on me, I would not have agreed to the operation. I would have liked to wait. But it did not depend on me. I was not asked at all. The doctor decided to operate, and that was it. The choice was in his hands, not in mine. I really felt a little bit of joy in my heart that he had decided upon me.54

Back to Siedman’s translations. Two examples will have to suffice, from the Dedication and the very last paragraphs.

… while the French memoir is dedicated “in memory of my parents and of my little sister, Tsipora,” the Yiddish names both victims and perpetrators: “This book is dedicated to the eternal memory of my mother Sarah, father Shlomo, and my little sister Tsipora — who were killed by the German murderers.” 55

Now the book’s ending in the Yiddish version:

Three days after liberation I became very ill; food-poisoning. They took me to the hospital and the doctors said that I was gone. For two weeks I lay in the hospital between life and death. My situation grew worse from day to day.

One fine day I got up — with the last of my energy — and went over to the mirror that was hanging on the wall. I wanted to see myself. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the mirror a skeleton gazed out. Skin and bones. I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened. Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it. And then — I fainted. From that moment on my health began to improve. I stayed in bed for a few more days, in the course of which I wrote the outline of the book you are holding in your hand, dear reader.

But — Now, ten years after Buchenwald, I see that the world is forgetting. Germany is a sovereign state, the German army has been reborn. The bestial sadist of Buchenwald, Ilsa Koch, is happily raising her children. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased. Forgotten. Germans and anti-Semites persuade the world that the story of the six million Jewish martyrs is a fantasy, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day.

So I thought it would be a good idea to publish a book based on the notes I wrote in Buchenwald. I am not so naive to believe that this book will change history or shake people’s beliefs. Books no longer have the power they once had. Those who were silent yesterday will also be silent tomorrow. I often ask myself, now, ten years after Buchenwald: Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it? 56

In contrast, Night ends with the gaze into the mirror at the very beginning of this passage. If the smashing of the mirror and the renewed will to live he felt from it was Elie Wiesel’s own experience, why would he leave it out in La Nuit? Because the publisher wanted it out? Not at all likely. Mauriac? Doubtful. It’s much more likely that it was not Elie Wiesel’s experience and it was not the kind of story he felt he could or wanted to tell.

Also note that the Yiddish writer says he wrote the outline of the book while still in the Buchenwald hospital, and that the published book is based on those notes. Elie Wiesel has never suggested that he began any writing in Buchenwald.

6. Wiesel wrote only one book in Yiddish; all subsequent books are in French.

If we could ask Elie Wiesel why he wrote his concentration camp memoirs in Yiddish, when he was already fluent and writing in French, we would probably get the answer he gave to his friend Jack Kolbert, who was writing a book about him:

“I wrote my first book, Night, in Yiddish, a tribute to the language of those communities that were killed. I began writing it in 1955. I felt I needed ten years to collect words and the silence in them.” 57

Alright. But we should also ask, just how good was Wiesel’s written Yiddish, that he could write this “enormous tome” in such a short time? After Nov. 29, 1947, Wiesel sought out and was given a job with the Irgun Yiddish weekly in Paris called Zion in Kamf. He tells how he was put to work translating Hebrew into Yiddish.

The task was far from easy. I read Hebrew well and spoke fluent Yiddish, but my Germanized written Yiddish wasn’t good. My style was dry and lifeless, and the meaning seemed to wander off into byways lined with dead trees. That was not surprising, since I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar and its vast, rich literature.58

Even though he continued to translate and eventually write for the paper, he also spoke and wrote otherwise in French. He was attending classes at the Sorbonne and reading French classics and the newer existentialists. Following this first and only Yiddish book, Wiesel has done all his writing in French, by his own account—and in longhand, while the Yiddish was written on a typewriter.

It’s hard to reconcile Wiesel’s professed love of Yiddish 59 with his failure to do any writing beyond Un di Velt in that language. It’s suggested it is because Yiddish readers are a diminishing breed. No doubt, but that was already the case in 1954. For what it’s worth, Myklos Gruner records that when he met Elie Wiesel at their pre-arranged encounter in Stockholm in 1986, he asked Elie if he would like to speak in “Jewish,” and Elie said “no.” They ended up speaking together in English.60 Wiesel seems to have no interest in keeping the language alive.

