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survivor
fraud
This page considers 'survivor fraud'.
It covers -
introduction
The
preceding page discussed appropriation of military honours
and other attributes, such as people awarding themselves
bravery medals and campaign decorations or falsely representing
themselves as being military veterans, a deception that
may provide financial benefit and gain the sympathy or
respect of their peers.
For some observers a more disturbing phenomenon is that
of people who falsely claim to be survivors of the Holocaust
or disasters such as the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist incidents,
sometimes apparently truly believing their own claims
and without a primary motivation of financial reward.
Personal validation and/or profit by being the focus of
community solicitude is not new: fraudulent 'survivors'
appeared after the Titanic sinking, the Crusades,
Tsarist pogroms, the epochal Lisbon Earthquake of 1755,
the San Francisco Earthquake of 1905 and other events
that grabbed public attention or private sympathy.
incidents
Such betrayal of good faith and appropriation of the respect
for another's genuine suffering and endurance is apparent
in literary frauds such as Wilkomirski/Doessekker - discussed
in more detail elsewhere
on this site - and the tawdriness of fakes
such as Khouri, Willson, De Wael and JT LeRoy.
Bruno Doessekker claimed to be Holocaust survivor Binjamin
Wilkomirski. Monique De Wael posed as Misha Defonseca
who had supposedly been succoured by wolves, Mowgli-style,
while trekking across Europe as an unaccompanied six year
old in the midst of the Holocaust. Norma Khouri, Chicago
and Gold Coast housewife, spun a tale of victimhood as
the witness to a Jordanian 'honour killing' that appears
not to have occurred. Laurel Willson recounted tales of
satanic sacrifice and child abuse, an echo of past fantasies
by authors such as 'Maria Monk'. Anthony Godby Johnson
offered an equally lurid 'true' account of his supposed
victimhood, readily received by a credulous audience and
promoted by the same entertainment industry that endorsed
concoctions attributed to survivor 'JT Leroy'. Aspects
of Martin Gray's memoir For Those I Loved (New
York: Little Brown 1971) - a best seller, awarded the
UN's Dag Hammarskjöld award - have been criticised
by figures such as Gitta Sereny and as feeding nonsense
from Holocaust deniers.
In 2007 questions were asked about Twin Towers personality
Tania Head, prominent as a founder of the 9/11 Survivors'
Network (WTCSN).
Sceptics reported that, contrary to her claims, Merrill
Lynch had no record of employing a Tania Head as a member
of a mergers team in the south tower (all of whom, including
her supposed fiancee, perished on 9/11 except her). Claims
of a Harvard undergraduate degree and Stanford graduate
degree appear inconsistent with statements by those universities
that they could not find records of a student by her name.
Other attempts to profit from 9/11 include that of Jerome
Brandl (imprisoned in New York in 2002 after posing in
San Francisco, New York and Lake Tahoe as a 9/11 rescuer
- including a week's free lodging at a New York firehouse),
Mark Christopher (who sought US $52,000 survivor benefits
regarding the death of his nonexistent wife), Daniel McCarthy
(featured in newspaper accounts about supposed heroic
rescue activity in one of the Twin Towers) and Sanae Zahani
(appearing on national television as the grief-stricken
sister of a casualty at Cantor Fitzgerald).
Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (or Tosa Motokiyu)
gained attention through publication in major literary
journals of work supposedly influenced by his experience
as a survivor of the Hiroshima A-bomb, which had resulted
in the death of most of his family. Yasusada managed to
read works by Celan and Barthes several years before they
were published, indeed before they were written.
In reality the poet appears to be a US academic whose
only experience of an atomic inferno is that of watching
newsreels and reading footnotes. Studies include 'Turning
Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax' by Emily Nussbaum
in 6(7) Lingua Franca (1996) 82-84 and 'In Search
of the Authentic Other: The Araki Yasusada 'Hoax' and
What It Reveals about the Politics of Poetic Identity'
by Marjorie Perloff in 22(2) Boston Review (1997)
26-33.
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