How Wiesel’s “tattoo” looks from where I’m sitting

Friday, July 15th, 2016

by Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2016 Carolyn Yeager

It’s pretty pathetic to be confronted with a picture like the above, and expected to acknowledge that it is Elie Wiesel’s Auschwitz tattoo that I have been asking to see for six years now. Once again, the best suggestion I have for magnifying it is to click on it to get the image page, then hit the plus key up to 8 times while holding down the Ctrl key. The image stays sharp while being greatly enlarged. What do you see? I invite all the amateur, and maybe professional sleuths out there to do their thing.

Wiesel has been hiding this faded-out, so-far-undecipherable spot on his arm for 70 years, and now that he’s safely buried and completely inaccessible, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that broke the story of Wiesel’s death, is beginning to reveal that arm. At least, that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.

To the naked eye, it appears to be a bruise on the arm. Upon magnification, we can barely make out what appear to be numbers, but it’s not at all clear what numbers they are. I think I see a couple but I’m not going to reveal what they are because I want a better image – and think we all deserve one. The dark and light lines made by his arm hair create a confused mess, visually. What we need are more high-resolution photographs like this one, preferably with a straight-on view of the arm. The photographer Eyal Toueg must have taken many shots on this day in 2006 and he would have all the negatives. It is his responsibility to publish them all, every one that shows Wiesel’s left arm, but he is probably Israeli and is under the dictate of higher ups. Someone else may have bought all the negatives. Maybe Haaretz owns them.

As it is, we are left with many questions – such as, why has Wiesel refused to show his supposed faded tattoo over the years? Is it because it’s unreadable? If he revealed it, the public would question it – or at least sceptics would – and he was not prepared to answer questions. Probably, if there were journalists who took a genuine unflinching investigative approach, he would have been forced to discuss it, but none did. The efforts of Jean Robin of Enquete & Debat website to encourage such an investigation show conclusively that lack of journalistic willingness.

Has it been kept hidden because it is not A-7713? Could that be why whatever was there has been defaced or somehow unnaturally/synthetically faded or smeared? I cannot find any example of an Auschwitz tattoo that looks like his does.

Is it because it is something he put on his arm himself when he was a youth in France? In this 1945 b&w photograph (below) taken at the French orphanage for Jewish boys we see what looks like an Auschwitz tattoo, albeit a tiny one, on Wiesel’s arm in the same place we see the dark spot in the 2006 photo.

The ready conclusion is that it’s his Auschwitz tattoo A-7713. But we can’t make it out at all! It’s already faint in 1945 and when I magnify it, no part of it is recognizable.

It’s also interesting that this photograph was posted on the Internet by French Jew Loupi Smith, but it doesn’t seem to be in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum online collection (where it is hopeless to try to view their Wiesel photo collection, anyway; they obviously don’t want you to see it). Nor is it in the Yad Vashem photo collection under Elie Wiesel – in fact, they have only 3 photographs with Wiesel in them – all the rest are aerial views of Auschwitz-Birkenau! Really weird. I think this decision to withhold pictures of Wiesel can only have come from Wiesel himself. In my opinion, though, the above is definitely a photo of Elie Wiesel in 1945 in France.

Our next pictures are these two, which show the same mark on the arm in the same place, but both are still completely unreadable as numbers. I assume these pics are from the same 2006 photo shoot that produced our newest picture, which is a much better high-resolution image. We can see sharp detail, but the “tattoo” is still not decipherable. It’s a really bad “tattoo!” The problem does seem to be with the “tattoo,” not the photograph. It is just very faint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now take a look at another  man’s equally hairy arm below– he is Erwin Farkas who was transported to Auschwitz from Hungary in 1944 at the age of 14. His number, A-7899, is only 186 digits beyond A-7713 – they are in the same time frame. His tattoo is faded and a little blurred, but still legible. There is no discoloration of the surrounding skin and the numbers are definitely blue. In fact, all the tattoos that one sees on the Internet are in this good of shape or better (many are fake though).

 

What happened to Wiesel’s that it is almost impossible to see? Only Wiesel could answer that – or would – so it’s clear that he didn’t want to since he didn’t allow the higher quality picture at the top of this page be published during his lifetime.

In the “court of public opinion” and morally (if not legally), there is no excuse for Elie Wiesel to have been given the velvet-glove treatment he was by journalists and by historians. He had a duty to show the tattoo he said was on his arm and allow it to be photographed. He had a moral duty to prove that it was what he said it was—A-7713. His failure to do that over the course of many years makes him, and the mainstream media that enabled him, guilty of worse than negligence — they are guilty of withholding evidence. The media and academics are more guilty than Wiesel himself because Wiesel has to be given the right not to incriminate himself.

But morally, Wiesel is guilty of withholding evidence that was available all the time.

Above, I used the words “higher quality” but if all these pictures of Wiesel in the white knit short-sleeve shirt were taken on the same day by a professional photographer (which it makes sense that they were) then they should all be of similar high quality. And since we can’t make out the numbers on any of the three, it can only be that it’s the fault of the ‘tattoo,’ not the photography.

I don’t believe this latest-to-be-revealed photograph from 2006 is photo-shop in any way. I do believe this is what Wiesel has on his arm, which he always claimed was A-7713. If it turned out to be A-7713, I would’t be upset in the least because all I’ve ever wanted was the truth about Elie Wiesel. But there will be questions and I will have a very hard time reconciling myself to the idea that the SS camp authorities could have made up a registration card for a 15 year old boy with the information that he was a 31-year-old man with the occupation of Schlosserlehring (Locksmith) – and never correcting it – allowing this boy to enter Buchenwald with that identification. No, it would be very hard to believe that.

So I can only hope that more of these photos by Eyal Toueg will be published. Because as it stands now, Elie Wiesel’s tattoo claims still don’t pass the most elementary test – that of what the heck is the number!

“Elie Wiesel Was Not in Buchenwald” Made Simple

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

[Continuation from “Is it time to call Ken Waltzer a fraud?“]

by Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2013 carolyn yeager  [last updated 12-5-2015]

 

“In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.” –Elie Wiesel speaking of his book Night, from his Memoir: All Rivers Run to the Sea

For the skeptics and know-nothings who have written in suggesting Eli Wiesel was not in the camps, that Night is purely fiction, you are all dead wrong. The Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives documents for Lazar Wiesel and his father prove beyond any doubt that Lazar and his father arrived from Buna to Buchenwald January 26, 1945, that his father soon died a few days later. –Kenneth Waltzer in a comment at Scrapbookpages Blog, March 6, 2010.

 

The story that Michigan State University history professor Kenneth Waltzer has told us about Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald, based on Wiesel’s book Night, is not true.1

Elie Wiesel was not incarcerated at Buchenwald.

He was not liberated from Buchenwald.

He was not a victim of the “Nazis” there.

How do we know that?

Well, how do we know that Elie Wiesel was at Buchenwald?

1.  We have a numerical file (registration) card for Lazar Wiesel from Sighet, born 1913.

2.  We have a questionaire (Fragebogen) made out for and signed by a Lázár Wiesel, a 16-year old Jew from Sighet.

3.  We have a transport list from Buchenwald to France with the name Lazar Wiesel, born Oct. 4, 1928.

4.  We see a picture of him in the famous photograph taken in Barracks #56 on April 16, 1945.

5.  We have a death report for Abraham Viezel on 2-2-1945, in Block 57.

6.  We have a transport list from Auschwitz to Buchenwald with the names Lazar Wiesel, #123565, born 4 September 1913 and Abram Viezel, #123488, born 10 October 1900.

7.  We have a photo of the “rescued children” marching out of the Buchenwald main gate on April 27, 1945.

8.  We have the book Night, in which he says he was.

*      *      *

The above list is ordered according to its perceived importance in proving Wiesel was at Buchenwald, so I’ll start from the bottom (least important) in showing that they don’t prove any such thing.

8.  The persuasiveness of the book Night has been dealt with in several other places, for example here and here, and is not considered evidence.

7.  Photo of Buchenwald Boys (scroll down a bit). The boy that Ken Waltzer has identified as Elie Wiesel (who was identified to him as such by Jack Werber of Great Neck, NY, a “holocaust survivor” activist) is clearly not Wiesel and has not been identified as Wiesel by anyone other than Ken Waltzer. Waltzer had this image/blurb, at right, on his MSU website for years [the site was removed sometime in 2012], making him look foolish. Will Waltzer admit that he was wrong all this time, or try to sweep it under the proverbial rug?

6.  The Transport List to Buchenwald only proves that Lazar Wiesel, age 31  (a locksmith by trade) and Abram Viesel,  age 44,  arrived at Buchenwald on January 26, 1945 from Auschwitz. See here and here. Lazar had been given the Buchenwald number 123565, while Abram had 123488. There is no honest way to turn these two into Eliezer Wiesel and his father. Both the birth dates and the names are wrong. It only proves that Elie Wiesel claimed for himself the Auschwitz prisoner number (A7713) of another man. Where is the tattoo on Elie’s arm that reads A7713?

5.  The Death Report for Abraham Viezel, Buchenwald prisoner number 123488, same as on the transport list. His death is recorded as taking place in Block 57 on February 2, 1945, not Jan. 29, 1945 as is clearly stated in Night for Eliezer’s father.2

4.   The Famous Liberation Photo taken at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945 is said to show Elie Wiesel among the men in the bunks. Beside the fact that the face pointed out as Elie’s doesn’t look like him (for reasons which have been made clear here and here) and that he did not identify himself in it until 1983 when the campaign to get him a Nobel Prize began, there is also his hospitalization which began on April 14th.3 He could not have been near death in a hospital and in the picture at the same time! Ken Waltzer took the liberty of changing the date the photo was taken to April 12 or 13th to get around that inconvenient fact.4

3.  The Transport List to France. When did Elie Wiesel’s birthday change to Oct. 4th from Sept. 30th? A majority of boys on this list share the birth year of 1928. The person listed as Lazar Wiesel is the same Lazar Wiesel that the Questionaire refers to, but we have determined that this person could not have been Elie Wiesel. It is true that Elie Wiesel went to France, but how he got there, and when, is not clear.

2.  The Questionaire  [scroll down page] was apparently prepared for and signed by every prisoner prior to their release. It is dated April 22, 1945; the prisoner number is 123165, different by one digit from our previous Lazar Wiesel #123565, and is the number belonging to a recently deceased inmate, Pavel Kun,5 whose death is recorded as March 8, 1945. Since Elie Wiesel allegedly received his number upon arrival on Jan. 26, 1945, he would not later be given a new number from a prisoner who just died. It would seem from this that Lázár Wiesel is a newcomer-of-sorts who had been given a number that had just been released.

The name  Lázár is spelled with distinct, heavy accent marks; the birth date given is Oct. 4, 1928 (Elie’s is Sept. 30); date of arrest is April 16, 1944 (Elie’s family’s deportation was at the end of May/early June – see here); the signature on the back does not match Elie Wiesel’s known signature or handwriting.  The signature is also written with accents over the a’s in Lázár, implying that the accenting originated with Lázár and not with the official who filled out the form.6

But, beyond all this, on April 22 Elie Wiesel was in a hospital in or near Buchenwald camp “hanging between life and death” after coming down with severe food poisoning. He was taken to the hospital on April 14 and not released until April 28, according to his own words in his “autobiographical” Night and his 1995 memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea. Therefore, he could not have been interviewed or signed the questionaire on April 22nd. (See Endnote 3)

1.  The Numerical File Card (below), made out at registration, is for Lazar Wiesel from Maromarossziget, born Sept. 4, 1913, making him at the time 31 years old. His Buchenwald prisoner number 123565 is written on the upper right. The card indicates his father, Szalamo Wiesel, was also at Buchenwald, while his mother, Serena Wiesel, nee Feig was currently interned at KL Auschwitz (at the time of Jan. 26, 1945).

This registration card is the only item that casts some doubt7 over Nikolaus Grüner’s account of Lazar and Abram. But it does not prove that this Lazar Wiesel is Elie Wiesel. It does not make any sense that all the birth dates for the same person would be different! It makes more sense that there were several persons with similar names.

Note that this card identifies Lazar Wiesel as a locksmith (Schlosserfehrling), a trade of which the 15-year-old Elie Wiesel never would have identified himself. In Night he identified himself upon entry to Auschwitz as “a farmer” (p. 32, MW translation) and continued not to boast of any skill (of which he had none anyway)  so as not to be sent out for work.