7.  Wiesel gives contradictory dates for the writing of his first book, and is fuzzy about what his “first book” is.

Wiesel makes it definite in All Rivers that he wrote the Yiddish book in the spring of 1954, in a cabin of a ship going to Brazil. But around the year 2000 he tells his friend Jack Kolbert:

It took me 10 years before I felt I was ready to do it. I wrote my first book, Night, in Yiddish, a tribute to the language of those communities that were killed. I began writing it in 1955. I felt I needed ten years to collect words and the silence in them. 61

So, is it 1954 or 1955?  Wiesel says in All Rivers he met Francois Mauriac in May 1955, one year after his Brazil trip. Mauriac is often credited as the one who convinced Wiesel to end his silence, which culminated in Night. In his 1979 essay, “An Interview Unlike Any Other,” Wiesel writes:

Ten years of preparation, ten years of silence. It was thanks to Francois Mauriac that, released from my oath, I could begin to tell my story aloud. I owe him much, as do many other writers whose early efforts he encouraged. But in my case, something totally different and far more essential than literary encouragement was involved. That I should say what I had to say, that my voice be heard, was as important to him as it was to me.

[…]

(H)e urged me to write, in a display of trust that may have been meant to prove that it is sometimes given to men with nothing in common, not even suffering, to transcend themselves.62

He also wrote, in the same essay on the next page (17):

 Paris 1954. As correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, I was trying to move heaven and earth to obtain an interview with Pierre Mendes-France, who had just won his wager by ending the Indochina war. Unfortunately, he rarely granted interviews, choosing instead to reach the public with regular talks on the radio. Ignoring my explanations, my employer in Tel Aviv was bombarding me with progressively more insistent cabled reminders, forcing me to persevere, hoping for a miracle, but without much conviction. One day I had an idea. Knowing the admiration the Jewish Prime Minister bore the illustrious Catholic member of the Academie, why not ask the one to introduce me to the other? The occasion presented itself. I attended a reception at the Israeli Embassy. Francois Mauriac was there. Overcoming my almost pathological shyness, I approached him, and in the professional tone of a reporter, requested an interview. It was granted graciously and at once.

Wiesel continues the confusion around ’54 and ’55 when interviewed by the American Academy of Achievement on June 29, 1996 in Sun Valley, Idaho.63 In answer to the question “What persuaded you to break that silence?” he replied:

Oh, I knew ten years later I would do something. I had to tell the story. I was a young journalist in Paris. I wanted to meet the Prime Minister of France for my paper. He was, then, a Jew called Mendès-France. But he didn’t offer to see me. I had heard that the French author François Mauriac […] was his teacher. So I would go to Mauriac, the writer, and I would ask him to introduce me to Mendès-France. […]

Pierre Mendes-France became Prime Minister on June 18, 1954; his hold on that office ended on Jan. 20, 1955. Wiesel, according to his autobiography, had returned from Brazil, after writing and giving his 862-page Yiddish manuscript to Mark Turkov, expressly to cover the inauguration of France’s new Prime Minister for his Israeli newspaper.64 In this case, Wiesel’s first meeting with Mauriac had to be some time after mid-June 1954, since Mendes-France is already Prime Minister; it couldn’t have been in May or June 1955 because Mendes-France was long out of office. But in All Rivers, he puts his first Mauriac meeting in May 1955: “I first saw Mauriac in 1955 during an Independence Day celebration at the Israeli embassy.”(p.258) Israel’s Independence Day is May 14. Wiesel says the interview with Mauriac he obtained from that meeting resulted in his writing La Nuit and sending it to Mauriac one year later, in 1956. He continues describing that meeting to the Academy interviewer:

I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He (Mauriac) ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. […] And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, “You know, maybe you should talk about it.”

He took me to the elevator and embraced me. And that year, the tenth year, I began writing my narrative. After it was translated from Yiddish into French, I sent it to him.

Wiesel says “the tenth year,” which would be 1955, but in the earlier part of the interview he is referring to 1954—because of Mendes-France. Snce he is mixing up the date, it’s no wonder we find the same mis-dating in stories about Wiesel’s life and accomplishments in books and on the Internet, including on Wikipedia pages.

Whenever it was that Wiesel had that fateful visit with Mauriac, he clearly did not mention that he had already written a very long Yiddish memoir, whether a year or a couple of months earlier. But had he written anything yet? Mauriac never alludes to a first Yiddish text. And as stated before, Wiesel himself didn’t either, until his 1995 memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea. This is truly noteworthy. Also, the title Un di Velt Hot Gesvign or, in English, And the World Remained Silent does not appear on the long list of “books by Elie Wiesel” at the beginning of All Rivers or the 2006 translation of Night.

