First, before we begin, cue the violin music. And open the Hollywood curtain halfway, so you can see the opening credits.
Ready? Hit projector button!
When the New York Times ran a weepy obituary last October headlined ”[Catholic Polish man ] Jerzy Bielecki Dies at 90; Fell in Love [With Jewish Girl] in a Nazi Camp,” not every Times reader was convinced that the backstory was true.
Was it?
Did Bielecki tell a few tall tales in the latter part of his life in order to get some love and adulation from the world around him -- including a book about him and a documentary? And an award as a Righteous Gentile from an Israeli group? And monthly payments from another Jewish group for his electricity and gas bills at home in Poland from 1997 on?
Sadly, these hoaxy, embellished, fabricated things sometimes happen in a post-Holocaust world — not always, but sometimes — where some victims of that tragic event, be they elderly non-Jews (as in the case of Bielecki) or Jews as in the case of Cyla Cybulska, either mis-remember what happened in those terrible faraway days or intentionally create fabrications that really amount to hoaxes and frauds.
The jury is still out on this one, but from all apparent information available online, something is not entirely kosher about Bielecki’s backstory, which the august and always fact-checked Times swallowed hook, line and sinker without apparent doing any deep fact-checking this time.
If you read the Times obit, as well as the past Associated Press and Reuters stories — (not to mention the Washington Post, thousands of newspapers and myriad blogs that picked up the sad, tragic, weepy Holocaust story with a happy ending of sorts, including mentions of things like a pear tree in Auschwitz in 1944 where the couple spoke in hushed tones and the 39 roses that Bielecki presented to his former lover when they met in Poland 39 years after the war) — you will see.
If you believe all this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that’s for sale. Interested?
First the good news: In 1985, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded Bielecki the Righteous Among the Nations title for saving Cybulska, a Jewish woman at Auschwitz who later married another man and came to America and died in 2005. Bielecki died this year.
“It was great love,” is how Bielecki, recalled it in an AP interview at his home in a small southern town 55 miles from Auschwitz. “We were making plans that we would get married and would live together forever.” Maybe. Maybe not.
You see, he was Catholic, She was Jewish. They were both inmates of the Nazi camp. They both escaped — together! — according to Bielecki.
As the Times tells it, "Jerzy Bielecki was 19 years old, Roman Catholic and suspected of being a member of the Polish resistance when he was arrested by the Nazis in June 1940 and transported to Auschwitz, where the number 243 was tattooed on his arm.