*      *      *

So we end up realizing there is no evidence that Elie Wiesel ever set foot in Buchenwald in 1945. What’s more, he and others (including Ken Waltzer) have actively and knowingly lied about photographs, dates, times, names, etc. This has gone on with the blessing and support of Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the New York Times Company, Associated Press,  and other establishment media – and the multitude of Jewish/Holocaust-promoting organizations across the globe. Think of Elie Wiesel conducting US President Obama and German Chancellor Merkel around the Buchenwald Memorial in 2009! It is a giant criminal conspiracy when one really takes a look at it. The ramifications are immense.

Someone, preferably Elie Wiesel, needs to explain all the discrepancies in his tale. He has never offered to and never been asked to. If Wiesel won’t attempt an explanation, then Ken Waltzer the Historian with the PhD from Harvard University must do so. In his scholarly studies, Waltzer includes Elie Wiesel as one of the “Rescued Children of Buchenwald. ” One duty of a scholar is to answer serious and justified questions about their work. Elie Wiesel Cons The World is asking such questions and so we await an answer.

Update 6-15   Great idea from a reader:  Write to Prof. Ken Waltzer at [email protected] and ask him politely to answer the questions raised in this article.

Endnotes:

1.  Prof. Kenneth Waltzer has removed this article from the Internet, along with his entire website which the article had been a part of for several years, and says he has written a new separate article on Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald.

The book is on track, and I have also completed a separate essay to be published on Elie Wiesel and Buchenwald. -Ken Waltzer to me, Carolyn Yeager,  in an email, March 2013

He obviously doesn’t want comparisons made between his old and new article and is waiting as long as possible to make it public. Or is he still reworking it?

2.  “Then I had to go to sleep. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. The date was January 28, 1945. I woke up at dawn on January 29. On my father’s cot there lay another sick person. They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium.” –Night, 2006 Marion Wiesel translation, p. 112

The Yiddish original, Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, says Father’s death occurs on the 18-19 of Shevat:

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. (p 238)

Readers might be surprised to learn that the Hebrew calendar date of 18-19 Shevat, 5705 corresponds to February 1-2, 1945.  This gives credence to the idea that Abram Viezel’s death is the model for the story And The World Remained Silent. The date in the original story for Father’s death and the date of Buchenwald records for Abram’s death concur.  This  leads me to question Elie Wiesel’s personal knowledge of events at Buchenwald because why would he change the date to Jan. 28-29 if he knew the significance of Feb. 1-2?

Also, the death took place in Block 57, the report said, which would seem to be next door to Block 56 where the famous Buchenwald liberation photo is said to have been taken.

3.   “Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill: some form of food poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.” –Night, 2006 Marion Wiesel translation, p. 118

Also in Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (the original Yiddish story from which Night was taken), 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.”

Another question that occurs is: Of all the photos taken in Buchenwald after liberation, why don’t we find even a single one with Elie Wiesel in it? Knowing he wasn’t there at all may be why he liked the food poisoning/hospitalization story – it can explain why he doesn’t show up in any photograps. But it totally contradicts the “evidence” of the Questionaire and of his being in the famous barracks #56 photo.

4.  Waltzer wrote in his article:

“He [Elie] was too weak at liberation on April 11 to leave his barracks  (hence he was photographed in a famous picture in the barracks on April 12 or 13),  and he came to understand he was free only days later.”

Waltzer trapped himself again. The officially declared date of the photo is April 16, which is well established. Waltzer is simply trying to evade with lies the serious problem of Wiesel going into the hospital 2 days before the photo was taken. This is NOT how a respectable, responsible historian does things.

In addition, Waltzer is saying that the photograph was taken in the children’s barracks #66, which is utterly wrong. The official description says it was barracks #56, for men, or possibly a sick barracks. If Abram Viezel was in a sick barracks when he died (#57), then #56 might also be an “infirmary” barracks.

5. Pavel Kun is on the transport list of Jan. 26, 1945 from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. He appears under the section Politische Slowakan Juden; his birth date is July 6, 1926, making him 18 when he died.

6.  Revisionist Carlo Mattogno concluded, after studying these documents, that Lazar Wiesel, Lázár Wiesel and Elie Wiesel are not the same person.

In conclusion, we can say that Elie Wiesel can be neither Lazar Wiesel, nor Lázár Wiesel, nor Lazar Vizel and that the ID number A-7713 was not assigned to him but to Lazar Wiesel, while ID A-7712 was not assigned to his father but to Abram (or Abraham) Viesel (or Wiesel).

The charge of identity theft raised against Elie Wiesel by Miklos Grüner does not concern Lazar Wiesel only, but Lázár Wiesel as well: from the former, he took the Auschwitz ID number (A-7713), from the latter the stay at Buchenwald and the later transfer to Paris. –http://revblog.codoh.com/2010/03/elie-wiesel-new-documents/#more-837

7.  Szalamo seems likely a Hungarian spelling for  Shlomo. Serena Feig is close but not Elie’s mother’s name, which was Sarah Feig. According to this card, Lazar had a father in the camp, something that was not mentioned by Nikolaus Grüner. Ken Waltzer will say this proves that Lazar Wiesel is Elie Wiesel, but what about the very wrong birthdate? Why don’t we have a card for Szalamo too? These cards are kept at Bad Arolson, not at the Buchenwald Memorial Museum Archive; only people with special permission (like Waltzer) have access to them.

Is it time to call Ken Waltzer a fraud?

Monday, April 1st, 2013

By Carolyn Yeager
copyright 2013 Carolyn Yeager

Updated April 7th

Kenneth Waltzer is a professor of history  at Michigan State University since the early 1970’s. He helped to create the Jewish Studies program which opened in 1992, and which he heads. Waltzer has been researching into evidence of a special ‘boy’s protection program’ run by prisoners at Buchenwald for going on 10 years now. As an “approved” researcher, he is allowed to peruse all the files at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany,  something that is made much more difficult, if not impossible,  for revisionists.

Waltzer is considered one of the top scholars in the U.S. of the ill-named holocaust but his work has been sloppy, and his attempts to cover up the sloppiness amount to fraud. This, along with his continual promotion and defense of Elie Wiesel as a Buchenwald survivor, is what has drawn me to study him ever more closely.

Because of the seriousness of the charge I am making against him, I will list right up front my reasons for thinking it is time for such a call. They are:

1. Waltzer habitually tells fibs in the form of false information which is intended to mislead. When called out for it, he tells more fibs to cover for the first ones.
   
