The only editor to respond to a request for comment was Pitorus, whose real name is Piotr Konieczny. Within thousands of lines of text in which the sides debate death tolls and sources in Polish, his editorial crusade is documented on the back pages of Wikipedia, those dark corners of the online encyclopedia known only to the heaviest of contributors. While the print encyclopedias of yesteryear derived their authority from the expertise of their authors, Wikipedia works thanks to a large community of dedicated, volunteer fact checkers. The new book "imagines" Cilka's story through . "The bravest person": Cecilia (Cilka) Klein, above left, the Slovak Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz, only to be sent to a Soviet gulag, with husband Ivan, stepson George Kovach, his wife and child, in Budapest in 1984. . In 2003 Cilka Klein spoke to Slovakian journalist Peter Juscak, the only person known to have interviewed her about her life. Heather is a fiction writer, not a historian, the publisher said. What I would like is for them [Heather Morris and St Martins Press] to publicise that this work is 99% fiction and to apologise for the treatment of my stepmother, he said. 'The book contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements on which the overall inauthentic picture of the camp reality is built.'. Ah, yes, the tunnel that is a gas chamber, laughs Grabowski, This is of course a joke, since a 500-meter long tunnel can hardly serve as a sealed gas chamber. Millions of men out of work and lonely. Cecilia had six siblings all in all. The effort to rewrite Polish history on Wikipedia joins Holocaust distortion efforts by Polish think tanks picked up and echoed by nationalist media outlets that try to increase the estimate of the number of Poles who perished during the so-called Polocaust, a term that has gained popularity in recent years and is used to describe the mass murder of non-Jewish Poles at the hands of the Nazis. Cilka, a virgin, was repeatedly raped by him and kept separately . Not long after, Kovach's lawyer sent a letter to Morris' publication requesting mentions of her father be removed from the book after which specific sections were omitted. Cecilia (Cilka) is my stepmother. Despite having history on his side, on September 28, Icewhiz lost his case against the group of Polish editors. A slew of false claims by Ukrainian and other east European nationalists still appear on Wikipedia. Cilka Klein, along with her family, was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau when she was just sixteen years old. Sokolov spoke of Cilka in those terms because immediately after her release from Auschwitz-Birkenau she was taken prisoner by the Soviet Army and sentenced to 15 years hard labour in one of Stalins most remote and terrible gulags, Vorkuta. Trump wants 'Freedom Cities' where cars can fly, parents get 'BONUSES' for having babies and huge monuments are built to 'true American heroes' in 'Quantum Leap' vision for the future, US soldier is sentenced to 45 years in jail for conspiring with Satanic neo-Nazi group to launch jihadi massacre on his OWN platoon as it guarded secret military site, Tom Sizemore, 61, dies after aneurysm and stroke: Action star known for Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Born on the Fourth of July battled addiction, Floridians are told not to wash their face with tap water over brain-eating bug fears: Public health experts issue warning after man died from amoeba-infested water. Grabowski, whose own Wikipedia page was targeted by members of the group Icewhiz describes, is not surprised. Her name was Cilka Klein. It was very clear that the situation for the women, every woman except for those old and sick, was dire. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is . By 2010, half were back to editing and they form the core of the Polish group at the heart of Icewhizs claims. Tim Stickings For Mailonline But the truth is that Jews and Poles were unequal victims. What I would like is for them [Heather Morris and St Martins Press] to publicise that this work is 99% fiction and to apologise for the treatment of my stepmother, he said. Cilka was just 16 when she arrived at Hitlers death camp but already beautiful enough to catch the eye of a high-ranking Nazi officer who took her as a sex slave. Above, a diagram of the bogus Warsaw gas chamber that appeared on Wikipedia. The first of the two, Boguslaw Kopka, published a book in 2007 that completely blew Trzcinskas theory out of the water, noted Grabowski. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Kleinone of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooistwas forced to become the mistress of two Nazi . Everything that is related to negative treatment of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust is now being distorted and manipulated with the goal of promoting a false narrative and sowing confusion on English Wikipedia.. In an introduction to Cilkas Journey, Morris writes that the book is based on what I learnt from the first-hand testimony of Lale Sokolov from the testimony of others who knew [Kovachova], and from my own research. One explanation is that though there was no death camp in Warsaw called KL Warschau, there was certainly a concentration camp with that name. This gulag hospital had very few drugs for its prisoner patients. I saw articles changing dramatically, in front of my students very eyes, claims Dreifuss. Not only that, her findings, which she published independently in 2002, were completely debunked by two historians appointed by the IPN. He argued that though he does not support the false narrative regarding the existence of a death camp at KL Warschau, he does not think it constitutes a hoax., In a detailed response to the claims presented in this story, Konieczny said that any errors that existed in Wikipedia on topics related to Poland and the Holocaust were minuscule and hardly widespread, and the result of the fact that this was a controversial topic on which there is some disagreement between academics. It has nothing to do with the Cecilia that he knew, or her history as she recounted it to him, says the letter, which goes on to list two of the most egregious errors in the book: the false and patently absurd storyline that Cilka is presented as being the mistress of not one but two high-ranking SS camp commanders, and that Cilka allegedly steals drugs from the Vorkuta camp hospital (supposedly to protect her reputation). Many of those caught were first transferred to the KL Warschau complex Among those grouped in Warsaw, the majority was either shot to death or gassed in a provisional gas chamber situated in a railway tunnel near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station.. An Australian author is under fire for allegedly misinterpreting the experiences of a Holocaust survivor in her latest book. What happened to her there is the subject of Morriss second book, the sequel to The Tattooist Of Auschwitz. . I have read both of the books. Available now.'She was the bravest person I ever met'Lale Sokolov, The Tattooist of Auschwitz In 1942 Cilka Klein is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. What struck me was how the central female characters, especially in Cilka's Journey, had great empathy for one another. The custodians of the Auschwitz concentration camp found numerous historical inaccuracies within the book, which was based onsurvivor Lali Sokolov, but it still became an international best-seller, selling upwards of three million copies. In the letter, Klein stated that she had been liberated by US forces in May 1945at the Neustatd Glewe concentration camp and returned to Slovakia the next month. It has nothing to do with the Cecilia that he knew, or her history as she recounted it to him, says the letter, which goes on to list two of the most egregious errors in the book: the false and patently absurd storyline that Cilka is presented as being the mistress of not one but two high-ranking SS camp commanders, and that Cilka allegedly steals drugs from the Vorkuta camp hospital (supposedly to protect her reputation). However, thanks to the existence of a large community of editors dedicated to maintaining English Wikipedias core policies, the site in recent years has emerged as the last bastion of truth online, the so-called good cop of the internet. The family owned a small grocery store, which Cecilie's mother managed. Still, Kovach wants a more explicit statement about its fictionalization, an apology from Morris and her publisher, and 10% of revenue to be donated to an appropriate charity nothing for himself. The centerpiece of the hoax the one that supported the 200,000 claim was the supposed existence of gas chambers in Warsaw during the war to systematically kill Poles. Cecilia Kovachova is pictured above with her husband Ivan, whom she met while they were both prisoners at the Russian labour camp. In recent years, when I examined certain articles with them, I noticed that the text and some of the visual aspects were altered. Het is vreemd om naar een man te kijken die . The person who first discovered the scale of the distortion and is now arguing to have it recognized as Wikipedias longest hoax is an Israeli editor dubbed Icewhiz, who refuses to be identified by his real name but agreed to speak with Haaretz. Adam Bartosz of the Committee for the Protection of Monuments of Jewish Culture in Tarnow said he believes that this act of vandalism is associated with the current election campaign for the Polish national parliament. The publisher said Morris was a regular donor to many charities, and that conversations about making donations to the charities suggested by Kovach were ongoing and under consideration. His stepmother, who later worked as a senior government accountant, had a reputation in Slovakia for incorruptibility. Her father, who was from