Prior sources for the Zisblatt diamond story?

[Archie]

I was reading a Stephen King novel called Apt Pupil. It's about a boy and his neighbor who's this notorious Nazi fugitive living under an assumed name. The boy has a morbid fascination with concentration camp stories because he thinks they're "neat," and he finds out about the old man and wants him to tell him all his gruesome stories. It's an amusing read for a revisionist, and quite over the top (as you'd expect from a writer like King). You've got your gas coming out of the shower heads, human skin lampshades, Jewish soap, all the familiar stuff. Here's one passage talking about how prisoners would hide contraband.

One woman, he remembered, had had a small diamond, flawed, it turned out, really not valuable at all--but it had been in her family for six generations, passed from mother to eldest daughter (or so she said, but of course she was a Jew and all of them lied). She swallowed it before entering Patin [note: fictional concentration camp]. When it came out in her waste, she swallowed it again. She kept doing this, although eventually the diamond began to cut her insides and she bled. (Apt Pupil, Ch 9)

When I read this I of course immediately recognized it as the Zisblatt story, but curiously the King novel was published years before.

Zisblatt's story does not appear to have been public knowledge until the Spielberg documentary in 1998. Her memoir is even later, 2008. She had given a Shoah Foundation interview in 1995 (this was ultimately how she was selected for the documentary).

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha7832

I don't see anything before 1995. I did a quick NY Times search and it seems her public profile is basically limited to The Last Days, and really only revisionists have heard of her (mostly because of the Eric Hunt doc).

Apt Pupil was first published in 1982 in Different Seasons, a collection of four shorter novels/stories King had in his drawer. According to King in the afterword, Apt Pupil was written "in a two-week period following the completion of The Shining." The Shining was published in 1977, so that would probably mean 1976.

This all got me wondering if this story had always been "around" or if it's something King made up in 1976. If King is the earliest example of this story, then most likely Zisblat directly or indirectly got the story from Apt Pupil (that seems more plausible than her independently coming up with the same story as it's quite specific). There are lots of stories about people hiding valuables in bodily orifices, but I don't recall an earlier example of this specific story of swallowing diamonds, defecating them out, and re-swallowing them repeatedly.

I have to say I am a little disappointed with Zisblatt. Although she's a fraud, I thought she at least deserved some points for creativity! But it seems we can't even credit her with that.

[Stubble]

Per Zisblatt herself, the first time she talked about it was the shoah foundation interview. After 'the last days' she decided to write her book.

[Wetzelrad]

You're the first to uncover this connection. You continue to impress me with the things you discover.

1982 versus 1995. Is this plagiarism? Holocaust fiction spilling over into Holocaust non-fiction?

Someone should ask the Zisblatt family if Apt Pupil or Different Seasons appears in their library or if Irene was ever a fan of Stephen King.

Then again, swallowing diamonds is a trope of many stories related and unrelated to the Holocaust. Any of these could have been the spark of inspiration for her. I've never actually watched Schindler's List but apparently there is a scene in that movie about parents in the Krakow Ghetto feeding their children bread-wrapped diamonds. Being as Schindler's List was released in 1993, and Zisblatt said that seeing this was what spurred her to write her book, this may be a more likely origin for her diamond story.



Where Spielberg got this story from is another question.

[Archie]

Per Zisblatt herself, the first time she talked about it was the shoah foundation interview. After 'the last days' she decided to write her book.

It doesn't look like the Shoah Foundation interview is online currently, but this page on Carolyn Yeager's site has a quite a lot detail about it.
https://carolynyeager.net/book/export/html/250

According to Yeager, she only mentions swallowing the diamonds once in the 1995 interview. Yeager seems to think the story was embellished with subsequent retellings. Perhaps she realized she needed some explanation for what happened to the diamonds.

ST = Shoah
FD = Fifth Diamond
LD = Last Days

Swallowing her mother’s diamonds only once versus over and over again

(ST) When undergoing the initial disinfection process, she remembered the (unknown number of) diamonds rolled into her skirt and eventually put them in her mouth and swallowed them when she saw they were examining inside people’s mouths, and pulling gold teeth (@1hr18min). After this, there is no further mention of the diamonds in her ST; they are a thing of the past. In her mind at this time in 1995, she may have visualized them as tiny diamonds, which is why she could use them to “buy bread.”