2. He has been in the service of the “Holocaust Industry,” not academic rigor and fair-mindedness, from the very start of his career.
3. He knowingly defrauds his students, his university and the public (you and I) with his dishonest “holocaust scholarship.”
4. While he is drawing high pay as a tenured American professor of history at MSU, he is working to advance the State of Israel.

I am going to show that these charges have a strong basis in fact. Fraud is commonly understood as dishonesty calculated for advantage. A person who is dishonest may be called a fraud. In the U.S. legal system, fraud is a specific offense with certain features. (see here)

Legally, fraud must be proved by showing that the defendant’s actions involved five separate elements: (1) a false statement of a material fact, (2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.

I am not intending to bring legal charges of fraud against Prof. Waltzer, but to try him in the court of public opinion. Therefore, it will be up to Waltzer to defend himself against my charges.

*     *     *

Two years ago, I asked the question on this web site:  “What happened to Ken Waltzer’s book about the boys of Buchenwald?” It was claimed to be, at that time, in it’s final stages. Eight years after he publicly announced he was researching for a book about the so-called children’s barracks at Buchenwald (Barracks #66 ), it still has not materialized. Five years after his book was described as “upcoming,” it still has not materialized. During this time, he has not produced another book, or any major work that would have taken precedence over this book. So what is the delay?

It’s pretty plain that the book’s thesis has shifted considerably since 2005, when his MSU website featured Elie Wiesel as the most recognizable and famous child survivor from Buchenwald. That website was taken down between one and two years ago and is completely wiped clean from the Internet. The banner on all the six to eight  pages that were included showed a photograph very similar to the one below of the “boys” being marched out of the main Buchenwald camp to temporary quarters at the former SS barracks.

The USHMM (national holocaust museum in D.C) website dates this picture as being taken on April 17, 1945, six days after liberation.1 At this time, Elie Wiesel, by his own account in two books, was laying in a hospital sick almost unto death  from food poisoning. Details like this don’t deter Prof. Waltzer from backing up in every instance the standard holocaust narrative. “Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald” is the standard narrative, so evidence must be found for it.

Ken Waltzer claimed for years that one of these boys was Elie Wiesel. But Wiesel is not in this picture!

From at least 2005 (eight years now), Waltzer has identified the boy third or fourth from the front (hard to tell) in the left-side column (dressed in a black suit and in front of the tall boy wearing a beret) as Elie Wiesel, based on nothing but his own fraudulent intention that there was enough resemblance that people would believe it if he said so. In this article , I exposed this lie. Waltzer has never admitted that he was mistaken or was perpetrating a falsehood that he intended to put into his book. Instead, what he did when his fabrication was sufficiently exposed was to take the entire site down and not mention it again.

Left is a close-up of the boy Waltzer has maintained for several years is Elie Wiesel. Anyone can tell it is not and that’s why no one else ever publicly agreed with him.

I have some of what was on that site copied into articles here at EWCTW and also in my files. At left is the cropped section of the photo that Waltzer used on the banner of his MSU-Newsroom/Holocaust website that was very much dedicated to Elie Wiesel. (Another reader, Chris,  informed me that he had found pages from the site using the Way Back Machine. Many thanks to him.) This shows that Waltzer definitely identified the boy in the black suit as Elie Wiesel. In addition, Jack Werber, a known dishonest survivor, was the supposed supplier of the picture.

Below right, a screen shot of one of the pages as it existed then, sent by a friend of EWCTW. It shows more of the emphasis on Elie Wiesel.

When I pointed out much of this in a podcast of March 25th, Waltzer sent me an email on March 28th stating,

My websites at UM FLint are down because I was appointed there one year and am now back at Michigan State.

Of course I never mentioned UM Flint and never even saw his website there. I was speaking about his MSU website, which was titled something like Ken Waltzer’s “MSU Newsroom Special Report.” It was full of information about his projects and especially what he calls “the rescue operation of children at Buchenwald.”  It was up on the Net since at least 2008 2, then suddenly disappeared, with not even cache pages to be found.  Did Waltzer tell me a fib, or did he just read the podcast program description and misinterpret what it said about “taking down web pages?” By now, he will know what I mean and may answer.

I think it is very possible that he timed the take-down of his MSU “Newsroom” site with his one-year visiting professorship at UM Flint — putting up a temporary website there which he could take down when he left.  This is a way of confusing the picture in order to distract as much as possible from his more recent decision to put more distance between himself and his prior (false) assertions about Elie Wiesel.

His intention was and is clearly to deceive.  The harm is caused to ordinary people who believe and trust that they are getting knowledgeable answers from a professor of history and a holocaust scholar. In this particular case, all five of the elements necessary to prove fraud are there.

First, he sets up a University-sponsored website maintaining falsely that Elie Wiesel is the boy in the photograph of youthful “survivors” marching out of the camp (1). He knows it is false because he has no evidence or proof, only his own “wishful thinking.” The USHMM never identified Wiesel in that group of boys, nor did anyone else (including Wiesel himself), unless they did so from following Waltzer’s example (2). Waltzer’s intent was to make the public believe something that was not true – that he had proof of Elie Wiesel being one of the “rescued children” (3). Because Waltzer is a Professor of History and “holocaust expert” at a major university, and is at all times written up very favorably in the media, the public (you and I ) and his students will rely on his statements (4). These same students and public are injured when photographs are mislabled in order to foist on them a certain belief about an influential  historical event that affects their entire world view (5).

*      *      *

This is just one instance of the untruths that Ken Waltzer has told over the years. Another tactic he uses is to promise an upcoming answer to your doubts which he cannot or does not produce now. As we have seen, we continue to wait as he continues to promise. Still another tactic is to accuse others of lying when it is he who is doing so. But only people who are knowledgeable enough about these complex and purposely obscured issues can see who is doing the lying. In this same email, he wrote:

The book is on track, and I have also completed a separate essay to be published on Elie Wiesel and Buchenwald.

