Comments on: Woman admits fabricating memoir

By: Maria

Maria — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:03:04 +0000

So sad that the Rosenblats lied about their story. Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was a great book and now movie, never pretended to be true. The Rosenblats, like Madoff, harming other Jews and it’s terrible.
I read a New York Times article about Stan Lee and Neal Adams the comic book artists supporting another TRUE Holocaust love story. There was a beautiful young artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. Dina’s art became the reason she and her Mother survived Auschwitz.
Painting the mural for the children caused Dina to be taken in front of Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he decided to make her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber as long as she was doing painting for him.
Dina’s story is true because some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. Also, the story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also a fact.
I wish Oprah would do a story about Dina and her art not about the Rosenblats who were pulling the wool over all our eyes.

By: Melissa Donovan

Melissa Donovan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:32:30 +0000

I definitely think that the publisher’s share in the responsibility for this. While I don’t expect them to do fact checking, I think that assigning a work as a memoir should at least involve some kind of contract between them and the author. Then, when this kind of debacle occurs, they can say that the author is in violation of the contract.
Also, I cannot comprehend why these authors don’t classify their work as fiction, or in Frey’s case, partially fictionalized. I think fiction is far more challenging than memoir anyway, which is another topic for discussion altogether.

By: Amy

Amy — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:42:37 +0000

exactly! Non-fiction sells right now in a way that fiction does not. And that encourages people to BS rather than just tell a story and call it one. It’s like our society’s love for “reality” has led to a more devious layer of falsehood — not unsimilar to what happened when “reality shows” replaced sit-coms.

By: Susan Helene Gottfried

Susan Helene Gottfried — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:03:51 +0000

It’s simple. Memoirs are easier to sell than fiction is. Once that changes, the fake memoirs will stop appearing.