Elie Wiesel

By Carolyn Yeager

Elie Wiesel questioned in a California courtroom in 2008:

Q. And is this book Night that you wrote a true account of your experience during WWII?

A. It is a true account. Every word in it is true.

Elie Wiesel mans his table at a Jewish book fair in Austin TX in 2006. This was the year the new translation of Night by wife Marion came out, and Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club.

In Part One, I established that the decision to rebrand Night into an autobiography was the reason for the new translation, in which necessary changes could be made to better 'fit' the story both to the real Elie Wiesel and the known facts of the Hungarian deportation.

By Carolyn Yeager

On Tuesday, January 17, 2006, Amazon.com announced that it was changing the categorization of a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night from novel to memoir.

Amazon would also revise the editorial description of the original edition to make clear that they consider the book a memoir, not a novel. “We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible,” said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for the online retailer. The day before, Oprah Winfrey had announced that Night was her latest book club choice, displacing her previous selection, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

Left: Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel pose together at the  Elie   Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on May  20, 2007.  Winfrey was honored  with  the  Humanitarian   Award for “positively impacting people all over the world, especially children.”  One year earlier, she had selected Wiesel’s “Night” for her popular book club “pick” which sent it immediately to the top of the national bestseller lists.

The sudden switch from fiction to non-fiction caused some discussion and questions, which Strand brushed away by saying,  “Amazon.com’s data source for the Oprah Book Club edition of Night inaccurately classified the book as fiction.” She declined to offer details. The book, re-classified as “Autobiography” and blessed by Oprah, was already No.3 on Amazon.com as of that Tuesday afternoon! Wiesel, interviewed later with his literary agent Georges Borchardt, insisted they had never portrayed it as a novel.

As expected, a judge in a Budapest court on Feb. 6 has rejected a lawsuit brought by Hungarian-born Nikolaus (Miklós) Grüner against Chabad rabbi Slomo Köves for helping to arrange Elie Wiesel’s “Homecoming Tour” to Hungary in 2009. Grüner maintains that Elie Wiesel is not Hungarian  and not a holocaust survivor.

Nikolaus Grüner, center facing camera, watches as a barrister makes a point in court during his January 27th hearing.

By Carolyn Yeager

New information has come to the attention of this site about the Yad Vashem “Page of Testimony” (PoT) filled out for Shlomo and Mendel Wiesel by their cousin Yaakov Fishkowitz in 1957. 

Our previous description of these pages was done without knowledge of Hebrew; thus we erred in one instance dealing with the place of death of Shlomo and his brother Mendel Wiesel. Note on the form above that “Sighet,” on line 10, refers to the “Place of residence during the war,” not to the place where death occurred.

Going to line 11, the instructions written in Hebrew on the right of the page read (right to left):

11. Place of death, time and circumstances (Place also in Latin alphabet).

To the left of that Fishkowitz has written (also right to left): in camp / labor / 1943

This gives quite a different picture than we had before! According to Yaakov Fishkowitz, his cousins Shlomo and Mendel Wiesel were both in a camp performing labor in 1943, where they both died in that year. Fishkowitz obviously did not know what camp. Sighet was located right on the border with what had been Czechoslovakia, but was at that time more of Hungary until 1945. [See map in Shadowy Origins of Night II) Today, that area is Ukraine, and Sighet is once again in Romania. If the brothers had gone north on some kind of mission, toward Poland, they could have gotten arrested and placed in a camp as labor. Continue reading at Elie Wiesel Cons The World

By Carolyn Yeager

Fact is–it’s a deliberately confusing story with two distinct versions. Originally, he was too late to be assigned that number; in a newer rewrite, he was right on time. Which would you believe?

Above: Hungarian transport arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Notice the casual atmosphere, the inmate-workers in striped clothing (not wielding clubs), the non-threatening guards spotted here and there (without snarling dogs), and the crematorium chimney in the distance — which is not belching smoke and fire.

Please continue reading at Elie Wiesel Cons The World

By Carolyn Yeager

New! at  Elie Wiesel Cons The World

In this video,  Nikolaus or Miklos (Michael) Grüner is being interviewed by the Modesto (Calif.) Bee while the photographer films him pointing out the tattoo on his left arm.  This is shown in the very beginning of the video; right after that we see  the famous “Buchenwald Liberation” photograph we’ve become so familiar with, and 16-year-old Grüner is in the lower left hand corner. Is Elie in the photo? No.

