In her memoirs, a Jewish artist named Rosemarie Koczy, pictured above, claimed to have survived two concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Upon closer scrutiny, however, her life story contained a few inconsistencies. For one, she wrote that the Nazis deported her to the Traunstein subcamp of Dachau, a place for male prisoners.

Rosemarie, biologists later confirmed, was female.

Just because one Holocaust survivor lied about her life, though, doesn’t mean that the millions of other ones also did.

I mean the story of 93-year-old Kalman Aron, another Jewish artist who survived more than one concentration camp, contains no inconsistencies whatsoever.

New York Times:

Kalman Aron began drawing pencil and crayon portraits of his family in Latvia when he was 3. A child prodigy, he mounted his first one-boy gallery show when he was 7. He was commissioned to paint the official portrait of the Latvian prime minister when he was 13. He enrolled at an academy of fine arts in Riga, the capital, at 15.

Then, in 1941, when he was 16, the Germans invaded, and his parents, who were Jewish, were murdered. But Kalman’s artistic talent would spare his life. Over the next four years, he would survive seven Nazi concentration camps by swapping sketches of his captors and their families for scraps of food.

…

After the German invasion, Kalman’s father was conscripted for a work detail and never seen again. Kalman was herded into Riga’s Jewish ghetto with his older brother and his mother. She was murdered later that year in the massacre of 25,000 Jews near the Rumbula forest.

Kalman was shipped to perform slave labor in camps in Latvia, Poland, Germany (where he was sent to Buchenwald) and what was then Czechoslovakia.

Seven camps, eh? These weren’t concentration camps to this guy – they were motels!

Seven isn’t the high score, though. That honor goes to Chaim Ferster, who survived eight of them.

(UPDATE: Chaim was beaten by Elias Feinzilberg, who survived nine.)

It’s still an impressive achievement for a man, especially considering that one of those camps was the notorious Buchenwald camp in Germany.

Buchenwald didn’t have gas chambers (that was more of a Poland thing), but it did have something almost as bad: execution rooms where innocent Jews were hung from meat hooks:

The guards at Buchenwald, known for their efficiency, hung Jews to death because they thought bullets were too slow.

After Nazi guards discovered his artistic ability, he would be temporarily relieved of hard labor and hidden away in a barracks to sketch their portraits or copy photographs of their families. He might be rewarded with a moth-eaten blanket or a morsel of food.

“They wouldn’t pay me anything, but I would get a piece of bread, something to eat,” he was quoted as saying last year in The Jewish Journal. “Without that, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I made it through the Holocaust with a pencil,” he told Steven C. Barber, who is adapting Ms. Magee’s book into a documentary, “Into the Light,” for Vanilla Fire Films.

Hmm.

You know, those Nazis seemed rather lenient at times. These people were supposedly dedicated to the complete extermination of the Jewish race, yet they were always willing to spare the lives of Jews that exhibited even the most modest of talents.

Is it possible that the Nazis weren’t as two-dimensionally evil as the court historians led us to believe?

I’m tempted to respond with “yes” like an anti-Semite.

But then I remember Schindler’s List and come to my senses. Of course they were evil – survivors like Kalman Aron were the exception, not the rule.

The rule was the Six Million.

Two ‘eye witnesses’ from Buchenwald add Pharisee tit-wallets to the more familiar Jewish fables of Semitic lampshades and Zyklon-B shower heads.

Lest we forget the horror of it all.

Five Came Back by Mark Harris (a columnist for Entertainment Weekly) says that film-directors John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, William Wyler and George ­Stevens faked scenes for propaganda-films that they made for the government of the United States during the Second World War.

Mark Harris on how John Huston faked The Battle of San Pietro:

“San Pietro was seen as a new pinnacle of realism. In some ways it was, insofar as John Huston’s faked war-footage looked more like what we now think of as war-footage than anything that Americans had seen. He knew that you needed to have a shaky camera. He knew what a kind of vérité-style for war-footage should look like. But the fact is, it was all faked. He and his crew got to the battle after it was over. They had gone to Italy with the assigned mission to find a town that the Allies were about to liberate, and to film the victory, the liberation of the town, and the joyous return of the villagers. And when they got to San Pietro what they found instead was an abandoned town that had been shelled to bits, the Germans already in retreat, corpses of American soldiers all over the place, and mines and boobytraps everywhere they looked. So, the movie that became San Pietro was a restaged version of that battle that was shot over the next six weeks.” [Mark Harris, NPR 22 February 2014]

Harris suggests that a realistic representation of what was happening might have damaged public support for the war:

“When you take away the whole question of fakery, it makes the combat look rough and frightening and punishing and makes the advance of a line of ­soldiers look slow and ­hesitant in ways that set it apart from Hollywood war movies and even from a lot of other documentaries.” [Express, 9 March 2014]

There are aspects of film-fakery during the Second World War that Harris likely does not discuss to any great extent in his book.

In addition to simulating battles, the directors would simulate atrocity-footage. Frank Capra used footage of Chinese Nationalist troops executing Chinese Communists to portray Japanese troops wantonly killing Chinese civilians. He accomplished this by cropping the frames and adding dramatized segments that induced viewers to interpret what they were seeing as a Japanese atrocity rather than what it was. (Details here.)

Capra was also not above misrepresenting clips from German newsreels, showing the suffering in eastern Poland under Soviet rule, as scenes of suffering under German rule.

At the end of the war, professional film-directors were also employed to make the Germans appear as monsters, thus justifying the war. Alfred Hitchcock was engaged to make a film that represented Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald as places where gassings had occurred — which is officially acknowledged now not to be true — but Hitchcock (not a Jew) never finished the film and it was never shown until PBS Frontline got hold of it in the 1980s, a few years after Hitchcock’s death. Billy Wilder, a Jew who had left Germany a few years earlier to become a famous director in Hollywood, was similarly engaged.