Diana Nyad often tells the story of meeting a Holocaust survivor who underwent horrific sexual abuse at the Dachau concentration camp beginning when she was three years old.

Nyad fabricated the whole thing.

 

Nandor Glid’s International Monument at Dachau. Photo: Wolfgang Manousek. License: CC BY 2.0.

 

The following summarizes Nyad’s story. It includes details common to most or all of the eight versions I’m familiar with:

I asked Dr. Sybille Steinbacher about Nyad’s tale. Dr. Steinbacher directs Frankfurt’s Fritz Bauer Institute on the History and Impact of the Holocaust. She forwarded my question to Dr. Barbara Distel, director of Dachau’s memorial site from 1975 through 2008.

With Dr. Distel’s permission, I’ve copied below the pertinent parts of her response (lightly edited for readability):

1. Dachau was a concentration camp for men only. There were never families or mothers with children. [There were some exceptions. See note #1. — Ed.]
2. Jewish families in Poland were sent to Ghettos and from there to the death camps, or directly to the death camps in Poland, never to Germany. The description Nyad gives refers to Auschwitz. The way she tells it is completely fictional. [my emphasis]
3. There were no three-year-old children in Dachau. [Unlike] Buchenwald concentration camp, there were no children’s barracks in Dachau. I have never heard of sexual abuse of children in Dachau concentration camp.
   

 

Nyad cobbles together her Holocaust tale from familiar details that few would think to dispute. Here are three of those details and how they expose Nyad’s story as fraudulent:

1. The tattoo
   Nyad always identifies the woman as a survivor by the tattoo she ostensibly received at Dachau — or, in one version, Treblinka. But the Nazis only tattooed people at Auschwitz. See “Tattoos and Numbers: The System Of Identifying Prisoners At Auschwitz” at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
2. The survivor’s gender
   The Nazis imprisoned many women, but few remained for long at Dachau until late in the war. However, Nyad says her acquaintance arrived at Dachau when she was three and remained there until the site was liberated 2½ years later.
3. The train from Krakow to Dachau
   In two versions, Nyad says the survivor went from Krakow to Dachau around the time the Nazis liquidated the Krakow ghetto. For geographic reasons that the map below makes obvious, when the Nazis emptied the ghetto, they sent people to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Plaskow, not Dachau. See Dr. Distel’s message and the Krakow (Cracow) entry at the USHMM.

 

Extermination and concentration camps near Krakow and in or near Germany. When the Nazis liquidated the Krakow ghetto, they wouldn’t have sent people to Dachau because Auschwitz-Birkenau and Plaskow were much closer. Adapted from the map “Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites” at “Facing History and Ourselves.”

 

In another version of Nyad’s story, she sends the family from Germany to Treblinka, Poland, which is over 300 miles in the opposite direction. But most deportees to Treblinka arrived from surrounding areas. See this map on the USHMM’s “Deportations” page.

 

Nyad, Nabokov, and the “Little Concubine”

Many parts of Nyad’s survivor fabrication change from telling to telling, but certain elements never vary. The little girl is always three. She always has a mother, father, and six-year-old sister. The Nazis always murder the parents and sibling while forcing the three-year-old into sexual slavery. And Nyad always refers to the girl as the SS officers’ “little concubine.”

Nyad wasn’t the first to use that term. Vladimir Nabokov beat her to it in his 1955 classic, Lolita. The story’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, kidnaps Dolores Haze, a.k.a. Lolita, and rapes her every day for two years. As the novel proceeds, Humbert calls her “a tiny concubine,” “my pubescent concubine,” and, finally, “my little concubine” (The Annotated Lolita, pp. 84, 148, 208/image).

Nyad studied literature during her year of graduate school. Whether she read Lolita then or at some other time, Nabokov’s literary masterpiece may have inspired Nyad’s Holocaust tale. If so, it’s fitting that a monumental work of fiction provides the foundation for Nyad’s monumentally horrific fabrication.

