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

 

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

 

The following paragraph 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 and holds its Chair for Research on the History and Impact of the Holocaust. She forwarded my question to Dr. Barbara Distel, who directed Dachau’s memorial site from 1975 until she retired in 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. 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]
2. 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, at Treblinka. But the Nazis only tattooed people at Auschwitz. See Tattoos and Numbers . . .  at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
2. The survivor’s gender
   The Nazis imprisoned many women and children, but none at Dachau until the end of the war. Nyad, however, says this woman arrived at Dachau when she was three and remained there until it 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 over 300 miles in the opposite direction (Germany to Treblinka, Poland). 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 story change from telling to telling, but certain elements remain constant. The little girl is always three. She always has a mother, a father, and a six-year-old sister. The Nazis always murder the parents and the 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).

Nyad studied literature during her one 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.

Excerpt from the Everyman’s Library edition of Nabokov’s Lolita, p. 220.

 

 

 

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Further Reading

 

Blog posts

• “And Then We Were Three: Diana Nyad’s Very Bad Year”
• “Diana Nyad’s Unspeakable Lie, part 1,” from which I borrowed much of the above, looks closer at Nyad’s Holocaust story.
• “Diana Nyad’s Unspeakable Lie, part 2” suggests that Nyad’s story expresses her own childhood difficulties.

 

For more on sexual abuse during the Holocaust and on Nyad’s delusion that a brief pep talk could negate the effects of two-and-a-half years of constant sexual abuse:

• “Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust”
• Forced Prostitution in Times of War and Peace: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls, edited by Barbara Drinck and Chung-noh Gross.
• “Holocaust film reveals long-hushed child sex abuse”
• “Hidden Children And Other Victims Of Sexual Abuse During The Holocaust” (archived)
• Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, Sonja M. Hedgepath and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds.