Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice, by Stephen D. Smith. 2023. Routledge, London and New York

Untruthful Anti-Polish Accusations in the Light of the Misha Defonseca Holocaust Fraud

This new book covers many aspects of Holocaust memory. I focus on the most relevant issues.

THE FRAUDULENT HOLOCAUST STORY OF NON-JEW MISHA DEFONSECA

Author Smith introduces the subject, “Testimony is shaped by the imagination but it is not the work of the imagination…Hoaxers like Wilkomirski so believed their own story that they were prepared to go on camera and give personal testimony. One such person is Misha Defonseca, who claims in her book Surviving With Wolves (Defonseca 2005) that during the war she had lived with wolves during her fantastical journey in search for her deported parents. Her parents, who were not Jewish, were part of the Belgian resistance and were deported to German concentration camps where they died.” (p. 114. Emphasis in original).

Defonseca continued laying on the bull. Smith remarks, “Misha Defonseca wears a large ‘Chai’ necklace during her interview for USC Shoah Foundation despite not being Jewish (1997). Her interview has not be deaccessioned as testimonies are only removed from the archive when requested by the interviewee. Defonseca has never asked for her testimony to be removed, although she has publicly acknowledged that her story is false.” (p. 116).

Note that Holocaust frauds are themselves a testimony to Holocaust supremacy. In no other genocide do uninvolved people try so hard to convince others, and themselves, that they went through it.

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES ARE UNCRITICALLY BELIEVED

What matters most about Holocaust fraud is the widespread naiveté concerning Holocaust testimonies. Smith comments, “Her [Misha Defonseca’s] hoax, the subject of the documentary film Misha and the Wolves (Hobkinson 2021), has highlighted the need to verify. Verification asks demanding questions, which the USC Shoah Foundation interviewer did not do when the testimony did not feel right, even though it was clear she was very uncomfortable with what was being shared and moved the interview to a swift conclusion. Such techniques did not serve either the purposes of history or memory. Had the right questions been asked in 1997, her hoax could have been exposed a decade before she was forced to publicly admit her falsehood. (p. 120. Emphasis added).

Note that it took no less than ten years for this outright fraud to be exposed! A declared “need to verify” obviously means that Holocaust stories are not being properly verified. Why were the right questions not asked in the first place? And why were the “warning bells” ignored for so long? This has sobering implications. What about less clear-cut cases–where there are no “warning bells” that only a part of the Holocaust account is fraudulent? That is, how many untruthful details in otherwise-valid Holocaust testimonies are never exposed? And how many of these untruthful details are anti-Polish?

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLONOPHOBIC HOLOCAUST-RELATED TALES

Let us elaborate. What is most significant is not the relatively few cases of outright fraud, but the potential untruthfulness that is found in the peripheries of the many otherwise-valid Holocaust testimonies. This allows for the smuggling-in of false anti-Polish narratives alongside the otherwise-truthful Holocaust testimonies. The fact that so many people are ready to believe anything about the Holocaust facilitates this turn of events, and surely this fact is not lost on the Jewish Polonophobes, who are all too happy to publicize various often-lurid Polonophobic tales.

The foregoing considerations are not true only of Misha Defonseca. They are true of other untruthful Holocaust-related accounts. See, for example:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/07/05/revealing-new-holocaust-frauds-even-at-auschwitz/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/11/26/wilkomirski-fraud-denial-200000-jews-allowed-to-survive-the-nazis-censorship-of-arendt-and-perechodnik-waxman/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/painted-bird-fraud-evil-murderous-peasants-siedlicka/

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JEWISH INFLUENCE: HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY PERSISTS RIGHT TO THE PRESENT

Lest anyone have any doubt that Holocaustomania rules the western world, consider the following sobering words of Stephen D. Smith:

“There are at least 200,000 hours of audio and audio-visual Holocaust testimonies stored in archives around the world, which amounts to over 20 years of continues content.” (p. 203). Now tell me that there is no such thing as Holocaust over-attention.

Pointedly, some 100 million non-Jews died in genocides and state-sponsored mass murder in the 20^th century. Guess how much recorded testimony there exists about their experiences. A pittance. Of course, we can credit this gross imbalance to Jewish influence, but this begs the question about the “might makes right” aspects of Jewish dominance, and how this use of Jewish might creates the very real injustice of marginalizing the sufferings of other peoples.

As if all this was not enough, author Smith mystifies the Holocaust in order to further elevate it above all other genocides in the public imagination. He thus quotes Aharon Appelfeld, “‘It’s like the sun. You cannot look at the sun, the temperature is too high. The Holocaust is a kind of temperature you cannot speak, you cannot utter, you cannot feel.'” (p. 125). Such expansive superlatives! I never hear them spoken of any other genocides. I never heard anyone say that the Polokaust is “just like the sun”. No one has ever said that the Rwandan genocide is something “you cannot speak, you cannot utter, you cannot feel.” Only the Jews’ Holocaust gets these highfalutin’, even racist, superlatives.