In 1995, the Swedish poet and author Barbro Karlén, in a television broadcast from Amsterdam, claimed to be the re-incarnation of Anne Frank. It was a claim she repeated in her autobiographical book And the Wolves Howled. Karlén was born in Sweden in 1954, to non-Jewish parents. She published her first book of poetry at the age of twelve. It became a best-seller. More books followed, nine by the age of seventeen, but later, after a personal crisis, she changed career, joining the mounted police.

Though And the Wolves Howled was described as a novel, she claimed that it had been taken directly from her life. Unsurprisingly, it prompted angry rejections, not least by a man called Binjamin Wilkomirski who had himself emerged as a key figure in Holocaust literature and who was seen as in a unique position to make a judgement about an account which supposedly reached back into childhood, albeit one which, in the case of Barbro Karlén, was not her own. He regarded her as ‘simply disturbed’, and dismissed her claim and the book as a fraud.

In February, 1998, Anne Karpf hailed a book by a Holocaust survivor. Herself a second-generation survivor, she praised it as one of the great books to have emerged from the camps. She was not alone in doing so. Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners had sought to broaden the condemnation of Germany's wartime crimes, saw it as a masterpiece.