Author | Jean Goodwin Messinger |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Hannah Pence |
Genre | Holocaust biography |
Publisher | White Pelican Press |
Publication date | August 2, 2005 |
Publication place | United States |
ISBN | 978-0615128665 |
Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond is a Holocaust biography written by Jean Goodwin Messinger about Hannah Pence. The book gained notoriety when it was revealed that the entire story had been fabricated by Pence.
Pence claims that during World War II, at the age of three, she was taken from her family of German Jews by the Nazis. She was forced into the Dachau concentration camp, where medical experiments were performed upon her and she was starved by the guards. After being rescued from the camp by American forces, she went on to live in a convent whose nuns taught her to ski. The Denver Post wrote that after the convent, "She claimed to have competed on Germany’s 1956 Olympic ski team. Then came a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. And a heroic battle for real estate she said Germany rightly owed her. And a marriage to a U.S. pilot who, she said, later went missing in Vietnam. Oh, and a scare during the 1972 Olympics, an audience with the pope, an encounter with Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall and an airplane hijacking by a Palestinian terrorist." [1]
The story began to unravel in the summer of 2009 when Pence was baptized by Texas evangelical Beth Moore. [2] The congregation and others in the town took issue with some of the claims in the book, which led to Messinger admitting that she had not checked on any of the claims Pence had made "because, to me, that would have felt sneaky." [1] After it was revealed that the entirety of Pence's story was a fabrication, Messinger stated, "I was terribly embarrassed. Not only for me, but for everyone else touched by this." [3] Pence's real life ex-husband, from whom she was estranged, confirmed to the media that none of her stories were true. [4]
Posters on the Holocaust denial website Stormfront used the news that the book was a fabrication as "proof" that the Holocaust itself was a fake.[ citation needed ]
The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODAH), a Holocaust denial forum, has also used Pence's stories as an argument that the Holocaust did not happen. [5]
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a fabrication or exaggeration. Holocaust denial includes making one or more of the following false claims:
Longmont is a home rule municipality located in Boulder and Weld counties, Colorado, United States. Its population was 98,885 as of the 2020 U.S. Census. Longmont is located northeast of the county seat of Boulder. It is named after Longs Peak, a prominent mountain that is clearly visible from the city.
Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a 1995 book, whose author used the pseudonym Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be a memoir of the Holocaust. It was debunked by Swiss journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried in August 1998. The subsequent disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications sparked heated debate in the German- and English-speaking world. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. Swiss historian and anti-Semitism expert Stefan Maechler later wrote, "Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch." The debates led to the creation of the term Wilkomirski syndrome for similar cases.
Deborah Esther Lipstadt is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Yaffa Eliach (May 31, 1935 – November 8, 2016) was an American historian, author, and scholar of Judaic studies and the Holocaust. In 1974, she founded the Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research in Brooklyn, New York, which collected over 2,700 audio interviews of Holocaust survivors as well as thousands of physical artifacts. Eliach created the "Tower of Faces" made up by 1,500 photographs for permanent display at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Alex (Uldis) Kurzem was an Australian pensioner originally from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and a centre-point of a long-standing controversy regarding his Holocaust memoir which has led to a financial windfall in the early 21st century. He was the subject of a television documentary and a best-selling book by his son, translated into 13 languages; both entitled The Mascot.
Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years is a literary hoax by Misha Defonseca, first published in 1997. The book was fraudulently published as a memoir telling the supposed true story of how the author survived the Holocaust as a young Jewish girl, wandering Europe searching for her deported parents. The book sold well in several countries and was made into a film, Survivre avec les loups, named after the claim that Misha was adopted by a pack of wolves during her journey who protected her.
Misha Defonseca is a Belgian-born impostor and the author of a fraudulent Holocaust memoir titled Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, first published in 1997 and at that time professed to be a true memoir. It became an instant success in Europe and was translated into 18 languages. The French version of the book was a derivative work based on the original with the title Survivre avec les loups that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film of the same name in 2007.
Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, written by Herman Rosenblat, was a fictitious Holocaust memoir purporting to tell the true story of the author's reunion with, and marriage to, a girl who had passed him food through the barbed-wire fence when he was imprisoned at the Schlieben subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II. The book was scheduled for publication by Berkley Books in February 2009, but its publication was canceled on December 27, 2008, when it was discovered that the book's central events were untrue.
Herman A. Rosenblat was a Polish-born American author, known for writing a fictitious Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence, purporting to tell the true story of a girl who passed him food through the barbed-wire fence at the Schlieben sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II. The book was planned to be published in 2009 by Berkley Books, but was cancelled after it turned out that many elements of his memoir were fabricated and some were contrary to verifiable historical facts. Rosenblat later admitted to lying on purpose with the intention of "bringing joy".
Several individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy. The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.
David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt is a case in English law against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books, filed in the High Court of Justice by the British author David Irving in 1996, asserting that Lipstadt had libelled him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law because Lipstadt's claim that he had deliberately distorted evidence had been shown to be substantially true. English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defence, meaning that it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that her claims of Irving's deliberate misrepresentation of evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true.
Hannah Rosenthal is an American Democratic Party political official and Jewish non-profit executive who served as the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism from 2009 until 2012 during the Obama administration.
Amanda Lynn Harvey is an American jazz and pop singer and songwriter. Profoundly deaf following an illness at the age of eighteen, she was a contestant on the 12th season of America's Got Talent, where she performed original songs during the competition.
Rosemarie Pence is a German-American woman who posed as a child Holocaust survivor from the Dachau Concentration Camp. Pence became the subject of a fake biography titled Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond published in 2005. Her fabrications, which included a fake Jewish background, were discovered in 2009. By 2012 she was wanted in Colorado's Boulder County on an arrest warrant for check fraud and the theft of more than $20,000.
Jean Goodwin Messinger is an author who has written books covering stories of World War II and Holocaust survivors including the book, Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond that she wrote in 2005. That particular book brought Messinger notoriety because it was revealed later after the book's publication that the subject of the book, Rosemarie Pence had lied about her story, which then made the biography fictional.
Donald Joseph Watt was an Australian Army soldier and the author of a literary hoax, a fictitious Holocaust memoir entitled Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster. Only the disclosure of Watt's fabrications altered the status of the book which was initially praised by various Jewish organizations as the most important work written in Australia.
Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for libel. It stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius and Alex Jennings.
Charlotte Pence Bond is an American writer who is the second child and elder daughter of former Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence and former Second Lady of the United States, Karen Pence.