Another day, another Holocaust Survivor™ Story exposed as a fraud:
Windsor author discovers holocaust survivor fabricated tale
BY KATHERINE POPOWSKI • For the Coloradoan • September 18, 2009
Windsor author Jean Goodwin Messinger discovered recently that the subject of her popular nonfiction novel “Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond” is not the woman she claimed to be.
In fact, the subject of the book, also known as Rose-Marie Pence, is a fraud.
Messinger said this week she was distraught to discover that Pence had fabricated the “Hannah” story.
Published in 2005, “Hannah” is the story is of a young girl who was imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, was rescued by American forces, and later became an Olympic skier.
The problem is none of her story is true, Messinger said.
Messinger offered an apology for her role in giving voice to the flawed memoir.
“I regarded this woman as a sister for the years I have known her,” Messinger said of Pence, a Longmont resident until recent weeks. “This revelation is shocking and disappointing to all of us who knew her and loved her, and counted her as a trusted friend.”
Pence’s story also caught the attention of Beth Moore of Houston-based Living Proof Ministries, who shared information about the Hannah book at conferences this summer in Albuquerque and Greensboro.
Now Moore has posted an apology on her blog and has offered to refund the cost of the book to anyone who might have purchased it after hearing Moore share Hannah’s tale.
“I would never in a million years knowingly mislead the people I have the privilege to serve. In a ministry of this kind, you can imagine that we’ve had many fraudulent stories come through the ministry and most of them never make it to second base. For extenuating reasons beyond what we can share here, this particularly well-crafted one got past us. We did not stumble on the book or the message. We were very much pursued – not by its author but – by its contriver.”
Messinger is an accomplished author who has written other books about WWII, including “Same War Different Battlefields.”
“I’ve always found history more exciting than fiction, and I regret that Hannah’s re-markable journey is not what it claimed to be in fact,” Messinger said. “There must be stories out there from WWII that would match it.”
The Boulder County District Attorney’s office is conducting an investigation of Pence, whose whereabouts are unknown.
Article #1: 'Windsor author discovers holocaust survivor fabricated tale'
Another article:
Holocaust survival tale took in many
By Susan Greene
Denver Post Columnist
09/17/2009
It's sick enough that a Colorado woman seems to have posed as a Holocaust survivor. But what's almost as curious is the number of people who lined up behind her unlikely story.
RoseMarie Pence, a one-time Super 8 manager, has lived for at least five years in Longmont. She also goes by "Hannah."
For the record, I've never met the 71-year-old and, despite my attempts, can't find her since former admirers outted her as an apparent fake.
What I do know is that Windsor writer Jean Messinger was so inspired by her life that she took on the project of self-publishing Hannah's biography.
"She didn't come to me. I went to her," she says. "I felt her story had to be told."
The result was 143 pages of supposed nonfiction titled "Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond."
As the story goes, Hannah was 3 when Nazis yanked her from her family of German Jews. She said she endured medical experiments and starvation at Dachau before American forces freed her. Orphaned, she claimed to be the only known survivor of 146 kids rescued from the camp.
Post-war, Hannah said, she went on to live in a convent whose nuns taught her to ski. She claimed to have competed on Germany's 1956 Olympic ski team. Then came a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. And a heroic battle for real estate she said Germany rightly owed her. And a marriage to a U.S. pilot who, she said, later went missing in Vietnam.
Oh, and a scare during the 1972 Olympics, an audience with the pope, an encounter with Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall and an airplane hijacking by a Palestinian terrorist.
Hannah is a Forrest Gump type who, we're supposed to believe, stumbled into some of the 20th century's biggest moments. Her biography reads like a hybrid of Anne Frank's diaries, "The English Patient," "Exodus" and "The Sound of Music" — almost believable in chapters, but implausible in its entirety.
Hannah elicited the kindness of Coloradans who housed her, fed her and found inspiration in her story. She agreed to share her sad tale with church groups and history classes. More than once, she didn't show up.
"Knowing Hannah, it isn't surprising that she finds no fraternity in the gloominess of self-inflicted despair. She recognizes it is destructive to be immersed, however justifiably, in self-pity and anger over past injustice," Messinger wrote about the happy Holocaust survivor she contrasted with the "bitter, sad old men" who work as "professional Holocaust spokesmen/ activists."
Messinger says the story began to unravel this summer when a Texas evangelist baptized Hannah and made her somewhat of a Christian folk hero. The national celebrity poked holes in a biography Living Proof Ministries now disavows as a "stunning fabrication."
Messinger voluntarily came forward about "misrepresentations" in a story she says she had no reason to doubt. She didn't check into Hannah's claims "because, to me, that would have felt sneaky."
University of Northern Colorado historian Barry Rothaus also was snookered. He wrote the following blurb on the book: "Messinger has captured the inner being of Hannah, and without editorializing, reveals the challenges and hardships of Hannah's life. This writing of Hannah's recollections adds to the literature of Holocaust survivors."
Rothaus, chief of UNC's history department, now says the story "didn't really hold together."
"Why did I attach my name to this piece of crap?" he mused. "Well, I made a mistake, and have to live with it."
Article #2: 'Holocaust survival tale took in many'
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