To clarify an important problem Wiesel faces here: Wiesel, prior to 1990, claims to have first met and interviewed Mauriac in the spring of 1954 after returning from Brazil, but later changed it to May or June 1955. But even after that, he sometimes reverted to the 1954 scenario. When you are inventing all or parts of your life story, it’s difficult to keep it straight, especially when your guard is down.

A likely reason is his need to fit the writing and publication of the Yiddish book into his “schedule”, something he had not considered, or just ignored, previous to the Yiddish book being brought to the attention of the world by Myklos Grüner .

   

8.  There are striking differences between Night, his “true story” derived from the Yiddish book, and his autobiography All Rivers Run to the Sea.

If Night is a true account of Wiesel’s holocaust experience, how to explain such major differences in the key passages that are compared below. In the first book it is his foot, in the latter his knee that is operated on right before the 1945 evacuation of Auschwitz.

Toward the middle of January, my right foot began to swell because of the cold. I was unable to put it on the ground. I went to have it examined. The doctor, a great Jewish doctor, a prisoner like ourselves, was quite definite: I must have an operation! If we waited, the toes—and perhaps the whole leg—would have to be amputated. .65

[…]

The doctor came to tell me that the operation would be the next day […] The operation lasted an hour.66

The doctor told him he would stay in the hospital for two weeks, until he was completely recovered. The sole of his foot had been full of pus; they just had to open the swelling. But, two days after his operation there was a rumor going round the camp that the Red Army was advancing on Buna. Not able to decide whether to stay in the hospital or join the evacuation, he left to look for his father.

“My wound was open and bleeding; the snow had grown red where I had trodden.” That night his “foot felt as if it were burning.” In the morning, he “tore up a blanket and wrapped my wounded foot in it.” 67

He and his father decided to leave. That night they marched out. They were forced to run much of the night and he ran on that foot, causing great pain. But after that he doesn’t mention it again. By contrast, in All Rivers, it is not his foot, but his knee that is operated on!

January 1945. Every January carried me back to that one. I was sick. My knee was swollen, and the pain turned my gait into a limp. […] That evening before roll call, I went to the KB. My father waited for me outside […] At last my turn came. A doctor glanced at my knee, touched it. I stifled a scream. “You need an operation,” he said. “Immediately.” […] One of the doctors, a tall, kind-looking man, tried to comfort me. “It won’t hurt, or not much anyway. Don’t worry, my boy, you’ll live.” He talked to me before the operation, and I heard him again when I woke up.” 68

[…]

January 18, 1945. The Red Army is a few kilometers from Auschwitz. […] My father came to see me in the hospital. I told him the patients would be allowed to stay in the KB […] and he could stay with me […] but, finally, we decided to leave with the others, especially since most of the doctors were being evacuated too.69

No further mention of the knee. How can we account for this bizarre change from foot to knee? It seems that as weak as Wiesel presents himself to be at Buna, he could not himself believe that he could run around on a foot that had just been operated on for pus in the sole, with no protection. So he simply changed it to his knee.

The next passage is after the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. In Night:

Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread.

And even when we were no longer hungry, there was still no one who thought of revenge. On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.

Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald I became very ill with food poisoning. I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.70

In All Rivers, Wiesel changes the story. He writes:

A soldier threw us some cans of food. I caught one and opened it. It was lard, but I didn’t know that.71 Unbearably hungry—I had not eaten since April 5—I stared at the can and was about to taste its contents, but just as my tongue touched it I lost consciousness.

I spent several days in the hospital (the former SS hospital) in a semiconscious state. When I was discharged, I felt drained. It took all my mental resources to figure out where I was. I knew my father was dead. My mother was probably dead ….. 72

 

From two weeks to only several days spent in the hospital. Could this change have anything to do with the famous “Buchenwald survivor” photograph73 that Elie discovered himself in sometime after 1980, when he was actively seeking a Nobel Prize? If he were in the hospital “between life and death” for two weeks following April 14 or so, he could not be in that photograph taken on April 16. The author of And the World Remained Silent, whoever he is, never claimed to be in that photograph.

