Intro: Stories of survival, hope, and love have helped shape the narratives of Holocaust survivors. But what happens when what we perceive to be the truth is actually a lie? In this post, current OHMA student, Elizabeth Jefimova, will discuss the role of truth and accountability in oral testimonies when faced with portions of narratives that are fabricated.

In 1944, Herman Rosenblat, a prisoner in the Schlieben subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, saw a young Jewish girl on the other side of the prison’s fence. In their first encounter she tossed him an apple and for the next six months she shared any food that she could secretly pass on to him. As time passed, however, he was shipped off to another camp, only to see her in 1957 on a blind date in New York. Soon thereafter the two married. In 1996, in the midst of serious financial problems, Rosenblat submitted his love story to an Oprah Winfrey contest and won. Oprah hailed it as the greatest love story ever told.  Rosenblat secured a twenty-five million dollar movie deal and a publishing contract worth a hundred thousand dollars for the book Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, as seen pictured.

The only problem? The story was a lie. 

There was never an apple and that girl didn’t even exist. Rosenblat’s wife was found through records to have been at least two hundred miles away from the concentration camp when he was there. Rosenblat admitted later on that the love story was, in fact, made up, and that the idea came to him when he was in the hospital dreaming about his dead mother. Multiple newspapers wrote about this. One of the most charged questions posed throughout the discovery was “If we can’t trust a Holocaust Survivor, who can we trust?[1]

Narratives like those of Herman Rosenblat can reflect poorly on oral history because of its reliance on individuals, subjectivity, and fallible memory as opposed to ‘credible’ written documents.

So how does oral history consider these fallible sources?

Some oral historians argue that in order to get the most out of oral sources we must first accept them as they are. They are credible, but with a different credibility that relies on telling us less about events and more about their meaning. [2] In his book The Order Has Been Carried Out,  Alessandro Portelli explains:

Even when [oral history sources] do not tell the events as they occurred, the discrepancies and the errors are themselves events, clues for the work of desire and pain over time, for the painful search for meaning [3]

Portelli’s statement requires us to pause and consider Rosenblat’s story in a different light. Although I am not defending Rosenblat’s actions, I have to wonder if anyone took the time to ask him why he lied? After all, although he fabricated a love story, he didn’t fabricate his time as a survivor of a concentration camp.We could ask questions such as: Why did he choose to fabricate a love story? Did the vision of his dead mother play a role in how he processed the memories of his time at the camps? Or was it the actual loss of his mother that began this interweaving of imagination and reality? 

Oral historians should be facilitating a discussion with the narrator about their complicated view of truth, and how they constructed that truth. After all, narrators could still be coming to terms with certain events that define their memories. As critical listeners, our job is to provide them the space and prompts for this deep reflection.

Yet such open-mindness doesn’t mean we aren’t permitted to feel wary of the stories we hear. If anything, such attention animates and holds accountable our work after the interview. So, how can we accurately and respectfully represent oral sources, on events like the Holocaust, while maintaining the validity of a narrative? 

Jacek Wasilewski, Michał Bukojemski, and Marek Miller, colleagues at the Laboratory of Reportage in Poland, offer the Polyphonic Documentary Novel as a solution. The Polyphonic Documentary Novel is a form of media that recreates the reality of historic events through many points of view. [4] This forces us to recognize each individual story as unique, and also to consider it with the collective truth of various testimonies. All those narrative subjectivities blend together into a more objective outlook on an event, without glossing over differences between them. In other words, this style can resolve (or even embrace) any discrepancies or questions about truth and accountability because it eliminates our search for a singular truth. What we “believe,” then, is not a set of facts but a set of experiences.

We must constantly remind ourselves that the nature of “truth” is fluid and defined through the various social interactions that human beings experience on a daily basis. As articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the process of dialogic interaction.” [5] Without the use of collective memory to better understand events in history, we are susceptible to the allure of narratives that speak to singular truths, like that of Herman Rosenblat.

Elizabeth Jefimova is a full time student at OHMA and currently working on documenting the experiences of student veterans. She graduated the Macaulay Honors Program at Brooklyn College in 2019 with a degree in History and Chemistry, and is hoping to attend law school in the future.

This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.

Sources Cited:

{1] Roberts, Sam. “Herman Rosenblat, 85, Dies; Made Up Holocaust Love Story.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 21, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/business/media/herman-rosenblat-85-dies-made-up-holocaust-love-story.html.

[2] Portelli, Alessandro. “What Makes Oral History Different.” Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans, 2009, pp. 21–30.

[3] Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pg 16.

[4] Miller, Marek. “The Polyphonic Documentary Novel.” Laboratory of Reportage. Method, Praxis, Vision, 2019.

[5]  Bachtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Picture Credits:

Kamer, Foster. “Holocaust Love Liar Gets His (Fake) Story Told.” Gawker, May 17, 2009. https://gawker.com/5258422/holocaust-love-liar-gets-his-fake-story-told.

'“Angel at the Fence.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, July 13, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_at_the_Fence.