Fake Holocaust Survivors: Louise Lawrence-Israels

Continuing on with my series of articles looking at the narratives spun by so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’ we have that being rattled off by a lady named Louise Lawrence-Israels.

To wit:

‘During her family's three-year period of hiding from the Nazis in the attic of an Amsterdam row house, Louise Lawrence-Israel's father would periodically slip out at night after curfew to gather food and information from the resistance.

In June 1944, he left and returned with the message of Allied forces landing in Normandy.

To celebrate the news, her father chose a special day to celebrate, settling on her second birthday.

As Lawrence-Israels detailed, throwing a birthday party at that time was no small feat. Nevertheless, her family made it happen.

"My mom cut up her favorite blouse and made a beautiful dress by hand for me. I didn't see it. I had no idea what she was doing until she put it on me on my birthday. Salma made a rag doll out of old pieces of fabric. And my brother, who had been allowed to take in one toy, he had been 3 years old when we went into hiding, and he took his favorite toy, what was a little wooden pull horse. And he was going to give that to me on my birthday," she said.

This was her favorite gift of all.

A resistance member gifted her a wooden wicker chair for her doll, as well as socks and shoes that were too small. The chair now sits in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"We were happy, my brother and I. My parents had actually succeeded in what they wanted. They wanted to save their children and they wanted to keep their children happy," Lawrence-Israels said.

In September 1944, southern Holland was liberated. The northern portion, which includes Amsterdam, was not. This was due to the difficulty of crossing the Rhine, Meuse, and IJssel rivers during an early onset of winter.

Lawrence-Israels referred to the record-breaking cold winter of 1944 as "The Hunger Winter."

Nazis had previously cut supply lines, resulting in little food and no electricity for many Dutch during this time.

"My brother and I cried because our hands and feet were so cold that they hurt," she said.

The pain was caused by chilblains; patches of discolored, swollen itchy skin caused by a combination of cold weather and poor circulation, to which the extremities are particularly susceptible.

The family had no access to medicines, so they resorted to a home remedy: soaking their hands and feet in their own urine to ease the pain.

Once the winter ended, Amsterdam was liberated by Canadian troops.

Upon discovering this, the family ate what little emergency food that remained in celebration: a single tin of cookies.’ (1)

Now unless I am very much mistaken Louise Lawrence-Israels’ story is lifted almost entirely from that of Anne Frank with the obvious exception that Lawrence-Israels’ family was not betrayed and is rather short on the details of everyday life. However the fact that we hear of little detail other than weird things such as her ‘birthday party’ in 1944 and the ludicrous idea that in the middle of an utterly starved Europe that the Lawrence-Israels family had managed to acquire a single tin of cookies – that apparently didn’t get mouldy despite being in the tin in all probability for four to five years – that they didn’t open or eat during this time despite practically starving to death.

Lawrence-Israels also claims – with some serious chutzpah – that the Germans deliberately cut the supply lines to Holland, which is nonsense because the Germans were in the middle of defending from the doomed ‘Operation Market Garden’ led by the British army and didn’t cut their own supply lines – which included food supplies for civilians in the area of operations – but rather the allies did via area bombing and partisan attacks.

Based on this is it likely that Lawrence-Israels is actually a ‘Holocaust Survivor’ given that she has basically reproduced Anne Frank’s story, changed a few details and claimed it as her own?

Not likely: is it?

References

(1) http://www.hotsr.com/news/2019/apr/07/holocaust-survivor-speaks-to-students-2/