(FD) She swallows the (four) diamonds for the first time and retrieves them the next day in the latrine, continuing to do this throughout her time of incarceration. Her insistence on keeping her mother’s diamonds is a major theme of the book. She also writes that the workers examining inside mouths during the initial disinfection “were removing fillings and crowns, and pulling gold teeth” (p. 36).

The pulling of the gold teeth is not believable, as it would have caused excruciating pain, a bloody mess and infection. Gold teeth were only removed from corpses.

(LD) She talks of her first time swallowing the diamonds, and says “The whole time I was in the camp, I swallowed the diamonds … so everytime I swallowed them, I had to find them again.” She adds: “(In the latrine) I never sat on the hole, because I had to find my diamonds.” Said she would rinse them off “in the mud, or […] in the soup that we were gonna get.” (Unbelievable! That would be a serious crime for which she could truly be shot.) One day she was caught defecating in the corner and had to swallow the diamonds without “rinsing them off.” This filthy stuff is not repeated in the book.

Joachim Neander also has a long article on her here. Neander is a Holocaust defender but he is relatively reasonable one. He actually had an account on the old CODOH forum.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... ct-or.html

[Stubble]

It is also covered in 'The Last Days of the Big Lie' by Eric. (The evolution of her poop diamonds story)



Hopefully the audio is not garbage. These videos have been copied so many times some of them sound like someone shouting down a brass hallway full of mirrors or something.

Also, The Shoah Foundation won't let me search or view their catalog without an account. I'm sure sheckles are involved. I decline.

[Archie]

You're the first to uncover this connection. You continue to impress me with the things you discover.

1982 versus 1995. Is this plagiarism? Holocaust fiction spilling over into Holocaust non-fiction?

Starting to see these stories through the lens of fiction can be an lightbulp moment for people, I think. A few years ago there was a show called Hunters and there were murmurs from the memorial museums and the like because the show had camp atrocity flashbacks that were completely made up and weren't part of the Holocaust canon.

Here's an example where the prisoners were forced to play in a bloody human chess game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8dVVGCk6Y

I think they get understandably nervous about people blurring the line because they don't want people to consider that many these stories could be fictional.

Someone should ask the Zisblatt family if Apt Pupil or Different Seasons appears in their library or if Irene was ever a fan of Stephen King.

Then again, swallowing diamonds is a trope of many stories related and unrelated to the Holocaust. Any of these could have been the spark of inspiration for her. I've never actually watched Schindler's List but apparently there is a scene in that movie about parents in the Krakow Ghetto feeding their children bread-wrapped diamonds. Being as Schindler's List was released in 1993, and Zisblatt said that seeing this was what spurred her to write her book, this may be a more likely origin for her diamond story.

As I see it,

If the story is true, that would mean King made up a story and, amazingly, it later emerged that it actually happened to someone. I rate this possibility low as even the mainstream is skeptical of Zisblatt at this point.

Assuming the story is fiction, then either
A - Zisblatt borrowed the story from King directly (or heard it from someone who got it from King)
B - Zisblatt made up the same story independently
C - Both Zisblatt and King owe the story to some earlier, unidentified source

A seems very believable to me. I was thinking B seemed like a big stretch given that the repeated re-swallowing and other details seem too distinctive. But on the other hand, if she mentioned the diamonds in the original Shoah interview and was later asked what happened to them, there are really only so many ways to answer that question. She either passed them and they were lost or ... So while I think this is least likely, I do have to admit that upon reflection it's not absurd to think she could have coincidently ended up in the same place. C can't be ruled out, but I can't recall anything. One lead here is that King in the book talks about pulpy Nazi/concentration camp themed horror magazines (maybe in the vein of Ilse, She Wolf of the SS). If King borrowed it from somewhere, these pulp mags might be the best candidate.