UPDATE, 9 February 2024: During the 2020 COVID lockdown, Diana fabricated a new Holocaust tale, “My Mother's Journey to Freedom,” and told it to members of her EverWalk walking groups. In this story, Nazis arrest her great aunt and uncle, Atherton and Ingeborg Curtis, for hiding Jews in their Paris home’s “garden basement.” However, they don’t arrest 17-year-old Lucy Curtis, Nyad’s mother, who has been living with Atherton and Ingeborg since she was about three.

The Nazis send the Curtises to a concentration camp. Meanwhile, Lucy, who holds an American passport, makes her way back to America. She later learns that her aunt and uncle died in the camp.

Lucy does return to the U.S., but not another word of Nyad’s new tale is true. For details, see “Diana Fabricates Another Holocaust Story, This Time About Her Own Family.”

Details from Atherton and Ingeborg Curtis’s death certificates. They died of natural causes two days apart in their Paris home.

 

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Notes

1. Women and Children in Dachau

If Diana Nyad wanted to address atrocities perpetrated upon women and children during World War II, she did not need to make up a story to do it.

Dachau opened in 1933 and, from then until the end of the war, remained a work camp for men. But there were exceptions.

(Much of the following information comes from four filmed tours of Dachau. For links to those tours and other sources, please see this resource list.)

 

Executions

Ernestine Zoref of Austria was the first woman in Dachau. The Nazis arrested her as part of Hitler’s Röhm Putsch. She arrived at Dachau on June 30 or July 1, 1934, and was immediately executed.

Four women from the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp arrived on October 13, 1942, and were forced to undergo medical experiments. They were sent back to Ravensbruck a few months later.

Four captured British Intelligence officers — Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan, and Éliane Plewman — arrived at Dachau on September 12, 1944. They were executed the following day.

Image via @debvaillancourt and SOE History.

 

On November 29, 1944, five women accused of “preparing to commit high treason” were brought to Dachau: Else Himmelheber, Gertrud Lutz, Emmy Seitz, Maria Schlotterbeck (Else’s mother), and Sofie Klenk. For Klenk, see also “Eighth-graders from Luginsland organize a memorial service for the resistance fighter Sofie Klenk.”

Before their transfer to Dachau, some or all of the five women were interrogated and tortured for months at other prisons. All five were executed the day after they arrived at Dachau.

 

The Camp Brothel

Under orders from SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Dachau opened a brothel in April 1944. (Some sources say May.) Himmler believed that concentration camp brothels would increase prisoner work productivity.

Approximately twenty women were sent from the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp to Dachau to work in the brothel as forced sexual laborers. They were sent back to Ravensbruck after the brothel closed in December 1944.

The brothel was only for prisoners. Dachau’s SS officers patronized an establishment in Munich.

 

Women Arrive At Dachau As the End of the War Nears

As Allied forces overwhelmed the German army in the summer of 1944, the Nazis evacuated camps close to the eastern front. They sent prisoners to locations further west, including Dachau.

Dachau had over 100 subcamps/satellite camps. “Almost all of the women who were sent to Dachau did not stay in Dachau. They were immediately sent to a satellite camp” where the Nazis used them as slave laborers („Frauen im KZ Dachau“).

 

Children

The Nazis murdered more than one-and-a-half million children during the Holocaust. Moreover, most pregnant women did not survive the camps, and if they did, their children didn’t.

Young people arriving at Dachau who were too young to work were sent to extermination camps. “The decisive factor in determining whether you could stay here in the camp or not was your ability to work and your age. Anyone who was a small child had no chance of surviving here” (Angela Zander, „Kinder und Jugendliche im KZ Dachau“).

However, at one of Dachau’s subcamps, there were seven notable exceptions, what Dachau educator Dr. Stefania Gavazza-Zuber called “Eine kleine wunder in diesem meer von leid” — “A small miracle in this sea of suffering.” Seven Hungarian Jewish women imprisoned together in late 1944 all gave birth to healthy babies and were liberated in May 1945 („Frauen im KZ Dachau“).

No one knows why the SS allowed the women and their babies to live.

 

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