Fake Holocaust Survivors: Max Fontak
Continuing on with my series examining the stories of so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’ we have the case of Max Fontak that has been the subject of an article in ‘Newsday’.
To wit:
‘Fontak and his seven siblings were raised in Bedzin, an industrial city in southern Poland, where his parents made a livings elling sausage casings. Around 1941, after the Nazis invaded the country, his family was forced into the city’s Jewish ghetto, where they shared a cramped apartment with two other families and subsisted on meagre rations, he said. In 1943, many of Fontak’s siblings, both parents and other family members were shipped to Auschwitz, where they were murdered, Fontak said.
But Nazi officials had other plans for Fontak, then around 25, and his brother Bernard, putting them to work stripping factories of machines that were sent back to Germany to aid the war effort.
His indentured labor continued two more years, during which the pair of brothers were sent to five different concentrationcamps. They worked for 12-hour stretches digging ditches for building foundations and army trenches in the freezing cold, he said. The prisoners lived on bread and watery soup, and wrapped themselves in empty cement bags to keep warm. A punch to the face by a kapo, a prisoner who supervised other inmates, broke Fontak’s jaw. He did not expect to live out the war.
That made the sudden appearance of Russian soldiers at Fontak’s last camp in May 1945 all the more surreal, he said.’ (1)
There isn’t a massive problem in Fontak’s story per se, but what I am beholden to point out is that the idea that he and his brother worked for ‘12-hour stretches digging ditches for building foundations and army trenches in the freezing cold’ while living ‘on bread and watery soup’ while wrapping ‘themselves in empty cement bags to keep warm’ is not exactly likely and had this truly been the case then the Fontak brothers would have died from frostbite and hypothermia within days of living in such conditions. (2)
Doesn’t sound like Fontak is telling the truth about his ‘suffering’ and living conditions now does it?
References
(1) https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/holocaust-survivor-birthday-1.16937847?firstfree=yes
(2) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-frostbite-or-hypothermia-2014-1?r=US&IR=T