I don't know how much effort should be put into this since Zisblatt is only of marginal importance. I noticed this purely by accident. I picked up the book to read the original stories for Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. I gave Apt Pupil a try since it was included in the same volume. There's actually a movie version of Apt Pupil that came out in 1998 which is coincidentally the same year as The Last Days. She probably could not have seen it before filming Last Days (and I don't know if this diamond bit is even in the movie), but it would have been in production which might have given the book a little boost around that time.

[Booze]

There are lots of stories about people hiding valuables in bodily orifices, but I don't recall an earlier example of this specific story of swallowing diamonds, defecating them out, and re-swallowing them repeatedly.

On the off chance that someone might have seen and saved this story or is aware of it. A 'survivor' (I think it was a woman but I'm not certain) claimed that she was holding the only surviving photo of family members and ended up hiding it in her rectum when she was in the shower.

[Booze]

This all got me wondering if this story had always been "around" or if it's something King made up in 1976. If King is the earliest example of this story, then most likely Zisblat directly or indirectly got the story from Apt Pupil (that seems more plausible than her independently coming up with the same story as it's quite specific).

I think it's an unavoidable given that if the King story predated hers, that she hijacked it.
Nice find.

[Wetzelrad]

I was thinking B seemed like a big stretch given that the repeated re-swallowing and other details seem too distinctive.

It is specifically the re-swallowing that makes Zisblatt's story distinctive, and that's why it's plausible that she got it from Stephen King.

But on the other hand, if she mentioned the diamonds in the original Shoah interview and was later asked what happened to them, there are really only so many ways to answer that question. She either passed them and they were lost or ... So while I think this is least likely, I do have to admit that upon reflection it's not absurd to think she could have coincidently ended up in the same place.

Maybe. But if Zisblatt did come up with "re-swallowing" on her own, then I still think she was inspired by the diamond story in Schindler's List. And here is where I would like to introduce Nuisia Horowitz who is given credit for that story. Horowitz is still living and a few years yonger than Zisblatt. Her name today is something like Bronislawa Niusia Horowitz Karakulska. According to video interviews her story bears many similarities to Zisblatt's. Here are some excerpts crudely translated:

Spoiler

Twice in Auschwitz I was taken to the crematorium. Twice. Once I was saved by a female guard to whom mother had given a diamond that she had swallowed. And this is a scene that I gave to Spielberg for the film. My mother swallowed a diamond, gave it to this female guard, and the guard pulled me out of the crowd. And I survived.

https://youtu.be/mzGMt7NNLG4?t=387

They told us to strip naked, that a bath would be taken, we had our hair cut, they shaved our heads, and so on and so forth and so on, it was a big scare for my mother. She was so smart, I don't know how. When the idea came to her mind that she swallowed diamond and had it inside her body all the time, someone must have talked her into it. I don't think it was her initiative, it wasn't her idea for sure. But there came a moment when she I don't know how she's going to do it, but I was witness of it, anyway, she had diamond somewhere. SS-women guards were constantly coming in and out, wearing such hats, German SS uniforms, they're beaten us on faces.
[...]
And there came a moment when I was taken to the crematorium (Auschwitz) there was a selection process because I was small and skinny.
[...]
So for the first time, for the first time, my mother's diamond saved my life save me because my mother gave diamond to SS-woman called Alice Orlovsky, just bribed her. Orlovsky, the huge tall woman whose face I will never forget for the rest of my life, she pulled me out of the crowd, I was that tall. Maybe she pulled me out of the crowd, she took my hand, my mother came over and bribed her with diamond. And SS-woman put me back in line. It was the first time. How I experienced it, I remember that I survived.
[...]
I must tell you that the film [Schindler's List] is absolutely Hollywood, there are a lot of scenes that never took place at all, so the story with this diamond is shown completely differently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ9QHluWfSc&t=2730s

So in both cases they were young girls sent to Auschwitz, the diamond/s belonged to their mothers, and one of the ways they hid the diamond/s is by swallowing them, but where Zisblatt retained her diamonds by repeatedly swallowing them, Horowitz's mother used her diamond as a bribe to pull her out of selection.

Possibly there is more to discover here. When did Horowitz first tell this story? Could King have been inspired by Horowitz or vice versa? Can someone familiar with these stories find more similarities between them? But I will leave it here.