This is one of those stories that many will be baffled about when others start screaming and hollering about its "authenticity".

The story is so moving and uplifting, most people will cling to it if for no other reason then to embrace a vistage of hope in a world that creates such monstrous events as the Holocaust.

From my point of view it is analogous to people stirring up a feverish controversy about William Stryon for writing Sophie's Choice and making Sophie a Christian in the deathcamps or for writng The Confessions of Nat Turner as a white man.

These narratives are deeply poignant precisely for showing the terrible choices people are forced to make in a world that can be indescribably perilious and cruel.

I can clearly see people being outraged when they are exposed to the stories of others who either participated in the Holocaust or stood by and did nothing to stop it....and then hid all that under a new identity or a new life. And, yes, I can see a reason to be angry if people are profitting today from invented tales about the Holocaust.

But when the rage reaches a certain level...a fever pitch...I suspect it is more a psychological defense mechanism, a livid projection onto or into something here and now because they cannot excise [or change] the horror of what once was.

george walton

Coming February 3, 2009.... It's time for the next big wintertime memoir scandal .... ...and Oprah

What is often very striking in these cases is the venom and hostility directed toward academics, historians and the like, who have the damed cheek to raise questions as to the veracity of a truth claim.  Nothing triggers anger and resentment in this country faster than somebody who knows more than somebody else on a particular matter (because he/she spend years studying it, much reading and research gaining familiarity with it, etc) challenging a "true" story, and especially one that sets out to make (a) people feel good and (b) money for folks.

This is clearly not as egregious a case as the Wilkomirski scandal of a few years ago, in which the writer's entire story of being a child in a Nazi concentration/extermination camp in Poland was ultimately revealed to be fraudulent (even if the motives there were not mercenary), but as a couple of the commentators quoted in the piece note, these stories can ultimately play into the Holocaust-deniers' hands.  As soon as one "autobiographical" account is proven to be false or distorted, it casts a shadow over others.

The ofttimes enigmatic relationship between human psychology and human behavior will always remain beyond the epistemological grasp of those who stalk it objectively. The same regarding those who react to the behavior.

People do what they do for so many complex and conflicting reasons you would have to go back to their childhood and note all the cultural and community mores they were brought up on, all the experiences they had, all the people they had met or who had influenced them, all the traumas they endured, all the seminal moments they were forced to choose from, all the peculiar biological or congental variables that shape their character and their comportment, all the idiosyncratic, conditioned responses that forged their outcomes from day to day.

These and many additional intrinsic and extrinsic progenitors become entangled in a personality that in turn becomes all the more problematic because over time personalities become intertwined in public personas such that even for the individual choosing a particular behavior at a particular time for a particular reason the motivation and intention become hopelessly blurred in ever changing circumstantial contexts.  

As Nathaniel Hawthorne put it;

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."

This line of reasoning, however, disturbs most people. They prefer instead to go on thinking that all of these alleged mercurial and capricious factors embedded in what we choose to do or not to do can be mitigated or dissolved into something that either is or is not "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

I am not, of course, an exception to the rule. But it least I know and acknowledge the quicksand that is embedded in the quagmire that engenders so many human relationships.

george walton