One fact proves more than any other that “Night” is a work of fiction

Friday, June 9th, 2017

By Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel wrote two ‘official’ accounts of his 1944-45 concentration camp experience: his novel Night (1958) and his official autobiography (Part One), All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995). Thirty-seven years separate these two publications.

Three articles written by me in 2011 (and here) and 2012 contain information that demonstrate conclusively that Night is not a true account of the experience Wiesel may have had with his family at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Night is written for “effect” and to be a gripping father-son drama that rises to the standards of a literary work of art. Night cannot, therefore, be called Wiesel’s testimony – a claim he made on several occasions.

Because a lot of information was conveyed in these three articles – a lot of details were covered, and I had other purposes in mind – this crucial fact easily gets lost to the reader’s attention. In this article I will zero in on this “crucial evidence” in order to make it crystal clear why Night can only be considered a work of fiction and Elie’s autobiography “All Rivers …” is the place to go for Elie’s ‘true’ account of his experience.

The main evidence I want to put up front is the agreed upon birth date of Elie’s grandmother Nisel Bash Wiesel, mother of Shlomo and Mendel and four daughters. In 1957, Yaakov Fishkovitz filled out a Yad Vashem Page of Testimony (PoT) for his aunt Nisel, stating she was born in 1881 in Chust, Romania and died at Auschwitz in 1944. In 1999, Eliezer Shlomovitz, living in Los Angeles CA at the time, also filled out a PoT for Yad Vashem giving his grandmother’s birth year as 1880, with a question mark. Elie Wiesel never filled out a form for his grandmother, whom he wrote he was very close to, nor for his mother or sister, but only one for his father.

Why Grandma Nisel’s birth date is so important

A birth date of 1880-81 makes Grandmother Nisel 63 or 64 years old in 1944, a figure agreed upon by Hilda Wiesel. However, the story line in Night, accepted as factual by writers, journalists and Internet sources like Wikipedia, gives Father’s age as 50 in 1944, which, if true, would mean grandmother Nisel was only 13 or 14 years old when she gave birth to Shlomo, her third child, and only 11 or 12 at most when she gave birth to her first child. Such a shockingly young age is not in the tradition of Hasidic Judaism to which the Wiesels’ belonged.

In the scene in Night when the family arrives at Birkenau around midnight, Father tells a fellow prisoner who questions him that he is 50 years old and the prisoner urges him to say he is younger. Similarly Eliezer says he is “not quite 15” and is told to make himself older. He subsequently answers “eighteen” when questioned by the guard (or Mengele?). Both men are passed on through. From this, and apparently this alone, the default birth date for Shlomo Wiesel became 1894 and no one, including Elie, ever questioned or corrected that. However, Elie slyly left blank the date of birth on the Yad Vashem PoT he filled out for his father in 2004, and he never offered a birth date for either of his parents.

Wiesel adds 10 years to Father-son age difference in Night

In 1957, Yaakov Fishkovitz also filled out a Yad Vashem PoT for his cousins Shlomo and Mendel Wiesel, giving their dates of birth as 1903 and 1905 respectively. These are probably correct because it makes their mother Nisel age 22 or 23 when Shlomo, her third child, was born, and age 24-5 when Mendel, her fifth, was born.

So why did Elie, in writing Night, make Father 50 years old instead of his real father’s age of 41? Answer: To make the  theme of a role reversal between father and son more dramatic, of course. To deepen the loneliness felt by the boy watching his worn-out father break down under the cold, uncaring death machine perpetrated by the evil German Nazis. To write the most heart-breaking story he could!

For the same reason, his 10-year old sister became seven years old and he even made himself a year younger (14 going on 15 instead of 15 going on 16).

It couldn’t be more clear that his purpose in writing Night was different than his purpose for All Rivers, which attempts to give a record of his early life and actual family history. In fact, while Wiesel writes pretty extensively about his grandmother Nisel, who even accompanied the family to Auschwitz in All Rivers – she doesn’t appear at all in Night. He left her out as extraneous to his tightly-constructed narrative, the purpose of which was not to tell it as it really happened.

Summing up

So when the facts diverge between the two books, as they often do, go with All Rivers as the more accurate version. For example, in Night, Eliezer is in the hospital at Birkenau in January 1945 with an infected foot. In All Rivers, he tells the very same story but it is not his foot at all, but his knee that is operated on! If there is any truth to the story, which can be considered doubtful, accept that it was his knee. (I think Elie, or one of his Night editors, liked the dramatic image of leaving a trail of red blood in the snow, so what the heck, just change knee to foot!)

To sum up, Wiesel’s willingness to change important details about his family, and his own major experiences, tells us that creating a “true account” of their year of internment was not his goal. For him, no different from most survivors who write memoirs, he preferred what was “true in his mind.” Or, in other words, what made for a better and hopefully more successful book.

Survivor stories are a genre that prove the “Holocaust” is a Jewish hoax

Sunday, April 24th, 2016

By Carolyn Yeager

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN a survivor story that passes the test of truth and accuracy – not one! Isn’t that amazing? They are all filled with exaggerations and downright lies. And that really tells us something, because “the Holocaust” is in actuality nothing more than a collection of survivor stories. I am not an expert in revisionist historiography, but I think I can say with confidence that no scientific/forensic evidentiary support for a “Holocaust” exists. Documentary support is both sparse and dependent on questionable or uncertain interpretations. That leaves us with witness accounts from those who were in the concentration and work camps to tell us what “the Holocaust” was.

It’s been known for a long time that eye-witnesses are the least reliable evidence for what really happened in any given situation. Forensic evidence is the best, and even circumstantial evidence is superior to eye-witnesses. The stories that were told by false eye-witnesses in 1945-46 were outlandish compared to what we believe today. Far-fetched and grotesque accusations of sadistic methods of killing were made against camp authorities and guards and then soberly reported in the world’s news outlets. The remaining leaders of National-Socialist Germany were executed by hanging after being found guilty by an unlawful tribunal of war victors without so much as a peep heard against it in the mainstream media of the time. With the help of the Internet and revisionist historians, we have come a long way since then in using our critical judgment when it comes to blatant atrocity propaganda. Now I think it’s time to encourage even more and tougher critical thinking about the stories survivors have told and are still telling.

There are certain elements all the stories have – that’s why they’re a genre.  They’re almost all written by Jews. They describe awful conditions in the camps with more generalization than specifics, ie. barracks, food, work, supervision, guards and, of course, Dr. Mengele if they were at Auschwitz-Birkenau. One common observation made by those who arrived by train at Birkenau is that they saw in the distance smoke and flames coming out of the crematorium chimney. Sometimes there was a bad odor. It is known by people educated in these matters that cremation does not create smoke or odor, and that flames cannot leap out of a chimney unless it is dangerously malfunctioning. But enjoinders to stop contradicting the laws of nature and science make no impression on these story-tellers. They are following a higher law of “Never Again,” which makes lying permissible and the impossible possible. I’ve come up with the word ‘surlievor’ for them, which I’ll use from here on.

With this introduction in mind, let’s look at Paul Argiewicz’ story again. I wrote about this man last week and tried to stress two major points: his lies about his birth date and about being in the Famous Buchenwald Lieberation Photo. But when I read fully through the Oral History he did with the Wisconsin Veteran’s History Museum, I discovered a few more major problems in his story. Using the critical method on Paul’s Story will show us why all surlievor stories are just that — stories so fictionalized that they are  totally unreliable as history. They are meant to propagandize, and they do, but for most who read them, they also serve as  entertainment in the widest sense.

The real Paul Argiewicz

If you read the above-mentioned oral history interview and then read Paul’s obituary placed in his hometown newspaper you find some very different facts in the places where it counts most. For more than a decade before his death at age 88, Argiewicz was known as a regular out-patient at the veterans hospital near where he lived. The personnel there, along with the U.S. Social Security Agency, the Veteran’s Administration, and other agencies he dealt with, had his correct date of birth. That’s why his obituary gives it correctly as 1925. Then there’s a newspaper report (also here) of a 2010 presentation he made to a high school group that is different still. I have not read the biography written by Deanne Joseph, but I know that she fictionalizes his story too.  I’m sure the “Oral History” from the year 2000 is more revealing than the story written by a professional writer hoping for a best-seller – or at least a good seller able to fulfill the curriculum needs at thousands of middle schools. In this interview at least, the real Paul Argiewicz does come through.

Some trivia: Even though the interview took place in 2000, it was not transcribed until 2008-09. The book by Deanne Joseph also came out in 2008. Katy Marty transcribed the interview; it was corrected by Channing Welch, after which the corrected copy was typed by Katy Marty. Since the interviewer James (Jim) McIntosh and Argiewicz talked over each other fairly often, it’s evident these ladies did a commendable job.

Sheryl Erdman Argiewicz, Paul’s wife, is present and says something from time to time. Right in the beginning Paul says, “Why don’t I have my wife with me?” and Mrs. A, who is apparently not seated just right next to him, says, “No just do it on your own honey.” Then she added, “I’ll just prompt you when you forget, alright?” And several times she answers questions for him.

At the time of the recording, they have been married four years. Paul is 75 years old. This is important because, from what he says later in the interview, he didn’t began to speak about being a holocaust surlievor until after they married in July 1996 when he was age 71. His first wife had died and he began looking for another. He said of Sheryl, “She was available,” but not in a derogatory way. He was clearly very dependent on her.

The revelation that, like so many others, he didn’t talk about the holocaust until after Schindler’s List became a big hit in 1993 and Hollywood made being a surlievor fashionable, puts the biggest question mark around Argiewicz, to my mind. Surlievor “meet groups” cropped up at that time wherever there were a lot of retired Jews. They got together and told their stories to each other, while Stephen Spielberg got the idea to tape record and archive as many surlievor stories as possible – thousands of them! [Thanks to Eric Hunt, we have been able to see a lot of them and can easily recognize the nutty things and enormous lies  so many of them tell.] It sure appears it was Paul’s new wife that encouraged him to “go on the speakers circuit” as a holocaust surlievor. In fact, Sheryl’s daughter Cindy is one of the biggest boosters of her father-in-law’s story.

13 Major problems in Paul’s one-on-one interview

1.  He didn’t speak publicly about being a holocaust survivor until he was in his 70’s, after remarrying in 1996.

Page 56:  MR. A: And we knew each other [his current wife Sheryl]. And she turned a lot in my life, a big change in my life. Literally, I couldn’t talk to you. Like you would ask me today about the interview what you give me. I would never give it to you. I would walk out.

JIM: Too tight?

MR. A: I was so tight I would walk out. I just, I just didn’t work. And this lady here made about face. She opened me and I became –

Unfortunately a major interruption occurs at this point and he doesn’t get back to it. But he’s telling us he never spoke about it and it is Jim who puts the words “too tight” in Paul’s mouth. Jim is very often doing this, or finishing Paul’s sentences, and Paul just accepts the word Jim gives him. Not what should happen in something billed as an Oral History

2. Claims he was born in 1933, when his actual birth date is 1925.

Page 6:   MR. A: I was born in Bielsko, Poland.

JIM: Boy, you better spell that one.

Mr. A. B-i-e-l-s-k-o, Poland.

JIM: When?

MR. A: In 1933.

JIM: ’33?

MR. A: Yeah.

This is pretty ridiculous because he makes himself 8 years younger when, according to his own story, he should be 5 years younger. Jim even gave him an opportunity to change it, yet Paul stuck with 1933 and his wife didn’t correct him. In a speech to a Jewish group I just happened to see on Youtube yesterday, he said: ‘In 1939 I was 10 years old,’ making his birth in 1929. So you see how it moves around.

3. Claims he was 10 years old when his family moved to the Sosnowiec ghetto, which would have been in 1943  according to the birth date he gives. And his wife answers for him.

Page 8:  MR. A: First I got into ghetto in Sosnowiec.

JIM: Age? Your age?

MRS. A: Ten, when you went in the ghetto.

MR. A: In the ghetto I was ten.

Sheryl apparently didn’t trust him to tell it right, or maybe he paused. But the timing is way off , showing that they don’t seem to get it that his dates are not aligned. Nor do they consider whether one part of his story fits with another part further on. If he was born in 1933, he was 10 in 1943. The Sosnowiec ghetto was liquidated in 1943, with the inhabitants being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The real Paul Argiewicz was 18 years old in 1943!

4. Claims he was only 11 years old when “arrested by the Nazis”.  But what year is it? He never tells us the year, only his age.

Page 9:  MR. A: Okay, and we were in that ghetto for almost a year.

JIM: Your family?

MR. A: My whole family.

The Sosnowiec ghetto was formed over time, from 1940 to 1943, with transfers of Jews from the surrounding areas. According to the Wikipedia page (which is really useless) it wasn’t “closed off” until March 10, 1943. The real Paul Argiewicz was 11 years old in 1936 – that’s a long way from living in the ghetto. One has to doubt his entire “arrest for stealing bread” story and conclude he was simply deported to Auschwitz with the rest of his family in 1943.

5. Claims he told the SS officer in charge that he was 18 and was believed.

Page 10:  MR. A: And a guy behind me kicked me in the shin and said to me in Jewish he said to me, “Say to him that you are 18.” And I was almost, I was just about eleven years old. But I was very husky built and strong. [He was a short person with a baby face. A minor problem here is that Paul says further on that he only learned Jewish in the camps but he understood this guy talking to him in “Jewish”, meaning Yiddish.]

MR. A: I said, “Eighteen.” I became instantly eighteen years of age. [Funny that in 1943 he really was 18 years old!]

JIM: Here, here

MR. A: So from the beginning you had your name and they kept your address, whatever it was. They sent me to a camp, what it was actually an “arbeitslager”, a work camp and we were working on the Autobahn.

So he gave his address, he says. It’s possible he was sent to work on the Autobahn at first, since he was the right age – 18.  Strangely, his surviving sister Lucy, around his age, has said nothing one way or the other [maybe she doesn’t want to contradict her brother], although her husband tells of his experiences after the Germans crossed into Poland when he was 13 years old – he was one year younger than Paul, in the same town, and they were friends. Matzner says his family lived in the ghetto until 1942 when all the Jews were sent to Auschwitz. He was young (16 then) and able to work. It would have been the same for Paul’s family. But Paul wants to stand-out from the rest … by being arrested and incarcerated as a child. His sister and her husband just stay quiet about it

Note that in the article Robert Matzner tells of lucking out with a work assignment in a surveyor’s heated office because he could speak German, and being brought sandwiches every day by the secretary.  Remember this when we get to the “sandwich” part in Paul’s story.

 

6.  Claims he was multilingual from the start, spoke perfect German

Page 10:  MR. A: …where I come from– It’s on the eastern part, southeastern part of Poland. […] So it was very close to Germany, and close to Czechoslovakia. That’s why I was born with three languages. I speak fluently German, Czech, and I speak Polish.

MRS. A: English, of course.

MR. A: And Jewish I didn’t spoke until I got in concentration camp.

This is only a problem in his story in that it would have helped him get along with the Germans running the camp. He says he worked as an electrician, but just bluffed his way through. Not possible to bluff electrical work! But being multilingual enabled him to collaborate with the authorities  and get cushy positions where his languages – especially German – were useful. So I’m questioning his suffering. He’s torn between representing himself as a starving laborer and bragging about how important he was. Everything he says about work is sketchy and disjointed; he avoids talking about it because he doesn’t want to be seen as a rat. That may be one reason he came up with the 11-year-old child story.

I’ll add that what he calls perfect German could not have been perfect (but passable) considering how terrible his English is.

7. Claims in the camps they were fed only 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) of rye bread made with sawdust or other filler daily along with potato/vegetable “peelings” made into a watery soup. In addition, he said a bowl of ‘watery’ oatmeal was given at noon to those who worked.

Page 17-18:  JIM: Tell me about feeding you. How about eating.

MR. A: The food that we used to get about in the evening you used to get I would say kilo bread, rye bread, about a portion like this. It was filled full with filler. It was not flour. It was — Sawdust. — to fill it up. It was very low in calories, and practically nothing in protein, but one thing the Germans didn’t know about. That they were feeding us. They were feeding us with peelings, dried up peelings. And this (unintelligible), that was very high in protein, very high in vitamins. This, they had this – this they thought that the —

JIM: Peelings of what? Potatoes?

MR. A: Potatoes,

MRS. A: Carrots, vegetables —

MR. A: Carrots, cabbage, anything would work.

MRS. A: Animal feed –

MR. A: In a soup, cooked in a soup.

JIM: Yeah, that, and bread that was your meal.

MR. A: Very thin. That was main stable.

MRS. A: And oatmeal, watery oatmeal in the morning.

MR. A: The oatmeal we were getting around lunch time. The people what worked only. The people what didn’t work got only one meal a day. They didn’t even get —

JIM: If you worked you got two.

MR. A: Yeah. You got two meals. You got the bonka suppe. The “bonka suppe” that used to be … Was watered down oatmeal just like I would say a little bit thicker then that water.

This doesn’t compute with what the German records show and with what many others say, but it does match what the worst of the surlievors say. Germans were not stupid enough to think starving people can make good workers. Everyone got at least two meals a day; physical laborers got four. They also were allowed to receive food packages from home and from the Red Cross  and Jewish agencies.  Even though Paul likes to talk about starvation, it was not happening, certainly not to him.

 

8. Couldn’t say how deep the bunk beds were in the barracks, whether 3 or 4 layers. Said he could show a picture from a magazine!

Page 19:  JIM: The bunks were how deep or how high?

MR. A: Ah, in some places we used to have three and four —

JIM: Three or four?

MR. A: In Buchenwald I remember, what was it, three or four I think. Was it three there or four layers?

MRS. A: (unintelligible) three.

MR. A: Whatever it was. I have pictures. I bet, in fact I’d like to show you the picture from U.S. News and World Report.

This is a good place to remark that there is not a single picture of our hero in any camp, or anywhere, from this period. We are taking his word that he was there. Like Wiesel, he thought to prove his claim by identifying himself in that “Famous Buchenwald Photo” but it hasn’t worked out. He’s not in it. It’s pretty funny that he can’t say immediately how many layers to the bunks in Buchenwald if he was there, as he says, for 4 months — It’s hilarious that he asks his wife — he thinks she knows more than he does!

9. Claims he worked as an electrician in the camps. How did he become an electrician? 

Says he was only a couple of days at Auschwitz (long enough to get a tattoo), then was moved because “I said I could work.” Says “They moved because they needed electricians.” He appears to mean going from Auschwitz to Blechhammer , not from Blechhammer to Buchenwald in Dec. ’44.  I wasn’t able to find any information on quarries at Blechhammer, but we know there was a big one at Buchenwald.

Page 20-21:  MR. A: The people would work in the steinbruch [stone pit], like in the quarries, or on the railroad they had no communication because they were all in gangs. Like in chain gangs. [not actual chain gangs] But I was working with a civilian as an electrician so I used to go around –

JIM: Outside the camp or inside?

MR. A: Outside the camp and inside the factory. The factory was almost thirty square miles. Blechhammer, ooh, that was one of the biggest AEG farm industry plan.

JIM: You mean continuous building, or did it just multiple buildings?

MR. A: There were hundreds of buildings in all different sections. They were making out of the coal gasoline [End of tape 1, side A ca.30 min] gasoline but the factory was still in process of building it. They were not completed. Then the Americans and the British denied it to be finished, but they already produced gasoline, because this was the most important thing because out of coal you had almost a hundred different products.

MR. A: Because they used to make ah, medicine out of it. They were making oil, gas, — Soap, whatever petroleum by product was producing.

JIM: How did you get there? [meaning into the big factory buildings at Blechhammer]

MR. A: How? Because I used to go with this man. Every day the guy, I used to come to him in his little cubbyhole he had. He had a few electricians with him working. He used to be the foreman and I used to be his go-fer.

JIM: Did you walk to this job? Or –

MR. A: No, the SS men used to bring me over to drop me off and he had to sign every day a paper.

JIM: This is how far away?

MR. A: Oh, I would say maybe a half a mile.

MR. A: Okay. So I came there and he says, “All right.” “What I did was in the morning, used to come I put the water on so coffee and I worked with him, oh, maybe a month. He was very leery of me, very careful with me. After all, I still was a dirty Jew. This was at Buchenwald.

JIM: And he was a Pole. A Pollock?

MR. A: No, I wouldn’t trust him. I was, he was a real German.

He was talking about Blechhammer, then the SAME STORY moves to Buchenwald. It’s totally confusing. He was never an electrician at Blechhammer if he wasn’t one when he got to Buchenwald. Says he was only a ‘helper’, a ‘go-fer’ in Buchenwald, probably because he spoke German and could work for the Germans in charge, or even Czech or Polish skilled workers. But he passes himself off as an electrician and Jim lets him do it.

Another thing that comes through with Paul is that he likes and respects Germans. He obviously had a lot of interaction with them. So he blames all the bad stuff on Nazis and Austrians (says Hitler was an Austrian, not a German!).

10. Also claims he learned electrical work in Buchenwald in January-February 1945 – a wild story.

Continued from above … page 21-23:

MR. A: He was a German and a very kind person. I never realized yet what this man was. So after a month working with him he comes to me says, “Pauliken, stop with your lies. Tell me the truth. You are not an electrician, are you?” And I looked in his eyes, with tears in my eyes, I remember that, and I said, “No.” That saved my life. [Everything saves his life. He’s obviously sensitive to the fact that he survived when so many didn’t, as the story goes. But also, it would not have taken the German foreman an entire month to discover Paul was not an electrician!] And he hesitated for a second and he closed his eyes and he took the pencil like this, he put it down. He closed his eyes, he put his hands like this. When he opened his eyes he says to me “Paul, Pauliken,” he said, “you know –

JIM: Little Paul.

MR. A: “Little Paul,” he said, “I will save you. Whatever I can, I will do but I want you to keep your mouth shut. Whatever people ask you, ‘I don’t know’, – and they won’t ask you for anything.”

MR. A: “You haven’t seen anything.”

MR. A: I don’t know anything, and that’s going to be the best thing. So all of a sudden he opens this little box. He gives me a sandwich. I never had a sandwich like this even when I was a kid.

MR. A: So he gives me a sandwich. I ate the sandwich. He says, “Don’t ever say nothing.” A week later he came to work. Well, he comes every day, but he came with tears and crying and everything. I don’t remember his last name. I said, “Hans, mit zu Ruhe?” And all of the sudden he breaks down. He says, “I lost my mother, I lost my wife, and I lost my children in Dresden in the bombing. He said, “I have nothing. What did that animal do to us.” He didn’t say the word Hitler.

This is Feb. 15, 1945. But he would never have addressed this man by his first name; plus Hans is a common German name to easily come up with. He “doesn’t remember his last name” so that he can’t be tracked in camp records and found not to exist. Most importantly, he’s making out that “good” Germans like Hans hated Hitler. And does the sandwich idea come from his brother-in-law’s story? I suspect so.

JIM: Right.

MR. A: He says Was has das, no, he said “Welche art schweine mach” to us, what kind of swine, what he did to us. And I didn’t say a word to him. He became so close to me.

No German at that time would have blamed Hitler for Dresden. Never. This simply didn’t take place.

JIM: You were a replacement.

MR. A: I was his –  and when the SS men came he said, “Oh this kid? He is essential. He is such an important person. He knows everything.” And he by teaching me how to wire things and how to do things, and he says, “Certain things I used to do backwards on purpose so they would have to call you to find if there’s any troubles on the line because you know about it.” And he says, “You’ve got to be so important that they will not kill you.” And when we used to go over there when the angriffe [attack] used to be the luftangriffe [air attack], the bombing used to come, and you could hear the siren. Everybody went for the shelters. They wouldn’t let prisoners from concentration camp people in the shelters but they let me in.

So he taught Paul to “wire things,” and even backwards, in one month? And this was in Feb-March 1945, after Dresden? It’s just not credible.

MR. A: I had the special ribbon on my thing.

JIM: Oh, really?

MR. A: Uh huh, and I had a special instrument to save those instruments for testing. I used to carry them. He [Hans] said, “You grab those and run with them. They gonna have to let you in because these instruments are more important than you.” And that’s how I saved my life. And a lot of guys got killed.

MR. A: And he used to be a foreman. He used to be a very big person at Blechhammer. And he taught me how to wire the turbines. This was got to be a perfect job. You can imagine the turbines were, each turbine was as long as this room here.

“He” can only mean “Hans.” But now “Hans” is at Blechhammer and teaching Paul to wire turbines! If he did this at Blechhammer,  he would not say at Buchenwald, “Tell me the truth, you are not an electrician, are you.”

In any case, never would an uneducated teenage Polish hooligan like him be allowed to work on the turbines at Blechhammer. Plus, Paul said he made his living as a steamfitter in the United States, not an electrician.

11.  Said the only day off was Sunday and “all you had [was] hazing, hanging, beating.” And sometime when they came back from work they had to watch “four or five people being hanged.”

Page 29:  MR. A: Because when I stayed home for some reason on Saturday and Sunday we didn’t work.

MR. A: No, Saturday we worked Sunday the only one day we didn’t work. That’s all you had hazing, hanging, beating. [It was generally the rule at Auschwitz camps to work til noon on Saturday, then have the rest of the day and Sunday off. We know the inmates engaged in recreation. So he was right the first time.]

JIM: Oh really.

MR. A:  Hanging, and sometime when we came from work we had to stay in crowd watching four or five people be hanged. Terrorizing people, keep them for no reason. For nothing.

JIM: Just for entertainment?

MR. A: Just for entertainment, yeah. When I used to come in through the doors  and I could hear the music playing, they had a four or five guys’ instruments and when I heard the music playing we knew right away there would be hanging. And the worse thing one time happened to me, this I never will forget. I was already about two years in Blechhammer on Yom Kippur Eve. You see he knew about it. How did I know all these things? I worked with this guy, sometime I used to pick up an old paper what be thrown away.

Shades of Elie Wiesel’s Night. I have not seen anything about public hangings at Buchenwald, but the discipline in the camp was totally under the control of the communist inmate organization, who had managed to take it over in 1943, not the SS. I would bet Argiewicz never saw a hanging in his life. He doesn’t describe anything about it – how, who, why, etc.

We don’t learn “what happened to him one time.” He started talking about the Voelkischer Beobachter and Julius Streicher instead, and Jim never brought him back to it.

12.  Claims before liberation in Buchenwald, in his barracks they were frying human bodies for food – “Take a knife and cut off the flesh and eat it.”

There is a story of cannibalism at Bergen-Belson; I don’t know how true it is. It comes from a General quoting a medical officer.

“The prison doctors tell me that cannibalism is going on,” the medical officer said. “There was no flesh on the bodies; the liver, kidneys, and heart were knifed out.”

But I don’t find anything at all about Buchenwald. Argiewicz must have copied what he had read about Belsen. He stresses several times how much reading he’s done, that he is self-educated. He talks about the day of liberation on page 35:

MR.A: On one morning I get up, I hear shoot – we were making fire and frying human bodies. Take a knife and cut off the flesh and eat it.

JIM: Where was this?

MR. A: In Buchenwald.

JIM: Who was doing this?

MR. A: We did, the inmates because there was no food.

MR. A: We became a lot of guys became –

JIM: Cannibals.

MR. A: Cannibals. That’s sad. So, one morning I hear shooting and trembling and I look outside and here I see a green tank with white markings, you know, olive green come right through the gate, not through the gate, through the barbed wires. And I see he stopped and I see the turret with the barrel facing one of the towers when all of the sudden a salvo I hear. The whole tower, you know can imagine, what is it? A hundred,what is it? A big barrel – I heard a salvo.

Jim wasn’t interested in finding out whose bodies they were cooking! Were dead bodies just laying about? Paul would like you to think so. Jim doesn’t care about telling lies because he does it too. On page 54:

JIM: You havin’ fun –

MR. A: Give you a lot of baloney. (laughs)

JIM: Oh sure, I like that.

13.  Claims he was on a four-week death march from Blechhammer to Buchenwald in November 1944.

Page 38:  JIM: Tell me about the death march.

MR. A: When the Germans were caving in, they were losing the war in the east, and the German army already, the Russian army already entered Poland and as they were going towards Germany so they came by Kattowitz, Katowice. This was right on the German border with approximately I would say maybe sixty kilometers, seventy kilometers about 45 miles from our camp. One day they gave each one of ‘em whole loaf of bread and took us on a four week death march. When we left there were about 3,000 prisoners. By the time we got to Buchenwald there were only 800 left, maybe, and whoever couldn’t walk, they came and rolled you over with their foot, you know on your back. They shot you. That was their favorite, right here. So when they shot you they gave you instant, instant death. You didn’t even feel it, you know when you get shot right through, through the back, and that was their favorite.

From Jewish Virtual Library:

On January 21, 1945, 4,000 prisoners, including 150 women, were taken out of the camp and put on a death march lasting 13 days.

Page 39:  MR. A: It is sad to say lot of these guys escaped into this country. And a lot of ‘em [speaking of “Nazis.” And what about all the horrible Jews like Paul that escaped into this country?]

JIM: Yeah, that’s another subject now. Let’s not get off into that.