Completed, he says. And separate. Why separate? I wrote back to him asking where I could find his essay because I wanted to read it. No reply – which is typical because factual information is not his forte, emotional rhetoric is. I feel it’s quite possible he wrote a separate essay on Elie Wiesel so as not to tarnish his book with the false “facts” about Wiesel in Buchenwald. He can always get rid of an essay, if necessary, later – but not his entire book. What might there be in this essay? Will it be the same or quite different from what he wrote in a March 6, 2010 comment at Scrapbookpages Blog, when he said [my underlining-cy]:

For the skeptics [I was using the name skeptic then -cy] and know-nothings who have written in suggesting Eli Wiesel was not in the camps, that Night is purely fiction, you are all dead wrong. The Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives documents for Lazar Wiesel and his father prove beyond any doubt that Lazar and his father arrived from Buna to Buchenwald January 26, 1945, that his father soon died a few days later, and that Lazar Wiesel was then moved to block 66, the children’s block in the little camp in Buchenwald. THese documents are backed up by military interviews with others from Sighet who were also in block 66, and by the list of Buchenwald boys sent thereafter to France. All of this is public domain.

Wishful thinking by Holocaust deniers will not make their fantasies true. While Wiesel took liberties in writing Night as a literary masterpiece, Night is rooted in the foundation of Wiesel’s experience in the camps. The Buchenwald experience, particularly, runs closely to what is related in Night.

Comment by kenwaltzer — November 14, 2010 @ 6:57 am

How much untruth is contained in this, in order to defraud us all in his devoted service to the “Holocaust Industry” and the state of Israel? Plenty. As proof that Elie Wiesel was in Buchenwald, he points to documents for Lazar Wiesel and “his father.” It is even more absurd because Lazar Wiesel’s relative was only 13 years older than Lazar – it was in fact his brother Abram! Waltzer is passing off Lazar for Elie simply on the basis that Lazar also came from Sighet, Elie’s hometown and carries the same name. Sighet was a city of 50,000 or so with a very large Jewish population, and Wiesel was a common name. But the “scholar” who has taken years to research this and still isn’t finished, wants us to believe there can  be only one Lazar Wiesel, who is Elie. He attributes the difference in their birthdates to bureaucratic error.

Previously I may have called this stupidity, but now I’m calling it fraud, based on the above-given definition. Of course Waltzer can see the discrepancies here, but he hopes he can convince you not to see them. The Military Interview mentioned with Lázár Wiesel’s name on it also does not have the right birthdate for Elie Wiesel, nor does the signature match Elie’s well-known signature.

Will Waltzer repeat this nonsense in his latest “completed” essay? Notice that Waltzer never fails in the name-calling department, here  calling his critics names such as “know-nothings” and “Holocaust deniers.” Several months later,  he wrote a similar comment at EWCTW to the blockbuster article: “Signatures Prove Lázár Wiesel is not Elie Wiesel”

by kenwaltzer

On November 14, 2010 at 10:34 am

Contrary to Carolyn Yeager’s wishful thinking, Eli Wiesel was indeed the Lazar Wiesel who was admitted to Buchenwald on January 26, 1945, who was subsequently shifted to block 66, and who was interviewed by military authorities before being permitted to leave Buchenwald to go with other Buchenwald orphans to France. Furthermore, there is not a shadow of a doubt about this, although the Buchenwald records do erroneously contain — on some pieces — the birth date of 1913 rather than 1928. A forthcoming paper resolves the “riddle of Lazar” and indicates that Miklos Gruner’s Stolen Identity is a set of false charges and attack on Wiesel without any foundation.

The promise of a forthcoming paper turned out to be a fib. From Nov. 2010 to now, there has not been any paper. Maybe it’s the essay he mentioned in his March 28th email? “Forthcoming” to Waltzer means up to two and a half years, it seems. That in itself is the sign of an unreliable person.

There can be only one reason Ken Waltzer allows himself to look like a buffoon and a shyster. He doesn’t need to do it to keep his position at Michigan State University. He does it because it is his larger job to keep the Buchenwald atrocity stories and Liberation lies, including the Elie Wiesel myth, alive and well in the mind of the public. He works for purely Jewish interests – I will be writing a future article on the priority, meaning and funding of Jewish Studies programs in American universities. For now, I can add that Waltzer is more of a public relations (PR) worker for the Holocaust Industry, the State of Israel and maybe AIPAC, than he is an honest-to-god academic. Another organization connected to Israel that he serves is Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has written four attack-dog articles for them since 2009, functioning in a sort of Abe Foxman-pitbull style.

In Nov. 2009, he attacked Alison Wier as another “know-nothing” because she speaks up for Palestinian rights on college campuses, where she is popular.

In May 2010, he went after John Mearsheimer for calling Israel “an apartheid state” and also took out after Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and “the crackpot Phil Weiss.”

Also in May 2010, another target was Judith Butler, who campaigned at the Berkeley campus for the university “to divest from companies making military weapons which Israel employs to commit war crimes.”

In August 2011, he wrote on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, arguing for Israel’s interests to be well and strongly presented on college campuses.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Walzer’s pro-Israel activities. I will be writing further articles that present the evidence for Ken Waltzer being guilty of fraud in his public writings and during his entire career. Much of it revolves around Elie Wiesel and the Industry’s  need to place him at Buchenwald. My position, if you have somehow missed it, is that Elie Wiesel was never at Buchenwald. I am also saying that Waltzer is backing down or “stepping back” from his blatant, dishonest claims about Wiesel, but he can’t back down altogether.

Endnotes:

1.  I have also seen it dated April 27 at the USHMM and have used that date in other articles here.  Now I have only found this one picture which is very officially dated the 17th.  There may have been an attempt to move the date to the 27th so that Wiesel could be in the picture (though he supposedly would not have been released from the hospital until the 28th).  It is really too bad the USHMM cannot be relied upon; nor can Yad Vashem. When the museum “researchers” are involved in lying or in complacency, one really has nowhere to turn.

2.  http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2008/mapping-the-holocaust-archive-msu-prof-explores-records-of-nazi-atrocities At bottom of article, it reads “For more information, and to follow Waltzer’s research and read his journal as he participates in the workshop, visit the special report at: http://special.newsroom.msu.edu/holocaust.” This is a link to the website that no longer exists, as you will see if you click it. Now he seems to be pretending it was never there.

Was Lazar Wiesel a relative of Elie Wiesel?

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

By Carolyn Yeager

The real inmate at Buchenwald, Lazar Wiesel, 31 years old in 1944, was the son of Szalamo and Serena Feig Wiesel of Sighet.

