Mietek Grocher

Mietek Grocher is a Polish Jewish author from Sweden and public speaker who survived the Holocaust. Grocher recounted the events in his 1996 memoir Jag överlevde (English translation: I survived).

Grocher was born in 1926 in Warsaw, Poland. As a teenager during World War II he resided with his family in the Warsaw Ghetto. Grocher claims to have survived nine different Nazi concentration camps during World War II including Buchenwald and Majdanek. He also wrote that he survived the Majdanek gas chambers. When he realized he was led to gassing by the guards, he began walking backwards. The SS man guarding the door to the gas chambers was in conversation with another guard and so Grocher escaped unnoticed, to join his father. He was the only member of his family to survive the Final Solution. Since the end of the war Grocher has lived in Västerås, Sweden and traveled around Swedish schools giving speeches about the events of the Holocaust.

Controversy

In late October 2010 upon reading Grocher's book Artur Szulc,[1][2] a Polish-born military historian from Sweden has noted, that aside from perpetuating long-debunked myths about the German attack on Poland, a large part of I survived has been copied verbatim from the book of fiction written in 1961 by Leon Uris and titled Mila 18,[3] including the mention of apparently fictional Nazi officers serving in the General Government during World War II. Several names of German officials in Grocher's book are unknown to history. Szulc contacted Grocher's publishers, but released his own findings in January 2011 when the questions he posed to them weren't answered to his satisfaction.[4][5]

References

  1. ↑ Ulf Cahn. "Judarna har vapen". Artur Szulc, Norstedts förlag (in Swedish). Menorah. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
  2. ↑ "Artur Szulc", Biography, including list of publications (in Swedish) (Sv.Metapedia.org)
  3. ↑ Stockholms Stadsbibliotek. "Mila 18 by Leon Uris". Stockholm City Library. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
  4. ↑ Sydsvenskan (2012). "Grochers memoarer anklagas för sakfel". Internet Archive. Sydsvenska Dagbladets AB. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
  5. ↑ Artur Szulc (28 January 2011). "Mietek Grocher "Jag överlevde"". Skalman.nu Forum, Sweden. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, April 22, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.