MR. A: I know, but I would like to tell you about it, the subject, how –

JIM: Yeah, I’m perfectly willing to listen to that. It’s just that I don’t want to get off our track here.

MR. A: Off our track, right. But what happened, we got into Buchenwald and the day when we got into Buchenwald, not to Buchenwald, to Blech – to Weimar. So of course the American pilots didn’t see that we were on the bottom. [They were now in a train, which he forgot to mention] And most of the guys what used to be in the open railroad and cars and when the artillery starts shooting I can imagine, you can imagine, the shrapnels were flying all over, and I knew and I could see how the guys were killed in the cars, so I jumped out of the car, railroad car, because the guards ran away. They hid in bunkers. And I jumped underneath the train, the railroad car and I got saved because sometime, you know, the metal pieces, and when I came back I saw half the car was dead. [Did nobody but him have the idea to jump out of the car?]

[…]

MR. A: Because, you see when we left on the march it was in November, November, and then we got into Buchenwald, I think it was in December.

JIM: You were on the road a month?

MR. A: About a month, yea.

All sources I find put the march from Blechhammer to Buchenwald beginning on Jan 21, 1945, lasting 13 days, half the time Paul claims. He says it was November and they arrived at Buchenwald in December 1944. Big discrepancy here. There were not two marches, only one. Why is Paul so confused? Does he want to give himself a longer stay at Buchenwald? If he didn’t arrive until February, he wouldn’t have had time to get in tight with “Hans” before the Dresden bombing. Or is he just guessing … badly. I think his entire Buchenwald story about Hans is fiction and he added it in competition with his brother-in-law whom he’s known since childhood.  He was probably in Buchenwald for a couple months and it was uneventful.

Some final quotes

Page 37: MR A: Well, that’s when I was liberated. I was not liberated in Auschwitz, because they evacuated us from Blechhammer. This was about maybe sixty, seventy miles from Auschwitz. And Auschwitz what they did they gave me this number, and I was there only a couple days because over there I bluffed myself through, too, because there I said that I can work. See this was my number. Can you see the number? 1-7-6-5-2-0. [Auschwitz was a transit camp. in addition to being a concentration camp in Birkenau.]

 Page 38:  MR. A: They moved because they needed electricians.

JIM: You were an ace by then. (laughter)

MR. A: Oh, I was an expert. I was a real expert (laughs), but I tell you but it worked. It worked. [He pretends it worked; it could not have worked. He was doing something else.]

JIM: So you went from one camp to the other?

MR. A: To another camp and they brought me then –

JIM: So you were liberated from Buchenwald.

MR. A: I was liberated from Buchenwald and that was, Buchenwald was outside Weimar. Weimar, do you remember that was the capital city of the Weimar Republic?

JIM: I know. Weimar Republic. Yes, I know that.

The capital was Berlin, which just shows how much critical attention Jim is paying. Whatever Paul says, Jim goes along with it. And that is the reception surlievers get from everywhere since the 1990’s, and earlier. It’s been so easy for him — no matter what he says, it’s accepted, no questions asked. So why not embellish the story? Why not add a bit more zest to it, why not punish the Nazis even harder, even if they treated you decently. It needs to be done for “Never Again.” It’s the same with Robert Matzner and all the hundreds of surlievers who go on the speakers circuit and engage a ghostwriter to put their story in a book. It has to be interesting, doesn’t it? We want it to sell. It’s for a good cause — for shutting up the antisemites. The deniers. For Israel. For our children’s future and safety. For all these reasons and more, we need to keep the story going.

For us on the other side, who are the victims of this hoax, we need to bring a hard critical spirit to every one of these overblown, nonsensical stories written by Jews. Not a one of them can stand up to scrutiny. (If you think one can, send it to me.) It’s just this scrutiny we don’t have enough of. Nor the media power to communicate the scrutiny we do have to large enough numbers of hoaxed and passive believers. We’ll  just have to keep working at it because continuing with the status quo is not an option.

Three must-read articles to give you the expertise you need on Elie Wiesel’s Big Con

Sunday, December 6th, 2015

By Carolyn Yeager

Here they are! These three articles, read in order, will explain why Elie Wiesel was not at Auschwitz or Buchenwald.  If you carefully read and comprehend what is in these three articles, you will understand why this site is called Elie Wiesel Cons The World and you will be able to explain it to other people in a way that they are unable to refute. Do you see any real refutation (with sourced material) brought by visitors to this site? If you do, please let me know because I missed it. The three articles are:

1. When did Elie Wiesel arrive at Auschwitz ? Could he have received the number A-7713?  This article proves that the answer to the second question is “no” … which makes everything else fraudulent and impossible.

2. Gigantic Fraud Carried Out for Wiesel Nobel Prize  This article points out that the main evidence for Wiesel to have been incarcerated at Buchenwald is a famous photograph he purports to be in, which was used to win him a Nobel Prize. But the person identified as Wiesel is shown conclusively NOT to be Wiesel.

3. “Elie Wiesel was Not in Buchenwald” Made Simple  Here, every piece of “evidence” used to place Wiesel in Buchenwald from the end of January to April 1945 is examined and shown not to apply.

If, after reading these three articles, you still believe in the legend of Elie Wiesel, please write to me and tell me why because to my mind they pretty much destroy it. One of the staunch upholders of the Wiesel-Buchenwald tale was Jewish Prof. Kenneth Waltzer. He tried to refute what this website was saying, only to be knocked down and out for the count. He  is now retired from Michigan State University, where he had his special Elie Wiesel projects going, and is only loosely associated with a film titled Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald in an   historical advisory role. Wiesel’s role is similarly reduced to five words between parentheses – “(including among them Elie Wiesel)” – while other names dominate the film.

So what is the Wiesel Legend running on these days? In my opinion, the most important ingredient is that the mass public wants to believe it. They like the story of incredible suffering of a persecuted people. They like the man who has been put into the center of the story, the man who survived against all odds and “turned the tables,” so to speak. They don’t know that Wiesel privately laughs at them for their gullibility. Family members have let on to that in the past,  but their words have been scrubbed away. Elie Wiesel is putting us on and the majority of us fall for it! He even admits he makes things up … but he excuses it this way:

In [my] 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.

In other words, he is a false witness, but a witness nevertheless.  He sees nothing wrong with that because the over-all “Holocaust” story is important for Jews and Israel, and relies on witnesses.  There can never be too many witnesses, no matter if they were actually there or not. Even if what he “witnessed” did not actually happen, it is  true (in his mind) because the conditions (he thinks) were such that it could have happened. Got that? Elie Wiesel is just the most famous false witness, but multiply him with thousands of others and you have … “The Holocaust”.

So our job, the few enlightened ones, is to get the mass public to pay attention, and to force this information into the mass media. You could start by circulating the three articles above, and selecting them on search pages enough times to get them to the top of the page. Elie Wiesel Cons The World is quite competitive as far as visitors go, in spite of the ridiculously low and inaccurate rating given it by Alexa.  It is popular because many young people and students search the subject regularly.  Our job is also to have all our facts straight and not be stuck in the low aspiration of only wanting to show that Wiesel exaggerates or lies about what he saw in the camps. If he was in the camps, he will receive sympathy no matter how many lies he tells. But if he wasn’t there – that is the shocker and changes the whole dialogue. And from all the evidence, he wasn’t.

Let’s be courageous and go where the evidence takes us. To be a top-notch ambassador for truth and freedom from political lies, you should also try to read and study these important articles:

Night #1 and Night #2 – What Changes were Made and Why, Part One and Part Two
Both contain original translations from the Yiddish forerunner of La Nuit and Night to reveal the what and the why of the changes that were made by Marion Wiesel in the new 2006 edition.

Elie Wiesel was unknown to Mel Mermelstein in the Buchenwald Camp   A famous survivor of Buchenwald who lived in the “children’s block” didn’t mention Elie Wiesel in his 1979 book.

Signatures prove Lázár Wiesel is not Elie Wiesel  The signature on the back of the Buchenwald “release” questionaire had been overlooked until I noticed it was unlike Wiesel’s known signature.

Questions on Elie Wiesel and the Sorbonne  Great examples of how Wiesel invents his past.

Elie Wiesel and the Mossad  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Amazing story of Wiesel’s ties to the Irgun and Israel from his earliest days in France; his trips to Israel and his role as a translator and journalist during the German-Israel Reparations negotiations; his move to New York and involvement in bringing Soviet Jews to Israel. Concludes that Wiesel has always been an asset of the Mossad.

The Shadowy Origins of Night  Part 2  Part 3  How the book Night came about and the impossibility of it happening the way Wiesel says.

You will find that the common thread in these 9 articles is to reinforce my original statement. This is very powerful. You can put it together for yourself in your own way, but I will try to summarize my findings even more clearly in a future article.

More Letters of the Week

Friday, October 18th, 2013

By Carolyn Yeager

In January 2011, I featured a Letter of the Week from Hailey S. In November the same year I featured two more, from Shelby and Sarah. Now I have received three more complaints about this site from (another?) Hailey, a Katie and a Lauren — right in a row.  Thank you ladies!

But it’s an odd thing — the latest three were all sent from the same computer. And with an email address that ends in the same edu., which I won’t reveal. I’m not even sure it’s legitimate … that is, a real school.  Could these young ladies be friends conspiring together in writing their comments? Could they even be the same person using different names and slightly different email addresses?

The content and point of view is similar, but written in different ways. You will find that “belief” and “believing”  are the major basis for, well, believing the “holocaust.” These comments are also similar to the earlier ones I published from Hailey S, Shelby and Sarah, although better written and thought-out. So I could reply to them all together, but since they are written to three different blog articles they appear on different pages. This is why I decided to reply to them here, under the title of “More Letters of the Week.”

First, from Hailey, who sent her comment to “Elie’s Adventures in Buchenland” on Oct. 14:

I find the trivialization of the Holocaust extremely disgusting. It maybe that some don’t believe that Elie Wiesel was an actual part of the Holocaust, but that does not mean anyone has the right to make fun of or make light of a horrific historical event. An event that almost entirely wiped out an entire group of people. There is an amount of dignity that must be maintained when dealing with this horrific time in history.

I already replied to Hailey on that page, so I’ll just say here that she’s free to express her feelings but I hope she understands that that is all she’s doing. Hailey has been indoctrinated into believing that “Holocaust survivors” are telling the truth about their “horrific” suffering and that “an entire group of people [by which she means Jewish people] were almost entirely wiped out.” Honest research has shown otherwise, but Hailey prefers to ignore this research.

The second comment is from Katie, who sent her comment to “Elie Wiesel Was Not in Buchenwald Made Simple“ on Oct. 16:

I think that there could be a logical explanation to explain the holes in Elie’s story. I cannot bring myself to believe that someone would fictionalize a story on the holocaust and its terrible events. When someone under goes a traumatic event they will most likely not be able to remember every detail perfectly therefore he may have been confused on the dates and times. Elie has also grown older in age which also may make it difficult for him to remember. His book Night, is very detailed and descriptive which makes it difficult to believe that he could make those events up. This blog also states that Elie has not been asked to explain his discrepancies in his “tale”. Could it possibly be because there is no solid proof to question his story? And if he wasn’t actually a survivor than his book is still an incredible account of a Jewish person in the Holocaust and is still educational and provides people with an insight to the terrible things that happened.

Poor logic here. Katie says, “I cannot bring myself to believe …” — she is also putting her belief first. How many times can we repeat that reality is not about belief.  It’s about facts and evidence. Belief belongs in religion — in this case the religion they have all been brought up in: Holocaustism.

Katie brings up belief a second time, saying in essence that after reading  Night, she finds it “difficult to believe that he could make those events up.” But Wiesel is primarily a fiction writer and has made up lots of stories about Jews; in fact Night was for a long time listed and sold as fiction! Good fiction makes us believe it’s real even when we know better.

As to the “logical explanation” Katie thinks could be found, she doesn’t come up with one. Illogically, she says that Elie was traumatized and thus not able to remember well. But Elie has always said he waited for 10 years to write his book so that he would have a clearer mind about it. Her other “logical explanation” is: Elie is now elderly and has a poor memory, thus he gets mixed up on dates and times. But Elie wrote Night in 1955, and it is in this book that the problems exist — the book itself is inaccurate and inconsistent. Since that time he has continued to say different things — inconsistent things.

Katie’s final remark falls back on what the bulk of “Holocaust” defenders come up with: Even if he wasn’t a survivor, it’s still an “incredible [fictional] account” providing an insight into the terrible things that happened. How does he know what happened if he wasn’t there? He made it all up, taking the framework for what others had already said about it.  Stop defending this multi-millionaire shyster, Katie.

Third, is Lauren, who sent her comment to “Ken Waltzer inadvertently supplies proof that Elie Wiesel was not at Buchenwald“ on Oct. 16:

I find this constant speculation about the validity of the Holocaust and its survivors extremely disturbing. The Holocaust was not a glamorous event, therefore, I find it hard to believe that someone would make up a story about being a victim of such tragedy. While I realize that many people would consider my opinion to be a ‘too optimistic’ view of human nature and morality, there is a lot of information to support the fact that Elie Wiesel was at the camp without the information that Mr. Waltzer is supposedly with-holding.

Once more, we find the belief mode: “I find it hard to believe that someone would make up a story…” Why? Hundreds of fake survivors have done so. What does it take for you to give up this childish belief in a religion of sadistically persecuted Jews?

You say it is not a glamorous event … but for ordinary “non-glamorous” Jews it is the ultimate stardom, and a very lucrative source of money too. Not only from the books they write, but also from the talks they give on the “speakers circuit” — and how they love all that respectful attention. They also love fooling so many Gentiles.

You say “there is a lot of information to support the fact that Elie Wiesel was at the camp …” No, there isn’t! This entire web site is devoted to showing that the alleged “information” is false or simply does not exist. Yet you cling to your belief in the non-existent. That is religion, not history, Lauren.

You are also mis-stating the case when you say Mr. Waltzer is withholding information. He is withholding nothing, for he doesn’t have the information he claims. Your Mr. Waltzer is another fraud who’s been caught in his frivolous promises. I know it’s tough for you to accept. But logic should tell you that if Waltzer had the information he would have put it out there already. He is embarrassing himself as a university professor by remaining silent and not publishing it. In failing to do so, he is proving my point  …  not yours.

Well, young ladies, thanks for your written words. They are a treasure. You are of course welcome to write again, but I caution you that I expect you to address my replies to you in some way. If you just write more of the same I probably won’t publish it. I don’t want to bore the readers. So step up to the plate!