We  present the question of why the personal information on Lazar Wiesel is so close, but still far from exact, to that of Elie Wiesel. Can we believe, as Prof. Kenneth Waltzer would have it, that these were errors in taking down the information on Elie, and Lazar is really Elie? No, we can’t because the nature of the differences cannot be simple errors. Lazar had a brother Abram with him in the camps; the 44 year-old Abram (in 1944)  cannot be turned into Elie’s father. And he certainly can’t be turned into Lazar’s father as only 13 years separated them. But it is very possible that the two families were related and that a part of Elie’s immediate family escaped the deportation altogether. Many so-called Hungarian Jews did – many more than are officially acknowledged. Keeping this in mind, I will examine the family names and see what they tell us.

Lazar Wiesel’s Buchenwald File Card (below) records Lazar’s father, Szalamo (equates to Sholomo), as being interned at Buchenwald.1 But more striking, Lazar’s mother, Serena Wiesel nee Feig, is listed on this card as being interned at KL Auschwitz. (As we know, Elie’s story is that upon arrival he saw his mother and sister moving away with the women and never saw them again. The idea they went to a gas chamber is pure speculation copied from other books.)

CLICK ON CARD  FOR AN ENLARGED VIEW.  Buchenwald Registration file card for Lazar Wiesel, birth date Sept, 4, 1913, arriving on Jan. 26, 1945 from KL Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel’s parents are known to be Shlomo and Sara (or Sura) Wiesel, nee Feig.

In Jewish Orthodoxy (the Wiesel’s were members of the Hasidim sect) and in Eastern Europe generally, certain family names were repeatedly used—recycled if you will. This is certainly the case in the Wiesel family with the names Eliezer, Elisha, Shlomo and Sara, and probably some others we don’t know about.

It’s no surprise that we find the name of the founder of Hasidic Judaism to be Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, and that he was born to Eliezer and Sara in Okopy, a small village that over the centuries has been part of Poland, Russia, and now Ukraine.

Wiesel was named after his grandfather Eliezer. His other grandfather on the maternal side is Dovid Feig.

Looking for genealogical information on Elie Wiesel is a disappointing affair—so little can be found. For such a famous person, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, to have his family history wiped away, hidden or not known is strange indeed. How to explain it when Hasidic family ancestry is traditionally honored and held in high esteem. It must be purposely hidden. The Jews talk about Adolf Hitler hiding his ancestry. Not at all. Hitler’s complete and accurate genealogy is available on the Internet, but Wiesel’s is not. How do we figure that?

The #1 site on Google Search for Wiesel’s genealogy is Geni which has only very limited information. There is nothing additional to be found on Wikipedia. I have filled in the gaps with two pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s online database—one for his father that Wiesel filled out himself, and one for his father’s mother, Nisel, that was filled out by her grandson Eliezer Shlomovitz, who lives in Los Angeles, CA.  This is all I could uncover and I do not guarantee the correctness of any of it.

Father: Shlomo Elisha Wiesel

• Parents: Eliezer Vizel and Nisel Vizel nee Bash. This grandfather Eliezer died serving on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WWI.
• Nisel was born in Chust (or Hust, not far from Sighet), later Ruthenian-Czechoslovakia , in 1880 to Moshe and Yehudit Bash, according to a Yad Vashem death report (mentioned above).
• Shlomo is said by several sources to have been born in 1894, but I think this is deduced from the book “Night” where he is said to have been age 50 in 1944. If this were correct, it would make Shlomo’s mother’s age 14 when he was born — highly unlikely. Elie Wiesel never gives his father’s or mother’s birth dates though it’s not like he doesn’t know.
• Wiesel writes in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea that he met his father’s brother Samuel in New York, but he has never written about his cousin Eliezer Shlomovitz in Los Angeles.

Mother: Sara Feig Wiesel

• Parents: Dodye (Dovid) Feig; no mother given
• Wiesel highly praises this grandfather in All Rivers and writes, “… in 1944 my parents invited him and his wife to live with us.” His wife, not ‘my grandmother.’  That is the only mention of ‘her.’ Seems clear she was not Elie’s grandmother, but a new wife. In any case, grandfather Feig declined and went to stay with his sons.
• Elie writes in All Rivers: “I had four uncles on my mother’s side: Chaim-Mordechai, Ezra, Israel and Moshe-Itzik
• He met an ‘Uncle’ Morris in New York.

From the little we have available, we can see certain names repeating. Elie Wiesel gave his son his father’s name, Shlomo Elisha. He himself was named after his paternal grandfather Eliezer. A cousin, another grandson of his paternal grandmother, is also named Eliezer. This cousin’s last name is Shlomovitz. From this we can begin to ascertain that Eliezer, Shlomo, Elisha and Sara are “family names” within the extended Wiesel family, along with being Hasidic names.

Two marriages between the Wiesel’s and the Feig’s

Looking back at the Lazar (from Eliezer) Wiesel who was at Buchenwald, we see another marriage between the Wiesel’s and the Feig’s. We see the same names:  father is Szalamo (Shlomo); mother is Serena Feig. Lazar is 15 years older than Elie and his brother Abram is 28 years older, and they are from the same city, Sighet. It seems pretty clear to me that these are two branches of the family tree.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match!

 Orthodox men and women usually meet through matchmakers in a process called a shidduch. A matchmaker’s services are necessary because of the constant intermarriage going on within the closely knit Orthodox communities. A matchmaker (shadchan) knew of the relations between those in the community, or could find them out, and could therefore prevent or warn against marriages between a couple who were too genetically similar. This role is not mentioned on Wikipedia and other Jewish sites, but it’s the most important one. In Night, Wiesel wrote that in 1943 his mother “was beginning to think it was high time to find an appropriate match for Hilda” who was already 21 years of age.2

The two families, Feig and Wiesel, may have been recognized as having diverse enough genetic relationship to one another to make for viable marriages. Perhaps there was a history of successful unions between the two family lines. In any case, it can explain the similarity in personal information between the older and younger Wiesel, and also the temptation to claim the one to be the other. The family members can be trusted to remain silent about it.

This last part is speculation, but one thing we notice is that Elie Wiesel does not want us to know who or where are the members of his family, and even more, he doesn’t want any of his family members to talk to us, the general public. We are not to know anything but the simplistic legend that he and his supporters and defenders have created for our consumption.