 In 2008, Grüner traveled to California from his home in Sweden. While there, this very important bit of video was produced but has not been given the attention it deserves. I wonder why. Notice I didn’t form that as a question since I think the answer is apparent:  If Grüner has a tattoo, why doesn’t Wiesel?

By Carolyn Yeager

10 “tricky” questions for  those who believe Elie Wiesel was in Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps and that he wrote Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world remained silent) based on that experience.

On the CODOH Forum Friedrich Paul Berg started a interesting thread on Dec. 30 with the title “Ten Trick Questions for “Holocaust Survivors.”1   Berg writes that his questions

are not really tricky at all. They are simply the kinds of normal and reasonable questions that defense attorneys should always ask prosecution witnesses. However, we have all been so thoroughly programmed with holocaust propaganda that hardly anyone ever dares to ask the right questions.

Berg is quite right and it gave me the idea to create my own questions for those (even some revisionists) who insist that Elie Wiesel has to be the author of the Yiddish book published in 1956 in Argentina, and that I am oh so wrong in trying to prove otherwise.

Above is an image of Elie Wiesel in 1954, age 25-going-on-26, when he says he wrote Un di velt … attached to some kind of entry card issued by the Yugoslavian embassy in Paris.

So here are the questions I would like those ’believers’ to answer. As Friedrich Paul Berg would say, they are normal and reasonable questions that attorneys should ask witnesses in court. Try your hand at answering them and send your answers to [email protected] or write them in a comment below. (Serious answers only, please)

By Carolyn Yeager

 Why is Grandma Nisel not mentioned in Elie Wiesel’s Night?

According to Hilda Wiesel’s 1995 “Survivors of the Shoah” testimony, Grandmother Nisel (also  spelled Nissel) went with the family to Auschwitz.

According to Elie Wiesel’s 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea1, Grandmother Nisel went with the family to Auschwitz.

But Grandma Nisel is not mentioned even once in Wiesel’s 1958-60 supposedly autobiographical Night.2

Did Wiesel simply forget about his grandmother only 10 years after the event and then remember her again in the 1990’s? Did he cut her out because he wanted to condense his book and she was peripheral to the storyline? Neither of these can be believed. In the first place, Wiesel makes it clear in All Rivers how important Grandma Nisel was to him and he writes affectionately about her. Secondly, by including his grandmother when he mentioned his mother and three sisters, he would not have added more than a few words to the deportation narrative, as we will see. Thirdly, Grandma Nisel, as a member of his family group that he says he lost at Auschwitz, could not be left out when writing about his family group.

And, in fact, he didn’t leave her out of his memoir, nor did Hilda leave her out of her testimony. But Night is another story (pun intended).  Continue reading at Elie Wiesel Cons The World

By Carolyn Yeager

Jury decides that death is the answer.

On Friday, December 9, the jury deciding the fate of home-invasion rapist/murderer Joshua Komisarjevsky rejected mitigating circumstances presented to them by Defense Council and decided for death on all 6 counts.  This was hailed by the general public (as noted in immediate comments to newspaper stories1), while it was a disappointment to the state of Connecticut’s largest newspaper The Hartford Courant, some Connecticut lawmakers and Elie Wiesel.

Above: Dr. William Petit, sole survivor of the brutal 2007 home invasion by Stephen Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky that took the lives of his wife and two daughters, watches as his sister Johanna Chapman thanks the jurors for taking their time to come to the “right decision” in this painful and disturbing case. Chapman attended all the court sessions with her brother.

Above: The father of murdered Jennifer Petit, Rev. Richard Hawke. on left, embraces Christopher Komisarjevsky (right), the uncle of Joshua Komisarjevsky, outside the courtroom after the verdict was read. The elder Komisarjevsky, who strongly resembles Nikita Khrushchev in this profile pose, has written that his father, Theodore Komisarjevsky, was a renowned theater director from a famous Russian theatrical family. His mother was a leading figure in modern dance, a teacher and a writer. He is himself the former chief executive of the prominent public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Joshua Komisarjevsky was adopted as an infant by Christopher’s brother Benedict; his mother unknown. Christopher K. was the only family member to attend the sentencing trial, during which time he made friends with the Hawke and Petit families.

On Oct. 26, 2010, Wiesel made a speech in Connecticut while the trial for Steven Hayes was in session, calling on the jury to not give the death penalty to either Hayes or Komisarjevsky for their brutal torture/killing spree. In his speech Wiesel repeated the words “Death is not the answer.”  I posted this article about it in October on Elie Wiesel Cons The World.  Continue reading at Elie Wiesel Cons The World.