False Holocaust testimony occupies a singular place in any exploration of textual deception, since what is seen as the effrontery of those who create or embellish accounts of survival in such circumstances is judged to have special ethical and political dangers, alongside the aesthetic and intellectual ones that we have already encountered. Such risks are seen to include the disparagement of genuine survivor accounts and thus the encouragement of Holocaust denial. The public controversy that has accompanied the exposure of the testimonies to be analysed here has also raised anew the question of fiction's role in representing the Holocaust years, as if registering a pan-generic backlash against all varieties of non-documentary discourse. In this chapter, I will consider such issues in relation to three testimonies that are known to be genuine but exaggerated, and contrast them with three that are entirely fabricated. The embellished testimonies are Martin Gray's For Those I Loved, originally published in French in 1971, Deli Strummer's A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust from 1988, and Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence, of 2009; the fabrications are Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, translated into English from the German original in 1996, Misha Defonseca's 1997 testimony, reissued in 2005 as Surviving with Wolves: The Most Extraordinary Story of World War II, and Bernard Holstein's 2004 Stolen Soul. In particular, I will ask what kinds of generic and ethical differences exist between the two categories, and how their inauthenticity is expressed in textual terms.

Embellished testimony

Embellished testimonies, that is, accounts by Holocaust survivors in which significant amounts of invented material have been included, are extreme examples of any testimony's being subject to what Primo Levi calls the unreliable ‘drift’ of memory, as well as such a work's inevitable reliance on existing testimonial and literary conventions. Changes over time in repeatedly delivered testimony, particularly when this takes an oral form, may not necessarily be a sign of unreliability or forgetting on the survivor's part. Inconsistency may convey how the experience appeared to the testifier in the moment of speaking or writing, and how the narration of memory may change over time.