An interesting side-note: I just discovered a book From Generation to Generation by Arthur Kurzweil, published in 2004, which features on the cover “Foreword by Elie Wiesel.” This foreword turns out to be only one page long, much shorter than the Acknowledgements even, and consists of a few vague words about the mystical aspect of  names.  What is interesting is that the book is 400 pages of “how to research your Jewish genealogy.” If Wiesel has researched his own, he certainly is not publishing it. Wiesel gives himself the prerogative of remaining a very private man, while working hard to become a highly public name. Jewish chutzpah at work.~

Endnotes:

1. Myklos Gruener never mentioned a father for Lazar and Abram, only his own father.

2. Elie Wiesel, Night, Hill and Wang, 2006 (original copyright 1958), p. 8

Ken Waltzer Replies to My Question

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

By Carolyn Yeager

(Last edited on July 3 and added to on July 9)

In my previous blog of June 14, I asked the question “What happened to Waltzer’s book about the ‘boys of Buchenwald?’” On June 27, Ken Waltzer (pictured right) answered me … sort of. He said he was not having any trouble with the book, but he didn’t say when we could expect to read it. Not a word on that. But he assured Elie Wiesel Cons the World readers that we will find it a powerful story when we do.

Being a person who likes to stick with the practical and real, I’m not satisfied with Prof. Waltzer’s answer because it avoids the real questions in favor of repeating his claims without supporting them. On top of that, he called me a bigot. This is a grievous fault, it seems to me, in a man who is a Professor of Jewish Studies and German History at Michigan State University. Let’s take a look at what he’s said.

Before writing a comment to my blog, Waltzer first wrote a comment on June 26 to Scrapbookpages Blog. The blogmaster there, who goes by the name of “furtherglory,” had blogged June 16 on my ‘boys of Buchenwald’ article. He checks out new articles about Holocaust on the Internet daily, and seems pretty interested in Elie Wiesel. He added an update to the original blog and asked the question: “Has Ken Waltzer finally figured out that there were three separate people involved in this controversy and all three are named Wiesel.” No, he hasn’t. Waltzer continues to insist that they are all Elie Wiesel.

This is what Ken Waltzer said on Scrapbookpages Blog:

All the ridiculous claims that Wiesel was not Wiesel, Wiesel was not at Buchenwald, Wiesel was a different Wiesel are false, There was one Lazar Wiesel at Buchenwald. He arrived with his father, who appears as Abram, born 1900, and who died shortly after arrival. (He signs his name Shlomo.) Wiesel was then moved to block 66, the children’s block, part of a large child-saving operation by people aligned with the German-Communist led international underground in the camp. He is there with others from Sighet who affirm he is there. He is there until liberation. He is interviewed by American military authorities there. He goes to France.,…

There is no question, indeed there is firm proof, Elie Wiesel was at Buchenwald. And the sections of Night written about Buchenwald are generally accurate and conform to the experience he had.

Comment by Ken Waltzer — June 26, 2011 @ 6:53 am

 

And this is what Furtherglory said in reply:

 

Thanks for your comment. A man named Lazar Wiesel was given the tattoo number A-7713 at Auschwitz. A man named Abram Viesel was given the number A-7712 at Auschwitz. Both of them were transferred to Buchenwald in January 1945. Lazar Wiesel, born at Maromarossiget on 4 September 1913, an apprentice locksmith, political detainee and Hungarian Jew, was registered at Buchenwald on 26 January 1945 and assigned the ID number 123565. This must be the man whom you have identified as Elie Wiesel and Abram Viesel is the man that you have identified as Elie’s father. In the records at Auschwitz, Abram Viesel was born on 10 October 1900 at Marmarosz. He was old enough to be Elie Wiesel’s father, but not old enough to be the father of Lazar Wiesel, who was born in 1913, according to the records.

Elie’s full name is Eliezer Wiesel and he was born in Sighet, Romania (Marmarossiget) which was a part of Hungary in 1944. Elie claims he was born on September 30, 1928. Are you saying that his birthdate was mistakenly written as Sept 4, 1913 at Buchenwald?

A man named Lázár Wiesel, (note difference in spelling) born 4 October 1928, was also registered at Buchenwald and given the ID Number 123165. Are you saying that this man did not exist?

You wrote that Elie Wiesel (Lazar Wiesel) was interviewed by the American military. Lázár Wiesel filled out a US Army questionaire on 22 April 1945 at Buchenwald; he stated on the questionaire that he was born at Màromarossziget on 4 October 1928; he was a student who was arrested on 16 April 1944 and interned at Auschwitz and Monowitz. Are you saying that this man didn’t exist?

The records at the Buchenwald Gedenkstätte show that Lázár Wiesel was sent to Paris on 16 July 1945 with a convoy of surviving children and is registered on the transport list. The name Lazar Wiesel is not on the transport list to Paris, which makes sense since he was born in 1913.

Lazar Wiesel’s name was on the transport list from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, but the name Lázár Wiesel was not. That doesn’t mean that Lázár was never at Auschwitz. He could have been sent, from Auschwitz, to some other camp, such as Gross Rosen, and then sent to Buchenwald when Gross Rosen, or whatever other camp, was evacuated.

Comment by furtherglory — June 26, 2011 @ 3:40 pm

It didn’t take furtherglory long to answer Prof. Waltzer and I thought he did a fantastic job. I mean, he’s got it all right and in order and that’s why I’m copying it here … so I won’t have to do it myself. Furtherglory asked Prof. Waltzer some questions, but Waltzer has not yet answered them. I have a feeling he won’t, either, because he doesn’t like to answer questions that he hasn’t posed himself, or are not easy ones. You see, Waltzer spends most of his time talking to his brainwashed students or to Jewish people at Jewish group events, like at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Did you know that Jews run that museum and make up most of the attendees at its events? See here. They never ask tough questions.

But still, I was very happy to find a comment on my blog from Prof. Waltzer and I thank him for it. I think it says a lot for him that he is willing to engage, even if only to this extent. He wrote:

by Ken Waltzer  On June 27, 2011 at 2:26 pm

Carolyn Yeager suspects that Ken Waltzer is having trouble with his Buchenwald book, esp. proving Elie Wiesel was at Buchenwald as he says he was. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Buchenwald book is drawn on survivors’ experiences interviewed around the world and on documents from the Red Cross ITS and it will tell a powerful story of endurance and rescue inside Buchenwald.

