Editorial: Maintain Holocaust awareness

A phony story about a little girl's Holocaust odyssey must not infect tireless efforts of survivors who have worked a lifetime raising awareness to one of history's most heinous crimes against humanity.

Instead, it must harden our collective determination to counter Holocaust deniers with truthful, solid information about the genocide that occurred - and that which continues to occur in parts of the world today.

Last week, Misha Defonseca, 71, a Belgian writer who lives in Massachusetts, admitted that her best-selling book, "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years," was an elaborate fantasy.

Defonseca had been the featured speaker in 1998 at the Leon and Helen Sperling Holocaust Lecture at the Jewish Community Center, where she recounted how she spent four years walking 1,900 miles through Nazi-occupied Europe in search of her parents. Along the way, she said, she was befriended by wolves, and claimed to have shot a German soldier in self-defense. Her book was translated into 18 languages and later was adapted for the French feature film "Surviving With Wolves."

Utican Helen Sperling, who along with her late husband, Leon, were Holocaust survivors, was devastated by news that the story was a fake.

"How dreadful it is not to believe and to be cynical about something so awful to remember," said Sperling, who has spent most of her life telling her own Holocaust survival story.

Herbert Usenheimer, executive director of The Jewish Community Federation of the Mohawk Valley, said the group will continue to bring in speakers about the Holocaust and to raise awareness about the terrible effects of hate all over the world. We've seen that more recently in places like Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s and Darfur today. Many newcomers to Utica are here because they faced the prospect of being killed because of their ethnic group or their religion or their tribe.

It's vital that Defonseca's lies don't distract us from the horrible nature of genocide. More than ever, we need to listen to the true stories of the Helen Sperlings and understand hate's terrible toll. We need to pass on these true stories to our children so they, too, become increasingly aware of the hate and injustice that must

never be repeated.