9.  Elie Wiesel refuses to back up his authorship by showing his tattoo.

If Elie Wiesel is the man who wrote Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, the source of the world-famous Night—the same man who wrote about receiving the tattoo number A7713 at Auschwitz in 1944—why won’t he show us this tattoo on his arm?  And why do we see video of his left forearm with no tattoo visible at all? Wiesel could so easily clear up this problem, but he doesn’t choose to do so.

Endnotes:

38)   Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, Vintage Books, 1979, 260 pg.

39)  http://worldsgreatestenglishclass.com/media/ww2/19EWSpeech.pdf

40)  Stolen Identity, p. 50

41)   Ibid, p. 43.   Grüner mentions the 862 pages twice, but not with proof of their existence. “… Lazar Wiesel’s manuscript […] tell us his story and covers his survival of the Holocaust in 862 pages.” Also, “… had to use Lazar’s false identity in Paris and his existing manuscript of 862 pages …”

42)  All Rivers, p. 277. “In December (1955) I received from Buenos Aires the first copy of my Yiddish testimony And the World Stayed Silent,” which I had finished on the boat to Brazil.”

43)   Ibid.

44)  http://rapidshare.com/files/441835370/Elie-Wiesel-Night-Yiddish.pdf

45)   All Rivers, p. 239

46)    Ibid, p. 240

47)    Ibid, p. 319

48)  Night, p. x

49)  All Rivers, p. 277

50)   Ibid. p. 267

51)   Siedman, “Jewish Rage”

52)   Ibid.

53)  “The Rage that Elie Wiesel Edited Out of Night,” E.J. Kessler, ‘The Forward‘, October 4, 1996

54)    http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6146

55)    Siedman, “Jewish Rage,” (trans. from Un di Velt)

56)  Ibid. (Un di Velt, 244-45)

57)  Jack Kolbert, The Worlds of Elie Wiesel: An Overview of His Career and His Major Themes,  Susquehanna University Press, Selinsgrove, PA, 2001, p. 29

58)    All Rivers, p.163

59)    Ibid. p.291-92

60)    Stolen Identity, p.31

61)    Kolbert, p. 29

62)    “An Interview Unlike Any Other,” Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York, 1979), p.16

63)    http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/wie0int-3

64)    All Rivers, p. 242: “I had been away for two months when Dov recalled me to Paris to cover Pierre Mendes-France’s accession to power. I flew back …”  This had to be in June 1954.

65)  Night, p.82

66)    Ibid. p.83

67)    Ibid. p.87

68)    All Rivers, p.89-90

69)    Ibid. p.91

70)    Night, p.115-16

71)    Why would soldiers throw cans of lard? Sounds terribly disorganized and irregular. How did he open the can? If he didn’t know it was lard, and lost consciousness before he tasted it, we must assume someone in the hospital told him after he regained consciousness that he had been holding a can of lard when he was brought in. Either that or it’s just made up.

72)    All Rivers, p.97

73)    http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/buchenwald

Is Elie Wiesel a perjurer?

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

By Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel stated under oath while giving testimony in the trial of Eric Hunt in San Francisco, California in July 2008 that the number A7713 was tattooed on his left arm. (see Where is the Tattoo? on this site)

Wiesel should have been asked to show his tattoo to the court at that time, but he wasn’t. This was a failure of the defense, for sure. But obviously, at that time, Mr. Hunt, the defendant, was not questioning whether Elie Wiesel had been an inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Since then, Mr. Hunt and others have uncovered video photography of Wiesel’s bare left arm from all angles, leaving no reasonable doubt that no tattoo is there. Backing up this conclusion is the fact that Wiesel has also famously refused to ever show his tattoo when requested to do so. For those who will retaliate that Wiesel may have had the tattoo removed, he said as late as March 25, 2010 that he still had the number A7713 on his arm. (see Where is the Tattoo?)

From this, the average man on the street would probably agree that Elie Wiesel has committed perjury (a criminal offense) if he does not indeed have the number tattooed on his arm. The law, according to http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p032.htm,  says:

When a person, having taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any case in which a law of the U.S. authorizes an oath to be administered, that he will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or certificate by him subscribed, is true, willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; (18 USC )

In order for a person to be found guilty of perjury the government must prove: the person testified under oath before [e.g., the grand jury]; at least one particular statement was false; and the person knew at the time the testimony was false.

