Fake Holocaust Survivors: Ethel Safran Kaplan

Continuing on with my series examining the stories of so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’; we have Ethel Safran Kaplan whose story one of my long-time readers sent me to look at.

This is helpfully provided by ‘The Atlantic’ as follows:

‘There were the scissors that my grandmother somehow remembered to bring with her as she fled. She could hear the rumble of destruction in the distance. She could see the cloud of smoke that was the Nazi murder of her family and neighbors. Without forethought, she made the decision to run ahead, carrying with her the scissors and, despite the blossoms of spring, a winter coat.

In the seasons that followed, which piled into years, she kept on walking, from Poland to Uzbekistan, and then back again. Although she was a teenager, her body could barely sustain the 2,600-mile trek. Her legs would swell, and sores covered her trunk. She nourished herself with stolen potatoes, expertly hidden in the lining of her dress. When she came into the occasional possession of grains of rice, she saved them as if they were precious metals. 

For decades, she said nothing about her escape. Then she gathered the courage to recite the story to her grandchildren, and she found that it fortified her against her nightmares. Narrating her life provided a sense of meaning to the improbability and pain of survival.

[…]

As a teenager, she was a communist, an act of rebellion in a small conservative shtetl. I imagine the intensity of her yearning for a better world, the romanticism that would lead her to dream like that. It was this rebellion, her sense that the Nazis might seek her out for special punishment, that prodded her to flee. Her story of survival was bound together with her capacity for free thinking and her ability to feel deeply.’ (1)

We read that Kaplan ‘escaped the Nazis’ with ‘scissors and winter coat’ after seeing a ‘cloud of smoke’ that was the SS ‘murdering her family and neighbours’ in which she randomly walked 2,600 miles from Poland to Uzbekistan (and back again!) feeding herself on ‘stolen potatoes’ and ‘occasional grains of rice’ that she promptly ‘expertly hid in the lining of her dress’. This is about as implausible as it gets since Kaplan is effectively claiming to have walked through thousands of miles of terrain that was inhabited with numerous Soviet partisans and German anti-partisan units hunting and killing each other in addition to the conventional Soviet and German units fighting each other on the front lines.

In essence Kaplan is claiming to have walked through the front lines of the deadliest war in human history without anyone noticing her while stealing food from everyone at the same time.

What does she claim to have been… invisible or something?

References

(1) https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/escaping-nazis-story-girl-who-lived/579139/