The Max Hamburger Story – Some Reasons Not To Believe It

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

by Carolyn Yeager

The interview with psychiatrist Max Hamburger that appeared in the March 2012 Dutch magazine Aanspraak was translated into English for me by Hasso Castrup. Some things that Hamburger said are revealing of his overall honesty when it comes to his statements about “the Holocaust.” Being a “holocaust survivor” who appears in the famous photograph is, after all, his only claim to fame.

Max Hamburger in 2012 pointing to himself in the Famous Buchenwald Lie-beration Photo from 1945 (Source: Aanspraak magazine)

I’ve already reported in a previous article (scroll down to end) that his father was an Amsterdam diamond merchant, Hartog Hamburger, who died from a bizarre accident when Max was only four years old. His mother, a fashion designer, worked even harder after that and often left him with his grandparents. When Max was ten, his brother died of leukemia, leaving Max alone with his mother. This is quite a lot of trauma in the first ten years of life, which couldn’t help but leave a mark on his psyche.

He says his brother’s death is what inspired him to study medicine, beginning in 1938 when he was 18. But in 1942, further public education was denied to him because he was Jewish. His job with the Jewish Council (Judenrat) allowed him to remain immune to deportation to Westerbork by getting a special stamp on his Ausweis (ID). In the summer of 1942, he went to work as an intern at the New Israelite Hospital, where he learned that when the substance ‘Pyrifer’ is injected intravenously it will cause high fever similar to what one gets with malaria or typhoid. Hamburger began injecting this into the Jewish patients so they would be declared unfit for deportation.

This, of course, raised suspicion among the Germans and Hamburger says in June 1943 the New Israelite Hospital was raided, in order to be emptied. He and other medical personnel hid patients under laundry and in the morgue, and led seriously ill patients into hiding (?). He is proud to describe himself as part of the Resistance and says he was later awarded with a memorial cross because of it. He tells a story that describes how in August 1943 he once again escapes deportation, but I’m not repeating it because there is no way to assure it’s true.

Working with the Resistance

He then moved to the Jewish Handicapped (Asylum) at Weesperplein, where he and other doctors again tried to”save” as many patients as possible by declaring them ill with contagious diseases. He says at the Portuguese-Israelite Hospital people in mixed marriages were to be sterilized. Along with most of the staff, he refused to cooperate and went through a hidden door into a neighboring villa and went into hiding. He and his girlfriend were married by a rabbi; they were both fully into the Resistance now. His mother was also brought to where he was, but she quickly hid herself elsewhere.

He says that “shortly afterwards we were betrayed and arrested, interrogated and deported to Westerbork. My mother was also betrayed.” On Sunday, February 6, 1944, he saw her for the last time in the penal barracks at Westerbork. They fell into each other’s arms and cried. But then … “In Auschwitz I met a fellow radiologist who was deported together with her. He told me that my mother was gassed on March 6, 1944. I arrived there on February 10, 1944 (his 24th birthday, but he doesn’t mention it), but did not see her again.”

Since we know there were no gassings at Auschwitz – this is a dead giveaway that he’s telling a big lie, although he’s putting the lie in the mouth of an unnamed “fellow radiologist.” This is a trick that is used often by so-called witnesses and “survivors.” The so-called informant should always be named; if they can’t name the exact source of the information, they should not be believed.

At Auschwitz, he at first failed, then succeeded in becoming recognized as a doctor. He began on a work detail where he says he was “poorly dressed in the icy cold damp weather, the work meant a maximum survival of 3 months.” (We hear so often that the life expectancy was “3 months,” but why did most inmates not only live until liberation, but into old age after it? Hamburger himself is 93 years old – Feb.10, three days ago, was his birthday.) As a doctor, he supervised the cleaning of the barracks during the day, in the afternoon handed out soup, evenings he did lice control. What’s so hard about that? Yet he says that in April he developed a fever, and on May 1st managed to avoid the medical inspection (a strange story of ‘luck’) in order to be included in a transport of Hungarian “forced” laborers headed to Silesia. He says this “saved his life” (considering his 3 months were almost up, don’t you know).

According to this, Hamburger was at Auschwitz from Feb. 10 to May 1, 1944 – a little less than three months. This was the usual length of quarantine at Birkenau for those who were then sent to other camps as labor. During the 2 to 3-month quarantine period the inmates did not work, so I do think his account has quite a bit of invention in it so as to not sound like quarantine. His mother would also have  been in quarantine and he would not have seen her there, being the men and women were strictly segregated into separate camps. This is the usual situation from which “survivors” claim their relatives were gassed, the information so often coming from a nameless fellow inmate; sometimes from a “sadistic guard.”

After Auschwitz, the story gets more confusing

The train took them to Gross Rosen, where an old factory was assigned as their hospital. He says “we” had to vaccinate everyone against typhus in February 1945. Their only hope were reports of advancing Russians and Americans, which they knew of because a fellow prisoner secretly listened to the radio. At the evacuation of the camp they had to walk in the snow to the Czech Republic. From there they were taken by train from Prague to Flossenbürg camp in Bavaria.

According to USHMM, Gross Rosen camp was evacuated in early February ’45 and “about 40,000” from the main camp and sub-camps had to march west. This is a lot of inoculation to be done in a few days. But more important, the 9-month period he spent at Gross Rosen between May 1944 and February 1945 is blank. May 1944 coincides with the time of the large Hungarian deportation to Auschwitz; Hamburger says he was with a Hungarian labor unit that had already been to Auschwitz and sent out from there. Would not the new arrivals also have been sent out from there in like manner? From here on, his narrative remains very sketchy, and is mostly made up of vague horror stories.

He says, “The camp guards were shooting prisoners who were their live targets in the white landscape. Daily there were death sentences and prisoners were hanged before our eyes.” Yet the prisoners were needed to work in the quarries and Messerschmitt factories … and they had been innoculated in February against typhus, no doubt at some expense. So why would they be wasted as target practice for the guards? This is when survivor stories become really unbelievable. At the beginning of March 1945, he says they were deported to Ohrdruf, a work camp of Buchenwald. “Here were bombproof underground factories for assembly of V-weapons. After underground explosions with dynamite, we were to remove the big stones from the corridors by small-gauge trains.” But he doesn’t stay there. “We had to walk for four days and nights 80 km (approx. 40 miles) through the snow to Buchenwald.” Although he says he was practically “in a coma,” he’s clear about the dates and distances.

“On 11 April 1945, Buchenwald was liberated by the American army. Five days after the liberation our well-known picture (was taken). I lie down there, fourth from the left. As I lay there someone advised me to go to the hospital, because I otherwise would not survive. “If they do not record you, you go ‘under the grass.’ When an American goes by and sees you lying, he makes sure that you get recorded. And so I went. With DDT powder I was lice free. The lice and I got U.S. baby food! For me THAT was liberation. During a night in the hospital, I knew: ‘If I fall asleep, I’ll never wake up and I won’t be able to testify to what happened to us.’ I fought that night to the utmost against sleep and thereby I survived.”

From the beginning of March to April 11, Hamburger has nothing to say except that he spent 4 days walking from Ordruf to Buchenwald and that he was in the photograph taken on April 16. He doesn’t give the date that he arrived at Buchenwald. What he tells can be picked up from any number of accounts of the time period. Can we believe he was even at Buchenwald? Why was he in that barracks #56? How long was he there? Why did “someone” have to tell him to go to the hospital 5 days after the Americans arrived? All very implausible since he was a medical professional.

But beyond all this is the fact that the figure he says is him is indeed a retouched copy of the figure in the row above, 3rd from the left. He doesn’t claim any relationship to that person, who has been identified (inaccurately) by Yad Vashem Museum as Yehuda Doron or Yaakov Marton. This famous photograph has been proved to be a composite photo created by a U.S. military intelligence department to be used in the ongoing propaganda war against Germany and Hitler’s Third Reich, so everything about it is suspect.

The rest of what Hamburger said in the interview does not apply to the questions I have. Again, my primary question is: When did Max Hamburger first say he was in that photograph? Like so many others, it was not at liberation, nor in the years following. In fact, there is no information that I have found as to when this did occur. Why? Because it must be recent – too recent.

Concluding thoughts

In 1945, Max was 25. He wrote that he and the loyal wife he married when he was 22 were divorced sometime around or after 1957, and he is now with his third wife.

“For a long time I have been a psychiatrist and I have helped many war victims thanks to my own experiences. Until I could no longer afford to listen to them. Unfortunately I never found a psychiatrist who could help me. I regret that I was a bad partner in the previous marriages, but that’s because I was in the grip of the past I had lived through. I find it annoying when people make demands on me and I can get angry.”

I bet he could sure get angry with me! I am making demands on Max Hamburger to fill in the blanks in his “holocaust survivor” story. I don’t have any reason to doubt the early part of his story but, starting with his and his mother’s arrival at Auschwitz, there is much to question.

He is, from all appearances, a loyal Jew with the typical Jewish desire to avenge the “wrong” done to his people and the interruption and pain in his own personal life. Telling lies to accomplish this is not, therefore,  a wrong in his eyes. A wrong for a wrong is, for Jews, a fair exchange … nothing to be ashamed of. This may even be how he counseled his patients.

“If you look closely you can see a sixteen-year-old boy …”

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

By Carolyn Yeager

Do we have a stupid President, or what?

On Monday, April 23, U.S. President Barack Obama toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with Elie Wiesel as his guide. Following the tour, both Wiesel and Obama gave boring, highly hypocritical speeches to the assembled diplomats, Jews,  Shoah  survivors, supporters  and workers. Both speeches together lasted about 35 minutes. (Pictured right, Wiesel and Obama hug between speeches)

During Obama’s talk, he recalled a previous time that Elie had guided him through one of the Shoah’s sacred shrines–Buchenwald, in June 2009. At the 11:10 mark of this video, Obama remembers:

We stopped at an old photo, men and women lying in their bunks, barely more than skeletons, and if you look closely you can see a sixteen year old boy, looking right at the camera, right into your eyes … you can see Elie.

President Obama was talking about this old photo, which is a cropped version of the original.

This photograph was taken on April 16, 1945 when Elie Wiesel could not have been in it because he was in the hospital at Buchenwald deathly ill from food poisoning, according to both Night and his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea.

Obama  made a big boo-boo in saying “men and women” were in the photo, lying in bunks together. But we already questioned his intelligence, so we’ll pass that by. The bigger mistake he made was identifying the face in the far upper right as Elie Wiesel.  His presidential aides should familiarize themselves with this blog before their boss’ next meeting with the Holo idol. This site has proven that it is not Elie Wiesel in that picture, especially here and here.

Judge for yourself from this cleaned up, unretouched enlargement of the round-headed man (right),  found to be in his 30’s by a computer program designed by Apple. Or check out Computer program judges “Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald” to be 30-36 years of age once again.

Compare this face to a  real 16 year-old—Nikolaus Grüner in the far lower left of the picture above.

This tells us that President Obama doesn’t think for himself, but accepts whatever he is told by members of the Jewish race, like Elie Wiesel. But we already knew that. Elie says, “That’s me,” and Barack says, “My, so it is.”

Obama continues recalling the Buchenwald meeting:

And at the end of our visit that day, Elie spoke of his father. “I thought one day I would come back and speak to him,” he said “of times of which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will. ”  Elie, you’ve devoted your life to upholding that sacred duty. You’ve challenged us all as individuals and as nations to do the same with the power of your example, the eloquence of your words … as you did again just now … and so to you and Marion we are extraordinarily grateful.

First, who is we? The entire U.S. citizenry? I’m sure there are many who, like me, opt out of that sentiment and are not grateful to Elie Wiesel. Think how Wiesel uses the word “memory” here. “Memory should become a “sacred duty of all people,” is what he is saying. How can “memory” alone be a sacred duty? But he is meaning a specific memory of the Jewish Holocaust, nothing else. He doesn’t want to say that out loud for all us non-Jews to hear, but we’re supposed to pick it up anyway. We know he means only the memory of the Jewish “holocaust” because he supports the Holocaust Lobby’s  condemnation of the Germans’ right to their memories, doesn’t he? If any nation’s memories conflict with the sacred Shoah narrative, they should be suppressed, even criminalized.  Wiesel said as much in his speech. In the case of Germany, their non-shoah-approved memories are criminalized (see here). It is the same in Austria and to a lesser degree in many European countries, and Wiesel is on record for favoring criminalization in the United States! Barack Obama is promising that “as a nation” we will follow Elie Wiesel’s example.

You should also be aware that the Shoah narrative is still in flux, still changing, so we don’t even know what we’re in for.

Barack Obama, representing the American people, is committing a great injustice to most of us in order to beg for the Jewish vote.  How far will we allow the Jewish takeover of America to go?

UPDATE: April 26, 8 p.m.

A perfect example of the hypocrisy of Wiesel’s “sacred duty of memory” was offered today in a news story from Europe. The U.S. State Department’s “special envoy to fight global antisemitism” Hanna Rosenthal was touring Latvia after meeting earlier with the mayor of Malmo, Sweden. In Latvia, she pressed the Latvian leadership on their country’s continued commemorations of Latvian participation in the Waffen SS, the military wing of the National Socialist party, which included volunteer divisions from all over Europe. Many Latvians consider the volunteers who fought against the Soviets to be heroes of the nation. To Rosenthal’s objections that this amounted to condoning the killing of Jews, they said their history is “complicated” and they don’t see it in simple right/wrong terms. But Rosenthal insisted, with the weight and power of the United States government behind her, that such a commemoration was “offensive to Jews.”  Because it is offensive to Jews, the Latvians’ sacred duty to their memory of resisting the takeover by the Soviet Union cannot be allowed.

What could show more clearly that it is indeed only the memories sacred to the Jews that all the world is expected to honor.  Our own sacred memories, whatever they may be,  must come second to theirs. Who in their right mind accepts such rules?

Night #1 and Night #2—What Changes were Made and Why, Part Two

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

By Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2012 Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel questioned under oath in a California courtroom in 2008:
Q. And is this book Night that you wrote a true account of your experience during World War II?
A. It is a true account. Every word in it is true.

In Part One, I established that the decision to rebrand Night into an autobiography was the reason for a new translation, in which necessary changes could be made to better ‘fit’ the story both to the real Elie Wiesel and the known facts of the Hungarian deportation.

When the 2006 translation came out, with its new classification to “autobiography,” questions arose from some circles. Responding to these questions, Edward Wyatt wrote an article  in the NewYork Times on Jan. 19, 2006, in which he quoted Jeff Seroy, senior vice president at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, parent company of Night publisher Hill & Wang, as strongly denying that changes were made to bring the book more in line with the facts. “Nonsense,” said Seroy. “Some minor mistakes crept into the original translation that were expunged in the new translation. But the book stands as a record of fact.”

Blaming the Translator

“Mistakes in the original translation” can only mean mistakes by Stella Rodway, the original translator! But we have already shown that Stella Rodway faithfully reproduced the French La Nuit, which was Wiesel’s own work. The author and publisher are casting  these changes as translation errors to divert attention away from Elie Wiesel’s own errors—part of their campaign to pass Night off from now on as “a record of fact.”

A record of fact it isn’t

When I ended Part One, Eliezer and Father were still in the train car on their way to Buchenwald. You will recall that the Yiddish, the French and thus the original English version of Night specified the trip took 10 days and 10 nights from Gleiwitz (on the former German/Polish border) to Buchenwald. Since we know from standard historical sources1 that the prisoners were evacuated from Monowitz on Jan. 18 and arrived in Gleiwitz the next day, Jan. 19; and since according to the description in Night itself, they spend three days in Gleiwitz (Jan. 20-22), this would make their day of arrival February 1, 1945. But in Night, Father’s death takes place the night of Jan. 28-29, three days before they arrived!  This is why Marion Wiesel removed the number 10 in her new translation, leaving the number of days and nights undetermined.

A strange detail that actually belongs in Part One is on page 87 of the original Night. Eliezer remarks, after his and his Father’s deliberations and final decision to go on the march: “I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.” The evacuation, as we all know, was on the 18th. We also know the Russians did not arrive on the 20th of January! The actual liberation day is January 27. What possessed Wiesel to write this? Well, because it was in Un di velt:  “Two days after we had left Buna, the Red Army occupied the camp.  All the sick had stayed alive.”

From the point in the story of Eliezer and Father’s arrival at Buchenwald there are no significant changes made by Marion Wiesel to the original French and English versions. But there is much in all the versions that differs strikingly from the “official holocaust history” as written by acknowledged official chroniclers such as Danuta Czech. So I will continue with comparisons between Night and “official history,” along with some very significant changes made from Un di velt hot geshvign to Wiesel’s edited French La Nuit.

Arrival at Buchenwald:  26 Jan. or 1 Feb.?

Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz Chronicle1,  records that on January 26,

A transport with 3,987 prisoners from Auschwitz auxiliary camps reaches Buchenwald.  There are 52 dead prisoners in the transport.  115 prisoners die on the day of arrival.  Their corpses are delivered to the autopsy room. (P 801)

This is the transport that carried Lazar and Abraham Wiesel/Viezel, Miklos (Nikolaus) Grüner and all of the inmates of Monowitz whose names are on the transport list.2 According to Czech, the Monowitz prisoners began their march on the evening of January 18, 1945, with “divisions of nurses placed between the columns” of 1000 each (P 786), arriving at Gleiwitz Camp the following evening. On Jan. 21 “they are loaded in open freight cars with other prisoners from Auschwitz who have arrived in Gleiwitz.” (P 788) From Jan. 21 to Jan. 26 is five days of travel … not ten, as Wiesel wrote in Night.

The narrative in Night gives us a date of Jan. 22 for the boarding of the train, one day later than Czech. And while Night gives the number of days on the train (10), it does not name the date of arrival.

Hilda Wiesel says her father died on arrival

Totally contradicting what is written in Night, Hilda Wiesel Kudler, Elie’s oldest sister, in her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995, said she learned from her brother that their father died as he stepped off the train.

And I said, where is father? And he replied, he’s gone back to Sighet; he[Elie] didn’t want to tell me [that he was dead]. And I repeated, but where is he? And he insisted he was at Sighet. And I said, look, I want you to tell me the truth. Because he knew the date of my father’s death. You know, they did a long march3 from Auschwitz, then they put them on the train to go to Buchenwald; he died gasping for air; when he stepped off the train, he died gasping for air; at Buchenwald. But he[Elie] knew the date.                 

From this, we can better understand something about Elie Wiesel—that he has never had a problem with making up stories that “sound better” than the truth. But, if Hilda is correct in her recall, and if their father really was one of the 115 inmates who Danuta Czech reports died on the day of arrival, then Wiesel’s long, melodramatic story of watching his father sicken and die over a ten-day period in Night is fiction. All of it—including his father being whacked on the head by a cruel “officer” in the barracks.

The day of arrival for this transport is Jan. 26, but according to the timeline in Night, it arrives on Feb. 1. Either way, it doesn’t correspond to the date of  Jan. 28 that Wiesel, for reasons unknown, selected as the date his fictional Father died.

You might also be interested to know that Hilda is named Deborah in Un di velt;  the name Hilda is never used. It was Wiesel who changed it to Hilda in La Nuit.

Un di Velt says Father dies a week after arrival in Buchenwald, Night says 8-10 days … yet it is January 28 … or is it the 18th Day of Shevat?

Regular readers of this blog will know this already, but it bears repeating yet again: there is no Shlomo Wiesel in the official history or in the records who fits the profile of “Father” as described by Elie Wiesel in Night. There is an Abraham (sometimes shortened to Abram) Viezel who is recorded in several places—on a medical report at Auschwitz, on the transport to Buchenwald, and on a death certificate dated  Feb. 2, 1945, seven (7) days after arrival. This Abraham was born Oct. 10, 1900, making him 44 years old when he died. Recall that Night gives Father’s age as 50 in 1944 (SR, P 40).

Wiesel’s description has the transport to Buchenwald arriving on Feb.1st.  But that’s just the beginning. After arriving, this is the timeline given in both the original Night and Marion Wiesel’s 2006 translation:

It was daytime when I awoke. I went to look for my father. (Feb. 2nd) 

[…]

On the third day after our arrival at Buchenwald, everyone had to go to the showers [his father went too-cy]. Even the sick who had to go through last. (Feb 4th)  […] Struck down by dysentery, my father lay in his bunk, five other invalids with him. I sat by his side watching him … A week went by like this. (Feb. 11th or Feb. 8th depending on how you read it)

[ . . . ]

When I got down after roll call, I could see his lips trembling as he murmured something. […] Then I had to go to bed. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. It was January 28, 1945. (still Feb. 8 or 11) I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory.” (Feb 12th or 9th)  [Stella  Rodway translation, pp 107-112]

The timeline in Un di velt is not in doubt:

On the seventh or eighth day of our being in Buchenwald, the bunk-elder [should be block-elder -cy) who used to deal out bread for the whole bunk [sic], came to me. . . .  

[ . . . ]

On the same day, in the evening, disaster struck. The end. During roll call.  The healthy had to go out of the block in order to be counted by the S.S. men.  The sick stayed in their bunks.  My father and I thus stayed inside.   He — because of his dysentery and I — because of my bandaged foot.  Father was lying in the lowest bunk and I — in the uppermost.

[ . . . ]

After roll call, I immediately jumped down from the uppermost bunk and ran to him.  He was still breathing.  But — he was silent.

[ . . . ]

For a couple of hours I stayed by him and looked at his face long and well […] Then they forced me to go lie down to sleep. I climbed up to the uppermost bunk and I did not know that in the morning, on awakening, I would find my father no more.

It was the eighteenth of Shevat, 5705.  

* * *

 Nineteenth of Shevat.  Early in the morning.

 I got up and ran to my father.  Another sick man was lying in his place.

 I had a father no more. (pp 233-238)

Readers might be surprised to learn that the Hebrew calendar date of 18-19 Shevat, 5705 corresponds to February 1-2, 1945! How neat is that? So, in Un di velt Father dies seven days after arrival, on the very same day as Abraham Viezel died, who was officially recorded at Buchenwald with the registration number of 123488 and the Auschwitz registration number of A-7712. (However, Un di velt also says that the trip from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald took ten days, which means they could not have arrived until sometime in February. Seven days from that time would not be Feb. 2nd.)

So can we conclude from this that Abraham is Shlomo? Not necessarily. The Yiddish author  reports Father’s death as occurring during the night of 18-19 Shevat (Feb. 1-2), but Elie Wiesel, author of La Nuit, says the date is Jan. 28th! Why? Who can answer that but Elie Wiesel? He certainly knows what the month of Shevat and the year 5705 means … or he could have easily found out.

Or can we conclude that Un di velt was written by Lazar Wiesel, as Nikolaus Grüner claims … that he wrote his story as a father-son relationship … and that he was perhaps not the brother of Abraham as Grüner says he was? (It’s noted on Lazar’s Buchenwald file card that his father was also in Buchenwald; his mother in Auschwitz.) Well, again, not necessarily.  There are other possibilities. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The facts are, there are problems with all of these theories; none is a perfect fit. We can ask: If Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, why did he change so many of the underpinning facts of the story when he rewrote it in French as La Nuit? This is a real head-scratcher. We can also ask: Why did Naomi Seidman, the Jewish professor who discussed in detail some of the differences between the Yiddish book and Night, not mention the 18th of Shevat? Is it because she couldn’t find an explanation for it? Siedman, Ruth Franklin and other Jewish reviewers have never brought up some of these Yiddish to French discrepancies. They are too embarrassing a problem for them.

What we can safely say is that no matter who the author of Un di velt was … he was totally unfamiliar with the real facts of when the Monowitz prisoners arrived at Buchenwald. Was it because he was not one of them? Was it  because he was not concerned about accuracy since his story was directed at a non-critical audience—a Yiddish-speaking Jewish audience? As we continue, we’ll find more mystifications, but also a few certainties.

 What happens to Eliezer after Father’s death?

Wiesel writes in Night (essentially the same in all translations):

I had to stay at Buchenwald until April eleventh. I have nothing to say of my life during this period. […] I was transferred to the children’s block, where there were six hundred of us. […] I spent my days in a state of total idleness. And I had one desire—to eat. I no longer thought of my father or of my mother. (SR, P 114)

He continues that on April 10, a general evacuation of the remainder of the camp—20,000 prisoners in all, including “several hundred children”—was begun but was soon interrupted. It resumed on the 11th but was again interrupted around ten a.m. when the camp inmate “resistance movement” rose up, firing guns. And then at 6 p.m. on that same day the first American tank arrived. This corresponds pretty well with the official story, but then it goes astray.

In a November 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Wiesel recalled:

… and we [children] were left until the end. But every day we marched to the gate anyway. I was near the gate more than five times before I was released, and each time, the gate closed just before I came to it. 

Ah, we have heard this before, haven’t we? As exaggerated as it sounds, in Un di velt the author goes even further. He writes:

I didn’t even bother to try hiding myself.  Let myself be born along with the stream.  Tens of times I stood before the iron camp gate, on the threshold of death, and always something happened which brought us back to the block.  

Un di velt continues: “If I was not killed then it is merely thanks to almightly chance. For – because of the hunger, I even wanted to go to the gate: outside the gate, they were distributing bread and marmalade.”

UdV, P 244:  The first gesture of freedom: the starved men made an effort to get something to eat. They only thought about food. Not about revenge. Not about their parents. Only about bread. And even when they had satisfied their hunger—they still did not think about revenge.

SR, P 115: 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.

Oprah Winfrey interview:  Oprah asks, “After you were liberated, what did you do?” Wiesel answers: “The first thing many of us did was reassemble to say a prayer for the dead.”  (page 5)

*   *   *   * 

UdV, P 244:  Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled.

LN, P 178:  Le lendemain, quelques jeunes gens coururent à Weimar ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits—et coucher avec des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace.

SR, P 116:  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.

MW, P115:  The next day a few of the young men ran into Weimar to bring back some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But still no trace of revenge.

In this case, Wiesel made the change from ‘rape’ to ‘sleep with’ in La Nuit. The expression for “German girls” that we find in the Yiddish book was also removed. The term that was actually used is shikses, a word which originally meant “abomination” and which is used today as a term of contempt for all non-Jewish women. In other words, in saying daytshe shikses, the author was expressing, in rather vulgar terms, his contempt and hatred for German women. This apparently was not good for the eyes of the Goyim to see. It was changed by Wiesel in the French La Nuit, and thus it never reached our eyes until now.

Yet, the Yiddish author goes even further and decries the failure of the Jewish males to take a proper revenge, which is here envisioned as a much larger public act of retribution than the “too mild” raping of German women. (Public retribution, of course, did come later with the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.)

Eliezer is hospitalized for two weeks—April 14 to April 28

UdV P 244:  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.

SR P 116:  Three days after the liberation I became very ill with food poisoning. I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

MW P 115:  Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill: some form of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

Three days after liberation on April 11th is April 14th. Thus, Eliezer is in the hospital from April 14 until April 28—extremely ill, close to death. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel claims that on that day (the 14th) he was thrown a can of lard, which he apparently ate although he doesn’t remember doing so. He lost consciousness and awoke in a hospital. But the addition of this story, which is in the original Un di velt, presents serious problems for Elie Wiesel. Perhaps the hospital story had slipped his mind when he decided to claim he was one of the survivors lying on a bunk in the “famous Buchenwald liberation photograph.” Because he was in the hospital …

He cannot be in the famous Buchenwald liberation photo taken on April 16 …

I have already demolished the false claim that Wiesel is in that photograph here. But on top of that, our translator found an interview of Leo Eitinger, a Jewish Czech-born psychiatrist, by Harry James Cargas, a friend and biographer of Elie Wiesel, which contained this gem:

 HJC:   The same thing happened with Livia Rothkirchen at Yad Vashem as happened with you. I was there doing research on atrocity photography for my book A Christian Response to the Holocaust and saw a photo that covers a large wall, of seventeen men lying in their bunks at liberation time. I think you’ve probably seen this picture. Wiesel and Dr. Rothkirchen passed it by many times, over a several-year period, before he told her he was in that photograph. I asked Elie if I could write something about it and he said, “No.” I wrote something and showed it to him and he gave me permission to publish it. 

The photo at Yad Vashem in Israel with Elie Wiesel posing in front of it in 1986 after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

LE: I didn’t know Elie is in the photo.4

Cargas’ book was published in 1993, ten years after it was publicly announced that Elie Wiesel was in that photograph. Apart from the revelation that Cargas has to ask permission from Wiesel before he publishes anything about him, can you imagine that after walking by that famous photo for several years, Wiesel would finally think to say, “Oh hey, that’s me laying there, back in the shadows.”

He cannot have been present to agree to and sign the Military Questionaire on April 22 …

Much has been made by holocaust historians like Kenneth Waltzer and others I won’t name that this Fragebogen made out for Lázár Wiesel proves that Elie Wiesel was in Buchenwald. The birth date is not Elie’s; the date of arrest is not Elie’s; the signature is not Elie’s; the registration number belongs to another prisoner (Pavel Kun) who died only a month earlier; and on top of all that … Elie himself tells us in Night that he was lingering between life and death in the hospital on April 22. He was still six days away from having recovered enough to leave the hospital.

