Cato Jaramillo’s (Un-)“True Story” of Holocaust Survival

Abstract

Abstract Taking its cue from the debunking of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust memoirs Bruchstucke as a fake and the resultant problem of categorizing it generically, the article focuses on Cato Jaramillo’s equally questionable US-autobiography Too Stubborn to Die: A Child of Nordhausen about the alleged survival of the Nazi concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora. The reconstruction of the Wilkomirski case’ illustrates how the demasking of Bruchstucke in 1998 at the same time uncovers the text’s resemblance with fairy tales, and as such provides the reading strategy for the analysis of Jaramillo’s “True Story” (subtitle): A detailed investigation provides evidence of its missing authenticity - which has so far remained unnoticed in literary or cultural studies - and reveals its Hänsel und Gretel subtext. The discovery of both the story’s fictitiousness and its fairy tale elements helps to demonstrate how the text as a whole splits into a victimized-child and a perpetrator- adult part: It is at once a narrative of suffering and of imaginary sadism whose focalization exhibits both the Hänsel and Gretel and the witch’s point of view.