However, in practice, the question of materiality is crucial. Perjury is defined at Criminal-law.freeadvice.com as:

the “willful and corrupt taking of a false oath in regard to a material matter in a judicial proceeding.” It is sometimes called “lying under oath;” that is, deliberately telling a lie in a courtroom proceeding after having taken an oath to tell the truth. It is important that the false statement be material to the case at hand—that it could affect the outcome of the case. It is not considered perjury, for example, to lie about your age, unless your age is a key factor in proving the case.

So the question becomes:  Was the status of Elie Wiesel as a survivor of at least a seven-month incarceration at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944-45, in which case he would certainly have been tattooed on his left arm, as he states himself, material to the guilt or innocence of Eric Hunt in light of the charges that had been brought against him? Certainly, Eric Hunt, not long out of college at the time and who had been assigned to read Night in school, had come to doubt the truth of Wiesel’s assertions and descriptions in the book, and believed that if he could confront Wiesel alone, unguarded, he could convince him to tell the truth.

Does the suspicion that Wiesel necessarily lied in his book Night about what he saw and experienced at Auschwitz-Birkenau because he lied about the existence of a tattoo which he has always claimed as proof of his credentials as an Auschwitz survivor, exonerate Eric Hunt from some of the charges brought against him by the State of California? Is it material to the case? Perhaps not, but it does show cause for Eric Hunt’s desire to speak to Elie Wiesel in an unguarded moment, which was what he was attempting to do.

If Elie Wiesel cannot be legally found guilty of perjury because of questions of materiality, he will certainly be guilty of perjury in the eyes of the public if he does not produce the famous tattoo A-7713 on his arm—the sooner the better. We are waiting, Mr. Wiesel.

Watch a new, short video on the subject.

Addendum:

”Auschwitz survivor Sam Rosenzweig displays his identification tattoo.” From Wikipedia   According to the information below, this man was in the “regular” series—numbers not preceeded with a letter of the alphabet. Note also that the tattoo is on the outside of the left forearm.

This is the best looking tattoo I could find on the Internet. If you want to have your faith in the Auschwitz Holocaust story badly shaken, google “Auschwitz tattoos” (or any variation thereof) – Images,  and see what comes up. Frightening! Of the little that is there, most look like the numbers are way too big, and you find the same few people exhibiting their specimen.

However … George Rosenthal, Trenton, NJ, an Auschwitz Survivor, has written an “authoritative” account at Jewish Virtual Library  based on “documents” obtained from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Sorry, no pictures here either, or on the USHMM website.  Elie Wiesel was a major driving force in the creationof the USHMM; why didn’t he volunteer his tattoo to be pictured on their website as an example of what a genuine tattoo looks like? Why does the USHMM have no images of a tattoo?)

Mr. Rosenthal writes:

The sequence according to which serial numbers were issued evolved over time. The numbering scheme was divided into “regular,” AU, Z, EH, A, and B series’. The “regular” series consisted of a consecutive numerical series that was used, in the early phase of the Auschwitz concentration camp, to identify Poles, Jews, and most other prisoners (all male). This series was used from May 1940-January 1945, although the population that it identified evolved over time. Following the introduction of other categories of prisoners into the camp, the numbering scheme became more complex. The “AU” series denoted Soviet prisoners of war, while the “Z” series (with the “Z” standing for the German word for Gypsy, Zigeuner) designated the Romany. These identifying letters preceded the tattooed serial numbers after they were instituted. “EH” designated prisoners that had been sent for “reeducation” (Erziehungshäftlinge).

In May 1944, numbers in the “A” series and the “B” series were first issued to Jewish prisoners, beginning with the men on May 13th and the women on May 16th. The “A” series was to be completed with 20,000; however an error led to the women being numbered to 25,378 before the “B” series was begun. The intention was to work through the entire alphabet with 20,000 numbers being issued in each letter series. In each series, men and women had their own separate numerical series, ostensibly beginning with number 1.

According to this, since there was never a “C” series, the maximum number of prisoners that could have been tattooed after May 1944 was 45,378.

Under “Notes” at the bottom of the page, four books are listed, all by holocaust historians. Are these the “documents” referred to? It also says Source: Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the very bottom of the page, as if referring to the entire page. This Center is located at the University of Minnesota. The affiliated faculty reveals mostly Jewish names.

I report all this because I’m looking for authoritative sources for the exact placement of the tattoos on the left arm, but one doesn’t find that answer even at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum. Why all the uncertainty? Could it be because so many pseudo-survivors have tattooed themselves in unusual ways and places, and the authorities don’t want to nullify their legitimacy?