He cannot be in the photograph of the “Boys of Buchenwald” taken on April 27.

Kenneth Waltzer also claims on his Michigan State University website that Elie Wiesel is “seen to the left”  (short boy fourth from the front in left row wearing dark suit in front of the taller boy wearing a beret) in this photograph of the youths being transferred from the barracks inside Buchenwald to the former SS barracks on the outside. Why is Waltzer not paying attention to what is written in Night — that Eliezer was put in the hospital on the 14th of April, at death’s door, and remained for two weeks? One really has to wonder at the stupidity of holocaust historians. Or more likely — how stupid they think the rest of us are! See The Many Faces of Elie Wiesel.

The book’s ending: What does the long passage in Un di velt hot geshvign tell us?

UdV P 245:  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 antisemites 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?

SR P 116:  One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.

The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

MW P 115:  One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.

The look in his eyes as he as he gazed at me has never left me.

The difference in length between the Yiddish and the English passage is the first thing that strikes us. The Yiddish writer had a lot to say in these final thoughts. He regained his “will to live” right there in the hospital. Twice he speaks of writing an outline and notes for Un di velt hot geshvign  while still in his hospital bed. But there is no record by Elie Wiesel anywhere that says he did any writing in preparation for writing his “testimony” while in the camp (in fact, just the opposite), or at any time in advance of 1954.

The tragic true story of Ilse Koch is that she gave birth to one child while a prisoner of the Americans but she certainly was not allowed to raise him. She was hounded, vilified and persecuted after the war, retried by a German court in 1951 after being acquitted at the IMT, and ultimately given a life sentence—solely, it can be argued, to satisfy Jewish vengeance. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

The Yiddish author also mentions the “six million Jewish martyrs” … in 1954. This number emerged from the Nuremberg Tribunals, but we know that claims of “six million Jewish victims” goes all the way back to the 1890’s.

All this and more was cut out for the French La Nuit (which, remember, was written by Wiesel) and the English versions which were taken from the French. As has been noted by Jewish commentators themselves, the Yiddish writer is an angry, politically-minded religious Jew who expected, or wished, the world to have been transformed by the travail of the Jews during WWII. He is bitterly disappointed. There is more in this final chapter of the Yiddish book that doesn’t appear in the French or English versions. Here is just one passage:

 Dreams of truth, of freedom are false dreams for men. Visions of justice and equality are false visions for men. Man is: the struggle for bread, for meat; man is: the struggle to satisfy one’s own instincts.

Man is instinct to the core.  Flesh to the core.  And not heart.  And not spirit.  And not morality.

I learned that in Buchenwald. And what one learns in such conditions is without a doubt the truth, the purest truth.  For man can really know man only in extreme conditions, when he has thrown away from himself all masks, social and psychological, and appears before us naked, as he is in truth.

In Buchenwald I saw the true face of man.  The face of a human animal, which is worse than a true animal. O God, woe is you, woe is man, how trifling and puny.  Ought you to even exist, if the son of Adam was made in your image!

God . . . I had ceased to believe in his existence.  But despite that, I continued to believe in his evil. (UdV, P 240-41)

Was this written by Elie Wiesel? If it was, he is a man who has put on his own mask to play the game of Jewish vengeance against the goyim persecutors of his people. In other parts of Night, Wiesel writes of losing his faith in a caring God, of no longer following his religion—but later he denied that is true, even though he wrote it! But this passage in Un di velt is too passionate to dismiss as merely a passing sense of discouragement. That is, of course, unless it is just a literary construct and doesn’t reflect any truth of the author.

What does it all mean?

The title of this two-part article is “What Changes were made to Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Why.” I didn’t promise to solve the mystery of the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, but I did hope I might do so, or at least eliminate some contenders.

I confess I expected there to be more difference between the Yiddish and the French books than it turns out to be. It is now clear that La Nuit was taken directly from Un di velt, although that doesn’t mean they were written by the same person. However, that is the greater likelihood unless it can be proven otherwise. Similarly, if Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt, it doesn’t mean he was in the camps. The fact that the books are filled with errors argues against it.

Night is a novel

It’s difficult to come to any certainties when the material we have to work with is so internally inconsistent and when there are several versions of it—similar in some ways to the many versions of the Anne Frank Diary. But we can conclude for certain that Night only works as a novel, not as an autobiography—no matter how much the Jewish spin doctors say that a memoir, to be a work of “great literature,” must include some fictional flights of fancy. Nowhere does Night fit the facts. Even with wife Marion’s changes in 2006, it couldn’t be pulled together enough to make a convincing true-life testimony. And we know how many of these “survivor novels” there are around. It’s not like many other hopefuls didn’t have the same idea!

The Lazar-Lázár Riddle

In spite of all the above, I would like to propose a hypothetical scenario, one that I am not endorsing, for obvious reasons, but that does have the value of answering one of the more ignored aspects of this riddle, namely the way the 32-year-old Lazar Wiesel disappeared at the same time the 16-year-old Lázár Wiesel appeared. This cannot be denied. Thirty-one-year-old Lazar arrived at Buchenwald in January; sixteen-year-old Lázár left there in July. The easiest explanation for this is that Lazar wanted to have the papers of a 16-year-old Buchenwald orphan so he could be sent to France. In the confusion of the last months of the war and the immediate post-war period, this kind of thing became more possible.  Such an explanation may sound a little far-fetched, but is it any harder to swallow than Elie Wiesel not having the tattoo (Auschwitz ID number) that he says he has? Or Elie Wiesel not having his own Buchenwald identification number, but “borrowing” a dead man’s (Pavel Kun, 2 years older than Elie) right before, or after, liberation? These things don’t make sense. Nor does the fact that in La Nuit Elie Wiesel wrote that his father died on Jan. 28, 1945, while in the Yiddish book that he also claims to have written as his own “testimony” the date is Feb. 2nd?  Or that he wrote that the Russian Army took over the Auschwitz complex two days after its evacuation, which everyone knows is false?

Elie Wiesel even wrote in Night that his foot was operated on right before the evacuation of Auschwitz, while in his later real memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pp 89-90), he flat-out recalled it as his knee, something that could not be mis-remembered. I could list many of these senseless “mistakes,” many of which I have written about in earlier articles.

There is something that doesn’t fit well into this Lazar-Lázár hypothesis, though—that is, that we have pictures of the real Elie Wiesel in France at the Jewish welfare orphanage, OSE. But how did he get through a year at Auschwitz and Buchenwald with no records of his being there … and a poor memory of what occurred and when?  Did he somehow manage to attach himself to the Buchenwald transport with the stolen identity papers? But also, there are other ways he could have come to be at the Ecouis homes in France than in the children’s transport from Buchenwald. Just as there are other ways he could have come into possession of the Yiddish Un di velt without writing it himself.

Was Elie Wiesel in the camps?

My answer is still no. Wiesel could have been in some camps in some capacity under some auspices, but he is not telling the truth about what camp experience he did have. That means Hilda Wiesel Kudler is also not telling the truth but is standing by her brother. She says at the end of her bitter testimony to the Shoah Foundation, “I will not forget, and I will not forgive.” Have you ever wondered why Elie has not contributed a videotaped testimony to the Spielberg/USC Shoah Foundation library?

Wiesel’s other sister, who changed her name to Beatrice from Batia, never wrote or testified a word about it. She did go to work for Jewish organizations in Germany, however, immediately after the war, helping Jews to emigrate to wherever they wanted to go, including Palestine. The whole family were committed Zionists, as were most Eastern European/Russian Jews who were able to flood into the West because of the war. ‘Bea’ finally got her own papers to emigrate to Canada.

A Jewish organization, Sharit Ha-Platah, gathered names of Jews who were liberated from Dachau and it’s many sub-camps and published them in 1946. This is the only record so far found with the names of Hilda and Beatrice Wiesel, and it is a self-identified list of Jews by Jews, not an official German record of forced laborers or prisoners. So the hard evidence for the Wiesel family is not there. It doesn’t mean they weren’t, however; it’s  just that we’re left with believing what they say, because we want to or because we’re expected to.

The easiest option is to go along with Elie Wiesel’s story that he was in those camps, and question his credibility from other angles, such as the in-credible stories he tells. This is what revisionists had done before Nikolaus Grüner came along and released documents he had obtained from Buchenwald and the correspondence he had with the archivists there. These documents cannot be ignored, in spite of what other nonsense Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity. These documents have caused a sea change in revisionism about Elie Wiesel, to the extent that it can be divided between pre-Grüner and post-Grüner research and writing.

Wiesel needs to expose himself to questions

Because of these documents, it is up to Elie Wiesel to come forth and answer questions about them. But being that he is completely unprepared to do so, this job has been given to his surrogates—Professor Waltzer for one. Kenneth Waltzer promised, with a lot of bombast, that he would produce proof that Elie is Lazar and that Shlomo is Abraham, but for a year now he has failed to produce it, or even say anything more about it. He has also failed to come out with his promised book, “The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald,” which was to include Elie Wiesel. In the opinion of this writer, Waltzer is as big a fraud as Wiesel, selling emotion and sentimentality instead of factual history. They are both supported with professorships at well-funded universities.

So, back to the main question: Was Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz and Buchenwald?  As I said, my answer is still no … and no one should accept that he was without some further explanation from him, during which he subjects himself to questions. If he’s genuine, he can certainly withstand questions. That, however, is not going to happen because … fill in your own answer.

Elie Wiesel has kept the details of his life before 1955 vague. He has managed to prevent unwanted questions from being asked of him. He hides behind a stated aversion to “holocaust deniers” so that anyone who is not a 100% believer is not welcome in his company. He gets away with the ‘moral outrage’ he professes toward anyone who doubts, thus no interviewer, reporter, writer, academic, student or even President dares to doubt in his presence. It works like a charm.

Endnotes

1.  Danuta Czech,  Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945.  New York: Henry Holt, 1997

2.  APMO, D-Bu 3/17, pp. 18-85, 87 (transport list as cited by Czech in Auschwitz Chronicle)

3.  Hilda was obviously unaware that the march itself was only 24 hours, probably because she had heard so many false and exaggerated stories about “endless days of marching” that proliferate in survivor stories.

4.  Harry James Cargas, ed.  Voices from the Holocaust, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993.  pp. 116-22.

 

 

Night #1 and Night #2—What Changes were Made and Why, Part One

Friday, February 17th, 2012

By Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2012 Carolyn Yeager

On Tuesday, January 17, 2006, Amazon.com announced that it was changing the categorization of a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night from novel to memoir.

Amazon would also revise the editorial description of the original edition to make clear that they consider the book a memoir, not a novel. “We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible,” said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for the online retailer. The day before, Oprah Winfrey had announced that Night was her latest book club choice, displacing her previous selection, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

The sudden switch from fiction to non-fiction caused some discussion and questions, which Strand brushed away by saying,  “Amazon.com’s data source for the Oprah Book Club edition of Night inaccurately classified the book as fiction.” She declined to offer details. The book, re-classified as “Autobiography” and blessed by Oprah, was already No.3 on Amazon.com as of that Tuesday afternoon! Wiesel, interviewed later with his literary agent Georges Borchardt, insisted they had never portrayed it as a novel.

But the publisher did.1 There has been confusion about the question for so long—even Wiesel’s defenders have to admit it. Ruth Franklin, in her 2011 book, A Thousand Darknesses, wrote: “Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.”2  On Night’s Wikipedia page it has long been described as autobiography, memoir, novel—yes, all three. How long will that continue? As long as there are editions of Night that still sport those labels, one assumes.

Left: Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel pose together at the  Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on May  20, 2007.  Winfrey was honored  with  the  Humanitarian   Award for “positively impacting people all over the world, especially children.”  One year earlier, she had selected Wiesel’s “Night” for her popular book club “pick” which sent it immediately to the top of the national bestseller lists.

As for Wiesel and Borchardt, they answered questions about differences in the text of the new edition by saying they were not significant enough to justify raising questions. The next day, Wiesel’s wife Marion, the translator of the new edition of Night, said in an interview that among the changes was a reference to the age of the book’s narrator when he arrives in 1944 at Birkenau, the entry point for Auschwitz.

“At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book,” Marion Wiesel said. She explained it this way:  The narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is “not quite 15.” But the scene takes place in Spring 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. So in the new edition, she changed it to “15.” Whaaaa? She changed the age of Eliezer as it was written in the Yiddish book to fit Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen and a half at that time. What is written in the Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign, we also find in the original Night, so that can only be called unethical. Marion tried to joke it away, telling reporters “I kidded Elie and told him, ‘I don’t think you can add.'”

But that particular change, rather than insignificant, was one of the major reasons that a new translation was undertaken. There are other quite significant changes in the new edition that will be enumerated in this article. When you learn what they are, you can decide for yourself if you think they are insignificant.

Right: Marion Wiesel is the translator of the 2006 edition of  Night. Here, in 2010, she attends an after party at The Monkey Bar for Oliver Stone’s new “South of the Border” New York premiere at Cinema 21.

Wiesel wrote a Preface to the New Translation, something he didn’t have in the original La Nuit or Night.

In his preface, Wiesel begins: “Why did I write it? … so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness …”

He continues in this vein—typical Wiesel mystical-religious style. However, in his only description of the writing process of this book—the typing of the 862 pages which he titled Un di velt hot geshvign, according to his later memoir—it is hard to believe that he was in such a state of mind. He writes in All Rivers Run to the Sea that during this time in Paris he is busy with his newspaper job and contacts; also involved in a love affair with a woman named Hanna. He embarks on a major journalistic assignment in Brazil, sent by his editor, taking along a friend to keep him company on the ship’s crossing. They both get free tickets from a “resourceful Israeli friend”—these benefactors are usually unnamed. As the voyage begins, he says his mind is dwelling on Hanna and whether he should take the marriage step that she had asked for.

I can’t imagine an atmosphere less conducive to writing about what he describes as “the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history.” But he continues very matter-of-factly in All Rivers, “During the crossing I wrote my testimony …” and in one short paragraph tells us all he thought important to say about it. Moreover, he has never elaborated on it since!

In the new preface, Wiesel writes that in retrospect he doesn’t know what he wanted to achieve with his words, but then he comes up with something: “I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them.” He needed to “invent a new language.” He is not speaking of an actual language, like German, French or English—but a language of survivors, or for survivors. Wiesel writes that common words like “hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney … all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else.” Really? He does not explain how that is so. But Wiesel has tried to create the idea of holocaust survivors as a special class, set apart, who know things others do not know, and can never understand—”Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.”