And related to that larger story, in which Elie Wiesel is merely one of many boys who were helped and saved inside Buchenwald, there simply is no mystery whatsoever of Elie Wiesel, as Yeager claims. He arrived from Buna on a terrible transport on Jan. 26, 1945, with many others (including Miklos Gruner); he was accompanied by his father, who was recorded as Abram (but who signed his name as Shlomo); they were initially together in a barrack in the little camp, 59, I think, and then — after his father died — Elie Wiesel was moved in early February to block 66, the kinderblock. Miklos Gruner too was in block 66. Elie Wiesel was there with other boys from Sighet, who knew him; he was interviewed by military authorities after liberation, in order to permit departure from the camp; and he went after liberation in early June, 1945, to France, to Ecouis…. one among 425 boys who did so. He appears in subsequent pictures at Ambloy and Taverny where the religious boys were taken after Ecouis….

More important, Elie Wiesel’s commentary in Night bears fairly close resemblance to the actual experiences he had at Buchenwald — as recorded in camp documents.

He is the truth teller — Carolyn Yeager; you are the dealer in false claims and bigoted charges.

I am a bigot for doubting Elie Wiesel. I guess it’s some form of antisemitism to doubt that every word Elie Wiesel says is absolutely true … because he is the truth teller, according to Waltzer. And he, Waltzer, is going to prove it.

I consider what Prof. Waltzer is doing similar to ‘sleight of hand.’ He‘s repeating what he’s been saying all along … with a few convenient omissions (for example, the paper proving it he promised 6 months ago). We are to believe that 1) Eliezer Wiesel was listed as Lazar when he arrived, and then as Lázár Wiesel after liberation, with the wrong birth date both times; 2) his father Shlomo was recorded as Abram, also with the wrong birth date; 3) Shlomo is short for Abram or Abraham, not Solomon; and 4) those crazy, mixed-up Nazis got their records wrong.

Has Waltzer managed to falsify some document to show that the elder Wiesel was also known at times as Abraham? We’ll see. Then there is the problem with the pictures. He hasn’t told us which of these boys arriving at Ecouis in France in 1945 is Elie Wiesel.  The USHMM tells us Elie is in this picture but doesn’t say where. Can you find him?

He also didn’t point out to us which of these ‘religious boys’ is Elie Wiesel. He titled it “In France — religious boys, including Elie Wiesel.” But how can we be sure?

What he seems to be doing is  moving the attention away from these pictures to others of Elie Wiesel at Ambloy and Taverny. If there are such pictures I have never seen them. Have they been newly created? Why keep them hidden all these many years? (post note: See Comments #1,2 and 3) Does this mean that Waltzer is now declining to say that Wiesel appears in the famous Buchenwald photo (below)?

Or in this photo of the boys marching out of Buchenwald after liberation—which he has claimed for several years?

Prof. Waltzer, I know you consider yourself one of the privileged of the world, along with Elie Wiesel, but you must realize that even people of such privilege as yourselves cannot just change Shlomo to Abram as it suits you. When all others who were ‘liberated’ from the German camps are identified by matching their names, birth dates, and prisoner numbers, you cannot decide that in certain cases this formula does not apply and it is YOU who decides who is who.

From your comments, I’m expecting that when your book does finally come out, it will say that Shlomo is Abram and birth dates don’t matter, and this will be a small portion of the book overshadowed by other “powerful” stories of Jewish children. There may be no pictures of Elie Wiesel in France because he is just one of many in your powerful story. It will receive praise, coordinated in advance, from the Jewish media and academic class and no concern whatsoever will be expressed about any contradiction with the facts as they are contained in the Buchenwald archival documents.

But there will be one entity that will not let you alone or off the hook, and that is Elie Wiesel Cons The World website, and maybe some of our readers and followers.  So I say—thanks for the comment but we are still waiting and watching for clarification from you.

UPDATE (July 1st):

Shlomo Wiesel was never at Auschwitz or Buchenwald. If he had been at Auschwitz there would be a record for a man named Solomon Viezel or Wiesel born in 1894, who was 50 years old in 1944.

>>We read in Frank N. Magill, ed., “Great Events from History II: Arts And Culture Series: Volume 4, 1955-1969“, Salem Press, Inc., Pasadena, CA., 1993, p. 1700:

“SHLOMO WIESEL (1894-1945), the father of Elie Wiesel“

>>And in in Michaël de Saint Cheron, “Elie Wiesel : L’homme de la mémoire“, Paris, Bayard (coll. Biographie), 1998, p. 25:

“Quant à son père, Shlomo, il ne fut vraiment proche de lui que dans les camps, ces lieux hors du temps, hors de l’espace des vivants, où ils partagèrent le même sort, le même enfer, ou presque.
Son père, né en 1894, à Màrmarossziget, était un juif tolérant et éclairé, alors que sa mère, née en 1898 à Bocsko, cadette de six enfants devenue orpheline de bonne heure, très pieuse,  (Translation: His father Shlomo, born in 1894, in Marmarossziget, and his mother, born in 1898 in Bocsko.)

>>More importantly, Elie Wiesel filled out a form for the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel sometime after the year 2000 (as my memory serves me) stating his father died as a holocaust victim.** On that form, he gave his father’s name as: Shlomo Vizel. He didn’t give a date of birth, but he gave a date of death as Jan. 27, 1945 and the cause of death as: Disease. He signed himself as Eli Vizel, son. That form can be viewed at the Yad Vashem archives online; that’s where I saw it.

Nowhere has Shlomo Vizel (Wiesel) ever been called Abram or Abraham, except now by Ken Waltzer in order to fit with the records for Lazar and Abram Wiesel at Buchenwald.

Stealing real victims and survivors identity is one of the lowest forms of behavior, according to holocaust survivor groups … or so they say. What do you think?

** It should be noted that Elie Wiesel did not fill out Yad Vashem forms for his mother or youngest sister affirming them as victims of the Holocaust. Why not? The logical reason is that he does not have any knowledge that they were indeed taken immediately to a “gas chamber” and killed, as the story has been put out for public comsumption. Even on Wiesel’s main page at Wikipedia it says they were “presumably killed.” That is all. Neither did his two older sisters, who were supposedly at Auschwitz for several months before being transferred to a sub-camp of Dachau, fill out this form for their mother and sister even though they are said to have been all together in the women’s line. These two surviving sisters were totally silent about their WWII experience, in spite of their famous brother, until Hilda, the eldest, gave a videotaped testimony to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation in the 1990’s.