Poland, taught private lessons in math and German. Tady ij knihy . The Nazis spared their lives because they were twins. Per Wikipedias rules, the fact that he allegedly took to Twitter to fight the Polish editors is akin to what was done by those who were implicated in the EEML scandal. She told another fan: You wont find anything on Google, it has taken professional researchers for me to get the details and information required to write her story, she was a closed book so to speak., A spokesperson for Bonnier Zaffre, Morriss publisher in the UK, said: Like The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Cilkas Journey is a novel. Cilka's Journey continues the story of Cilka, a prisoner featured in The Tattooist of Auschwitz.The character was based on Cecilia Klein, who, according to Morris, served as the "sex slave . Cilka's Journey is based on interviews with Lale Sokolov (The . At that time she was already completing the novel about Cilka., Morriss UK publisher Bonnier Zaffre defended the novel: Cilkas Journey is a work of fiction, and it is based on the memories of survivors who knew Cilka at the time these events are described, in particular, Lale Sokolov, the Tattooist of Auschwitz, who regarded Cilka as the bravest person he had ever met.. Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. But as a professor, a teacher, and an avid reader, I finished the book having the highest regard and hope for Celika Klein and only learned of this controversy after. In another case that shows how Trzcinskas work supplied revisionists with the citations they needed, an editor called Poeticbent insinuated the 200,000 death toll figure from the Warsaw article to the one about Nazi crimes against the Polish nation. But our Second Gentlemen is lecturing us about 'toxic masculinity'. Kovachovas stepson, George Kovach, is the latest to complain about the new release, though he's not the only one. French family sues Airbnb after 19-month-old daughter dies from fentanyl overdose while taking a nap at Miami rental - after previous tenants held cocaine-fueled party, Walgreens says it will NOT sell abortion pills in 20 Republican-controlled states - even where it is still legal. In Cilka's Journey, we are introduced to Cilka Klein, who first appeared in the bestselling The Tattooist of Auschwitz. In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years' hard labor in a Russian gulag.. The article was translated into a dozen languages, and false bits of information from it permeated other Wikipedia entries on related subjects, gaining over half a million views in English alone. This attempt to revise the accepted history of the Shoah on the internet encyclopedia parrots the revised historical narrative currently being trumpeted by the Polish government. His experience was now public, she told . 'There's still people in Slovakia who knew my stepmother, who loved my stepmother, and for them to pick up this book that says it is a true story, and then to read about this woman who (supposedly) stole drugs in the gulag, who slept with camp commandants, it's terrible.'. For example, claims, attributed to eyewitnesses, that canisters of Zyklon B poison gas were found at the site, or that bodies were carried out of the tunnel, were found to be full of holes. Australian author Heather Morris tried to track the real-life Kovachova down when researching her book Cilka's Journey, but the Holocaust survivor died in 2004. As Sokolov began his life as a free man following the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, Cilka was being branded a collaborator and transported by cattle truck to Vorkuta, a gulag deep inside the Arctic Circle. KL Warschau was actually a collection of a few places of internment spread out over the city. According to the author, on liberation, and still only 19, Cilka was charged by the Russians as a collaborator. The group has learned to play by the rules, editing under the auspices of Wikipedias formal project system, which allows editors to organize and work on shared topics of interest. This line attempts to shift the light away from a growing body of research into cases of Polish cooperation and collaboration with the Nazis in the persecution of Jews. . Cilka, based on the real life of Ceclia Kovov, was a character in The Tattooist of Auschwitz; in the novel, Cilka was 16 in 1942 when she entered Auschwitz, where she was forced to become . Despite these claims, Wikipedia reveals that aided by the likes of other editors from the group, like Volunteer Marek, some members of the group are also active in downplaying Polish violence against Jews and in some cases have even accused the Jews of violence against Poles. There, he laid out how, riding on the coattails of the populist wind that swept the current government into power in Poland, the story has taken on a life of its own, assuming a key role in the Polocaust narrative and developing a cult-like following among nationalists.