Wiesel describes his writing as slow!  “Writing in my mother tongue (Yiddish) … I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right.” This contrasts totally with his description in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (p. 238-40)  that he wrote the original Yiddish manuscript fast and feverishly without re-reading!

Why a new translation of Night after 45 years of success with the old one?

Here again, Wiesel hedges in the preface and doesn’t have a convincing answer. He says his wife Marion has translated other books for him, and “knows his voice better than anyone else.” He says he didn’t pay enough attention to the original English translation by Stella Rodway—after his first reading of Night from the publisher, he never read it again. As for Mrs. Wiesel: “Fluent in French, she had never read the English version,” she said. But good news! Elie Wiesel Cons The World has found a translator and now has large portions of the Yiddish book translated into English. We can compare the real 245-page original to both the 1960 English translation from the French by Stella Rodway and the 2006 English translation done by Marion Wiesel.

In doing so, we have made two important discoveries.

First, Stella Rodway’s 1960 English translation of Night is an accurate rendition of the French text of La Nuit, as originally published in 1958.  That means that if there are any “errors” in the Night story, they weren’t put there by Stella Rodway.

Second, when we compare the three texts—the original version of Night, as translated by Rodway, the “corrected” 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel, and the 1955 Yiddish original of Un di velt hot geshvign—we find that the “errors” brought up by Marion Wiesel are for the greater part what was actually written in the original Yiddish book, though usually in more detail there.

In other words, the 1955 Yiddish version, the 1958 French version, and the 1960 English version generally agree—only the “corrected” 2006 translation is different.  So, are these really errors of translation that Marion Wiesel is fixing for us?  Or are they not simply problems for Elie Wiesel?  Under close scrutiny, the Elie Wiesel narrative has huge holes which bring up embarrassing questions, and this is what Marion Wiesel’s new translation was meant to head off.

Left: Original Night cover, 1960, features the title, while the author’s name is exceptionally small and insignificant. Francois Mauriac’s forward is featured.  In 2006, the author becomes the “title,” i.e. the main selling point, and Mauriac is no longer mentioned, although his forward remains in the book.

A Comparison of the 1960 original with the 2006 new version.

Following are the most “significant” differences I have found between the Stella Rodway 1960 translation and the Marion Wiesel 2006 translation. To make as clear a case as possible, I begin with the Yiddish [UdV] and its French translation La Nuit [LN], followed by the Stella Rodway English translation [SR]. Finally, Marion Wiesel’s revised translation [MW]. The word or phrase being compared is in boldface. Number one has already been written about in When Did Elie Wiesel Arrive at Auschwitz?

1.  The Saturday before Pentecost … or two weeks before?

UdV Page 22: Geshen iz dos Shbth far Shbw’wth. A friling-zun hot oysgegosn ir likht un varemkeyt iber der gorer velt un oykh iber geto …  /  It happened Saturday [Sabbath] before Shavuot. The springtime sun had spread its light and warmth over the whole world, and even over the ghetto. . . .

LN Page 29: Le samedi précédant la Pentecôte, sous un soleil printanier, les gens se promenaient insouciants à travers les rues grouillantes de monde / The Saturday preceding Pentecost …

SR Page 23:  On the Saturday before Pentecost, in the Spring sunshine, people strolled carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets.

MW Page 12:  Some two weeks before Shavuot (Pentecost). A sunny spring day, people strolled seemingly carefree through the crowded streets.

The Yiddish, the French and the original English versions agree—it was the Saturday before the festival of Pentecost/Shavuot—but Marion Wiesel’s new edition sets that date back by two whole weeks. This is very significant because, as the story continues, it was later on the following day that the Jews of Sighet were forced to leave their homes in preparation for their eventual deportation:  “The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. We were to leave street by street, starting the following day.”

So Mrs.Wiesel was NOT correcting errors in the English translation, but changing the text to fit the reality of when the Hungarians from Sighet arrived at Birkenau.  Pentecost was on Sunday, May 28, 1944. The “Saturday before Pentecost” is thus May 27. Some two weeks before is May 14.

Un di velt hot geshvign, La Nuit and the Rodway translation all have Eliezer’s family leaving on the final journey to Auschwitz around June 2nd, six days after Pentecost/Shavuot, which was a Friday. However, they also agree that “Saturday, the day of rest, was chosen for our expulsion.” So it’s necessary for us to add another day to the family’s stay in the small ghetto to make the chronology work.  On Saturday, then, the Jews are marched to the synagogue and spend the night there; in the morning, Sunday June 4, they board the train: “The following morning [Sunday], we marched to the station, where a convoy of cattle wagons was waiting. [… ] We were on our way.”  Four days and three nights on the train (according to the description in Night) makes their arrival date June 6, 1944, around midnight.

But this is not only long after the prisoner number A7713—which Elie Wiesel supposedly received at Auschwitz, and still (again, supposedly!) has tattooed on his left arm—had been given out, but also long after the last transport left from Sighet.  Indeed, there were no transports from the town after May, according to official records.

Marion Wiesel did not mention this one to the reporters; nor did Elie speak of it in his preface to his wife’s translation. But it was discovered by our translator. Marion Wiesel’s arbitrary “correction” allows Eliezer’s family to leave on May 21 and to arrive  by May 24 (just before midnight!) thus making it possible for Eliezer to receive the registration number A7713. This is a very significant change, probably the most significant in her entire new English translation.

An added note: This interesting passage is on page 27 of Un di velt, but is not included in the shorter French or English Night:

We had opportunities and possibilities to hide with regular goyim and with prominent personalities. Many non-Jews from the surrounding villages had begged us, that we would come to them. There were bunkers available for us in villages or in the mountains. But we had cast aside all proposals. Why? Quite simple: the calendar showed April 1944 and we, the Jews of Sighet, still knew nothing about Treblinka, Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Now we have April as the general time of deportation!  So according to the timeline we find in Un di velt, Eliezer and his family left Sighet some time in June, while the calendar on their wall still said April . . .  and in the meantime, we know from official Auschwitz records that the deportations actually occurred in the last two weeks of May.  The person who wrote this knew nothing about the real deportation dates for the Sighet Jews.

2.  Copulating on the train … or just caressing?

UdV Page 47:  Tsulib der engshaft hobn a sakh instinktn zikh dervekt in kerper.  Erotishe instinktn, un untern forhang fun der nakht hobn yungeleyt un froyen zikh gelozn bahersht durkh di oyfgereytste chwshym zeyere.

Ot der ershter rezultat fun umglik: erotishe freyheyt.  Di shpanung fun di letste teg hot itst gezukht a veg vi oystsulodn zikh un der leychtster iz geven – an erotisher.

Di erotishe stsenes hobn nisht dervekt keyn protestn mtsd di eltere Yidn.  Zey hobn farmakht oyern un oygn, zikh gemakht nisht zen un nisht hern.  In moment fun schnh faln avek di keytn fun der konventsioneler moral.  Mentshn hobn zikh getrakht: ver veys vos der morgn iz “lwl tsu brengen?  Zol yugnt oysnutsn dem heynt, oystsapn fun im dem letstn hn’h-tropn . . .

In English: Because of the crowding, a host of instincts awoke in [people’s] bodies.  Erotic instincts – and beneath the curtain of night young men and women let themselves be ruled by their aroused senses.

And so the first result of misfortune: erotic freedom.  The stress of the last days now sought a way to discharge itself, and the easiest was – an erotic one.

The erotic scenes did not arouse any protests from the older Jews.  They closed their ears and eyes, and forced themselves not to see and hear.  In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.  People thought to themselves: who knows what the morning is likely to bring?  Youth must seize the day, squeeze from it the last drops of pleasure . . .

LN Page 45: Libérés de toute censure sociale, les jeunes se laissaient aller ouvertement à leurs instincts et à la faveur de la nuit, s’accouplaient au milieu de nous, sans se préoccuper de qui que ce fût, seuls dans le monde.  Les autres faisaient semblant de ne rien voir.

SR Page 34:  “Free from all social constraint, the young people gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst, without caring about anyone else, as though they were alone in the world. The rest pretended not to notice anything.”

MW Page 23:  “Freed of normal constraints, some of the young let go of their inhibitions and, under cover of darkness, caressed one another, without any thought of others, alone in the world. The others pretended not to notice.”

Elie Wiesel did not mention this change in his preface to the new English translation by his wife, but he did give quite a lengthy explanation (humorous to us) in the preface he wrote for the new French edition. This is what he said there:

Thanks to her, it was possible for me to correct an incorrect expression or impression here and there.  An example: I describe the first night-time voyage in the sealed cars, and I mention that certain persons had taken advantage of the darkness to commit sexual acts.  That’s false. In the Yiddish text, I say that “young boys and girls allowed themselves to be mastered by their excited erotic instincts.”  I have checked among many absolutely trustworthy sources.  In the train, all the families were still together.  A few weeks of the ghetto could not have degraded our behavior to the point of violating customs, mores and ancient laws.  That there may have been some clumsy touching, that is possible.  But that was all.  Nothing went any further.  But then, why did I say that in Yiddish, and allow it to be translated into French and English?  The only possible explanation: it is myself I am speaking of.  It is myself that I condemn.  I imagine that the adolescent that I was then, in the throes of puberty even if profoundly pious, could not resist such erotic imaginings, enriched by the physical proximity between men and women.

The original French : Grâce à elle, il me fut permis de corriger çà et là une expression ou une impression erronées. Exemple : j’évoque le premier voyage nocturne dans les wagons plombés et je mentionne que certaines personnes avaient profité de l’obscurité pour commettre des actes sexuels. C’est faux. Dans le texte yiddish je dis que « des jeunes garçons et filles se sont laissés maîtriser par leurs instincts érotiques excités. » J’ai vérifié auprès de plusieurs sources absolument sûres. Dans le train toutes les familles étaient encore réunies. Quelques semaines de ghetto n’ont pas pu dégrader notre comportement au point de violer coutumes, moeurs et lois anciennes. Qu’il y ait eu des attouchements maladroits, c’est possible. Ce fut tout. Nul n’est allé plus loin. Mais alors, pourquoi l’ai-je dit en yiddish et permis de le traduire en français et en anglais? La seule explication possible: c’est de moi-même que je parle. C’est moi-même que je condamne. J’imagine que l’adolescent que j’étais, en pleine puberté bien que profondément pieux, ne pouvait résister à l’imaginaire érotique enrichi par la proximité physique entre hommes et femmes.

Is this convincing, dear readers? Consider that the narrator of Un di velt says exactly the opposite of what Wiesel tries to present in his new French preface: the first result of a few weeks in the ghetto was erotic freedom, which was acted out in front of everyone in the train. And the “erotic instincts” that the youths let themselves be “ruled by” clearly must have involved sexual intercourse—why else would everyone have needed to shut their eyes and ears so tightly?

The Elie Wiesel of 2006 (and perhaps the Hasidic rebbes had something to do with this?) wants us to believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Jews’ “customs, mores and ancient laws,” and also in their innate respect for their elders and one another. But he is directly contradicted by what are, we are told, his own words of fifty years ago : “In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.”  Which Wiesel do we believe?

And Ruth Franklin, senior editor at The New Republic,  has the temerity to insist (toward the end of her 2006 review article) that “his [Elie’s] original suggestion that couples “copulated” in the cattle cars on the way to Auschwitz  . . .  was always a gross mistranslation of the original Yiddish.”  We’ve shown you here that it isn’t.

3.  Not yet fifteen … or fifteen?

UdV Page 63 : Yingl, vi alt bistu? fregt mir a heftling.  Zeyn pnym iz geven in der fintster, ober zeyn kol iz geven a mids, a varems. Nokh nisht keyn 15 yor, hob ikh geentfert.

“Kid, how old are you?” a prisoner asked me.  His face was in darkness, but his voice was tired and warm. “Not yet 15 years,” I answered.

LN Page 54:  Hé, le gosse, quel âge as-tu?  C’était un détenu qui m’interrogeait.  Je ne voyais pas son visage, mais sa voix était lasse et chaude.  “Pas encore quinze ans.” / Not yet 15 years.

SR Page 39: “Here, kid, how old are you?” It was one of the prisoners who asked me this. I could not see his face, but his voice was tense and weary. “I’m not quite fifteen yet.”

MW Page 30:  “Hey, kid, how old are you?” The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice  was weary and warm.  “Fifteen”

This very important passage was discussed above. I think the reader would agree that “not yet 15″ can mean even farther from the age of 15 than “not quite fifteen.” What is clear is that Marion Wiesel has changed the author’s original words to fit them to her husband’s age in Spring 1944.

4.   April … or May?

UdV Page 83:  A sheyner April-tog iz es geven. A frilings-rich in der luft.  In English:  It was a beautiful April day. A scent of spring in the air.

LN Page 69: C’était une belle journee d’avril.  Des parfums de printemps flottaient dans l’air.  Le soleil baissait vers l’ouest.

SR Page 49:  It was a beautiful April day. The fragrance of spring was in the air. The sun was setting in the west.

MW Page 40:  It was a beautiful day in  May. The fragrances of spring were in the air. The sun was setting.

(See again When Did Wiesel Arrive) Once more, the original Night as translated by Stella Rodway agrees with the Yiddish and the French; Marion Wiesel arbitrarily changed April to May, yet said her translation did not “change the meaning or the fact of anything in the book”  … what she calls a “significant change.” Well, this is a significant change, and for the same reason as given in number 1 above.

5.  Himmler … or “Reichsfuehrer Himmler?”

UdV Page 124-5:  “In nomen fun Himler . . . der heftling num’ . . . hot gegnbet . . . bsh”thn luft-alarm . . . loytn gezets, paragraf . . . iz der heftling num’ . . . farurteylt tsum toyt!  Zol dos zeyn a lere un a beyshpil far ale heftlingen . . .”

“In the name of Himmler . . . prisoner number . . . stole . . .  during the air raid . . . according to the law, paragraph . . . prisoner number . . . is condemned to death.  May this be a lesson and an example for all prisoners.”

LN Page 100:  “Au nom de Himmler ... Le détenu N^o… a dérobé pendant l’alerte… “

SR Page 68:  “In the name of Himmler … prisoner Number … stole during the alert … According to the law … paragraph …prisoner Number … is condemned to death. May this be a warning and an example to all prisoners.”

MW Page 62:  “In the name of  Reichsfuehrer Himmler … prisoner number … stole during the air raid … according to the law … prisoner number … is condemned to death. Let this be a warning …..”

Again, the Yiddish and the original Night agree.  However, no trained member of the SS, or even the Wehrmacht, would ever have shown such disrespect as to use Himmler’s name in such a formal context without his full title: Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler.  Marion Wiesel tried to fix the error by adding “Reichsfuehrer,” but she still gets it wrong: you don’t drop the “SS.”  On its own, this tells us that the speech was an imaginary one  invented by the author (whoever that is), someone who was never present at such a scene. Indeed, lack of knowledge about how the SS functioned in the camps is evident throughout the book. For example, the SS did not normally go inside the barracks; everything inside was handled by the kapos.

6. Ten days and ten nights … or just “days and nights”

UdV Page 207:  Tsen teg un tsen nekht hot gedoyert di reyze. / Ten days and ten nights the trip lasted.

LN Page 155:   Dix jours, dix nuits de voyage.  Il nous arrivait de traverser des localités allemandes.

SR Page101:  Ten days, ten nights of traveling.  Sometimes we would pass through German townships.

MW Page 100:  There followed days and nights of traveling. Occasionally we would pass through German towns.

In January of 1945, as the advancing Red Army approached Auschwitz, a decision was made to evacuate, sending the prisoners to other camps in Germany.  Evacuation of the Monowitz (Auschwitz III) camp, to which Eliezer and Father had previously been transferred, began at 6 p.m. on January 18. The prisoners were given extra clothing and food—bread to carry with them. They also had whatever food they had saved up. After marching all night during a snowfall, they rested in the morning in an old brick factory. In late afternoon, they began again and reached Gleiwitz camp in a few hours [night, Jan. 19]; they then remained in Gleiwitz barracks for three days. On the 22nd  they went to the train stop and waited until evening. They were brought bread for the journey. The convoy set out

From there, as we see above, the Yiddish, the 1958 French and 1960 English versions agree on the trip lasting ten days and nights. But Marion Wiesel removes the number ten because it makes Eliezer’s timeline for the death of his father on Jan. 28/29 completely impossible. Another very significant change. Ten days and nights from the night of Jan. 22nd is the night of Feb 1, 1945.

This shows that the author of Un di velt knew nothing about the transport that arrived at Buchenwald on January 26 with 3000 prisoners from Auschwitz. This is the transport that, according to existing official records, brought Lazar and Abraham Wiesel to Buchenwald, who were registered at the camp there on  . . . January 26, 1945! (See Buchenwald Archivist Cannot ID Elie Wiesel, How True to Life is Wiesel’s description of Buchenwald, and Gigantic Fraud Carried Out.)

7. Fifteen … or sixteen?

UdV Page 213:  I was fifteen years old then. Do you understand—fifteen? Is it any wonder that I, along with my generation, do not believe either in God or in man; in the feelings of a son, in the love of a father. Is it any Wonder that I cannot realize that I myself experienced this thing, that my childish eyes had witnessed it?  (This passage from Moshe Spiegel’s stand-alone translation of Chapter Six of Un di velt hot geshvign, published as “The Death Train” in the 1968 volume Anthology of Holocaust Literature.)

LN Page 158:  J’avais quinze ans. / I was fifteen.

SR Page 103:  I was fifteen years old.

MW Page 102:  I was sixteen.

In the original versions, Eliezer repeats that he is fifteen years old in January 1945. Elie Wiesel’s birth date is Sept. 30, 1928 so on that day in 1944 he became sixteen years old, making him 16 years and 4 months when this particular event on the train to Buchenwald occurred in late January 1945. Once again, Marion Wiesel simply changes the age as she did before — if Elie was actually sixteen at that time, then Eliezer, the character in the book, must be too!

In Part Two, I will construct the timeline of the events in Buchenwald following the arrival of Eliezer and his father, and other details about Buchenwald. What will we find out?  Stay tuned.

Endnotes:

1. On the back cover of the original hardcover Night,  with the black & white striped jacket (as pictured here), it is printed “Literature” as the classification.  

2.  Ruth Franklin,  A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2011,  pp 71-72.

Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.  Lawrence Langer, in his landmark study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, notes that Night “continues to be classified and critically acclaimed as a novel, and not without reason.” . . .

Nonetheless, in 1997 Publishers Weekly columnist Paul Nathan had to issue a correction apologizing for referring to the book as an “autobiographical novel”; he had been misled, he said, by the entry on Wiesel in The International Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Biography.  In response, the correction itself was challenged by the director of Penguin Reference Books, publishers of the biography dictionary, who cited half a dozen sources to the effect that Night was in fact a novel.  Together with most critics, Gary Weissman, who recounted the above history in his book Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, seems to concur with Ernst Pawel’s remark in an early magazine survey of Holocaust fiction, that “the line between fact and fiction, tenuous at best, tends to vanish altogether in autobiographical novels such as Night.”  The hybrid terms used to describe it include “novel/autobiography,” “non-fictional novel,” “semi-fictional memoir,” “fictional-autobiographical memoir,” “fictionalized autobiographical memoir,” and “memoir-novel.

GO TO PART TWO

Buchenwald Memorial Archivist Cannot ID Elie Wiesel as an Inmate

Saturday, November 26th, 2011

by Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2011 carolyn yeager

Accepts Yad Vashem propaganda book as good enough to go by.

According to a letter (see below) received by a German reader of this website from Sabine Stein of the Gedenkstatte Buchenwald (Wiemar, Germany), the  Buchenwald Memorial’s acceptance that Elie Wiesel is one of the men in the famous Buchenwald Liberation photograph is based on the reliability of Yizhak Arad’s The Pictorial History of the Holocaust. This book was published several years after the New York Times announced to the world that Elie Wiesel was in the picture, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum went along with it. There has never been any real, or convincing, verification that the man in the picture is Elie Wiesel.

Originally published in 1990,  The Pictorial History of the Holocaust was edited by Yizhak Arad; designed by Hava Mordohovich, published by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. It says on the copyright page: The publication of this album was made possible through the initiative and generosity of Miriam and Haim Schaechter. The Editorial Board is composed of Yizhak Arad, Reuven Dafni, Gideon Greif and Yehudit Levin. Maps drawn by Alissa Gold. The book is a 100% Jewish-Israeli production (note the Star of David on the cover) and is partisan propaganda.

But the Buchenwald Memorial outside of Weimar has nothing better to point to as why we should believe that Elie Wiesel was one of their famous “guests.” This book captions the picture in question as:  “Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner 1986, is the farthest right on the second tier from below.” Interesting that they add Nobel Peace Prize winner, isn’t it? That was the whole purpose of claiming Elie to be in the picture to begin with.

Sabine also admits that Simon Toncman (standing, who never identified himself in the picture) was identified by his internee number, while all others who are supposedly known to be in the picture recognized, i.e. identified, themselves. That means Elie Wiesel is self-identified, as is Myklos Grüner.

To put a better face on this, Ms. Stein tells the letter-writer about the questionnaire of 22 April 1945. But as we know, this questionnaire was filled out for Lázár Wiesel with a birthdate of Oct. 4, 1928, not Sept. 30 which is Elie’s birthdate, and the hand-written signature on the questionnaire doesn’t match Elie’s later known signature. The Buchenwald ID number given to this Lázár Wiesel is 123165, which had formerly belonged to a Pavel Kun who died on 8th March ’45 (one month earlier!) That means it could not have been given to Elie Wiesel when he arrived and was registered at the end of January ’45.  Why would young Elie Wiesel be given, in April,  a new ID number that had belonged to a recently deceased inmate? And at the same time be given a new birthdate?  With all these problems, this questionnaire is still used, along with the photograph, to “prove” Wiesel was detained in Buchenwald. I conclude that the Memorial Museum is only going along with these weak pieces of “evidence” because it is itself part of the “holocaust” business. We must remember that the Buchenwald Memorial was the creation of ex-inmates, mostly communists, who had. and still have, a vested interest in promoting the worst possible view of the National Socialist Germans. No exaggeration or lie was too great for them to enshrine as truth. The organization these ex-inmates formed still runs the Buchenwald Memorial site today.

All deceased internees names not known

Ms. Stein further tells our reader that her department cannot determine the names of all deceased internees of the KZ Buchenwald because at the beginning of 1945 arrivals died before their personal datas could be registered. However, the day and location of death was registered as “unknown deaths.” (We know that Shlomo Wiesel could not be one of these “unknown deaths” because his death, according to son Elie’s books,  took place over a week after arrival. In addition, others in the transport Elie and Shlomo are said to have been on were registered.) According to Stein, there were a total 1265 of these deaths between Jan. 1 and April 11, 1945 and just who they are will be determined at a future time when the Bad Arolson archives are made available to them. (Can it be that the Arolson archives are open to Ken Waltzer of Michigan State University Jewish Studies Dept. but not to the Archive Dept. of the Buchenwald Memorial Museum? Strange stuff.)

Therefore, Sabine Stein says a complete list of the names of the liberated internees of the KZ Buchenwald, who were present at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945, is not available from her. In other words, she cannot clear up the mystery of Elie Wiesel, she can just go along with the narrative as it is and not make waves.

******

The letter from Sabine Stein to our reader, with personal information removed,  is translated below into English.

07 09 11

Dear  Mr. ______,

Please find the enclosed answer of your questions as per our previous notice.
Permit me some remarks concerning the general position of the memorial regarding its archive and documents.
The Archive of the memorial does not posses the original registration of the KZ Buchenwald, nor the original documents of the closing of the camp after its liberation in April 1945. Those documents are stored at the International Search Service of the Red Cross at Bad Arolsen (www.its-arolsen.org). The basis of our research is a biographical collection of individual persons and comprehensive reports for our archive. We started in 1971; for historical reasons it is therefore forced to be incomplete. In order to arrive at dependable results, additional relevant collections and archives have to be gained, specifically in regard to internees who were transferred to different national socialist concentration or destruction camps.

1) Photo 020-46007
With exception of Simon Toncman  who was identified  by his internees number, all  other named persons recognized  themselves. Elie Wiesel’s identification was based on the publication of Yizhak Arad’s The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, Maxwell Macmillan International 1992. On page 403 is the photo and on page 404 the following text appears: Buchenwald, after the liberation, survivors in their barracks. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner 1986, is the farthest right on the second tier from below.

2) Regarding the liberated person Elie Wiesel, there exists a  questionnaire on microfilm for inmates of the concentration camp 22nd of April 1945, (BwA 51-11-842).  The original is at the aforementioned ITS (International Tracing Service) Arolsen.

When counting the dead internees based on the camp statistics, you made an error.  According to documents of the camp office, official death is registered for the time span 1.1.1945 to 31.3 1945. (Jan. 1 to March 31—3 months -cy) During that time 13.910 internees died.

From 1.4.1945 until 11.4.1945, 913 internees died. (April 1 to April 11—10 or 11 days)  This amounts (from 1.1 to 11.4 1945), to a total of 13,966 and not 13,969. (These figures don’t add up, but I double-checked them and this is what the original letter in German said.)

Throughout years of research we tried our best to determine the names of all deceased internees of the KZ Buchenwald. Yet at the beginning of 1945 arrivals died before their personal datas could be registered, in that case the statistics of the camp register them as “unknown” death. All those not-named deaths are registered at the data bank as “unknown death,” by day of death and location of death. For the time of January till April 1945 a total of 1265. Because the archive of the international search institute at Bad Arolsen unfortunately remained closed for us, the files available there are not yet worked into our memorial book.  This will be done in the near future. A complete list with the names of the liberated internees of the KZ Buchenwald or the persons present at Buchenwald on 16.4.1945 is unfortunately not available. Further information might be found at the National Archive at Washington.

Of the 5 Buchenwald internees numbers, I can only name the one of Miklos Gruener (Michael Nikolas Gruener), 120762. The one of Wiesel, 123165, you know already. The other numbers I could not find because the number card is not handed down (or complete).  Only ITS Arolsen can also help here.

Friendly Greetings
Sabine Stein/Archive

Grüner False Identity Lawsuit Against Elie Wiesel Set For January 24 in Budapest

Friday, November 18th, 2011

by Carolyn Yeager

Myklos Grüner will finally get his day in court!

This writer spoke on the telephone with Grüner in Sweden in September 2010, at which time he assured her he would challenge Wiesel’s identity in a court in Budapest the following January. We know how court dates can be postponed, and even cancelled, but Grüner has proved himself to be a persevering man, and though a year late, it now seems he will indeed present his evidence in court.  However, the defendant will not be the highly protected Elie Wiesel himself, but Hungarian rabbi Slomó Köves, who invited  Wiesel to Hungary in 2009 while “knowing that (he) is not a genuine Holocaust survivor” but “stole the identity of an inmate,” according to Grüner.

It’s possible this could deteriorate into a circus, but one hopes not. Grüner views the court case in Budapest as a giant leap in a long, painful, personal journey, according to the BosNewsLife story.  As a 15-year-old boy in Auschwitz whose father had died, he “befriended Lázár Wiesel, who was among those protecting him. In January 1945, as the Russian army was coming, the inmates were transferred from a satellite camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buchenwald in Germany.”  The satellite camp was Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, for workers at the IG Farben plant.

Grüner exaggerates the length of time it took the Auschwitz inmates to get to Buchenwald, but he indeed was on that march. (The march itself was only one day, after that they went by train.) Grüner, as well as Lazar and Abram Wiesel, were registered at Buchenwald, but the man we know as Elie Wiesel never was. This is proved by the documents held at Buchenwald. Grüner states in the Bos article that Abram Wiesel, Lazar’s older brother, died on the way, but this is not as he described it in his book Stolen Identity, nor according to Buchenwald records which record Abram Wiesel’s death on Feb. 2, 1945 in Barracks 57.

Miklos Grüner, like most holocaust survivors, has memory problems and embellishes his facts … however, he was there and he is in the famous photograph (far left, lower bunk) while Elie Wiesel is not the man at the far right (upper bunk) that he claims is himself. This has been proven on this website Elie Wiesel Cons The World, most recently and thoroughly here.

According to Bos, Grüner still says that when he was invited to meet Nobel Prize winner Wiesel in 1986, he thought he would be meeting his old friend. Instead it was a man who Grüner claims he never saw before. “Wiesel refused to show me his tattoo. It was a very short meeting.” Grüner said he “doesn’t mind that Wiesel earns 25,000 dollars” for a 45 minute speech.” But I don’t want him to make money on the deaths of my family members and the millions of others who perished in the Holocaust,” he said, his voice trembling. “I want to leave this world knowing that I have told the next generation the truth…I even want a dialogue with Anti-Semites and the Catholic Church, for I later painted as an artist.”

 Swedish newspaper article from 1986 of Grüner-Wiesel meeting.  Grüner, on left, greets Wiesel, right,  in a friendly fashion but is inwardly wondering who he is!

It is our hope that Mr. Grüner succeeds in having his day in court and that he will be able to make his case. It appears that at least the BozNewsLife news service will cover it, and that is good news for us. We know what he is up against, but still we hope.