Jews have become instrumental in the justification of attacks on Israel. How can you say that being anti-Israel is anti-Semitic if there are Jews saying the same thing? But what happens when you don’t have enough Jews? Well just manufacture one.
Irena Wachendorff, a German poet, music teacher, and anti-Israel activist, is an example of this type of fabrication. She claimed to have served in the Israel Defense Force in the first Lebanon war, that her father was Jewish and fled to England in 1936, and her mother survived Auschwitz.
Wachendorff published her first poetry in 1989, with the Holocaust and its consequences for society and the individual as one of the focal points of her poetry. On January 2, 2011, she initiated the establishment of an official non-profit association to support the vision and activities of Ein Bustan by raising donations from Germany. The Ein Bustan kindergarten is a Jewish/Arab kindergarten in Israel, whose 28 Arab and Jewish children come from Kiryat Tivon, (a Jewish town in the North of Israel) and the surrounding Bedouin (Arab) villages of Hilf, Zbidat, Zarzir and Bosmat Tab’un.
She has termed strong pro- Israel activists “the neo-Nazi troop among the Jews,” and expressed support for Hamas in the Gaza Strip. She can quote from her supposedly Jewish parents as saying: “If there ever is something that we could see in this endless torment, then it is to recognize the indispensability of that compassion and kindness, the basic preconditions for this are that not more people something is done "In my conversations with many others who, like me, have many children of survivors, I can learn, that this movement is a theme through all of our upbringing."
"I work in the region in peace projects: bilingual kindergarten and school, playing field for education, mental health care for children in Gaza who can not speak. It's a myth that the Arab/Palestinian population wants a "total war." These people are demoralized, traumatized, jobless and hopeless. The Israeli regime continues to be harsh and leaves the Gaza people only in despair! I went as a Jew to those areas and have experienced great openness when I offered to help."
"There is no way to justify the destruction of settlements, expropriating homes to raze neighborhoods, building walls and fences that prevent people from earning a livelihood, and kidnapping, intimidating, arresting and torturing! " "I would say from my experience on that side: Some Jews have unfortunately learned nothing from what has been done to Jews ..."
She becomes really angry when someone questions her competence to make such anti-Israel remarks and responds that such doubters such guard their tongue since she cares for her 85 year old mother with a number tattooed in his arm! “They should be ashamed!"
Wachendorff regularly gives lectures on anti-Semitism. In the summer of 2011 she lectured at the Regional Association of Ahrweiler Left Party on the question: "What is anti-Semitic?” “What is anti-Zionist?"
Wachendorff will at times use in every other sentence the words that "I, as a Jew." Her supposedly Jewish father was Orthodox but she says that he never held to Zionism in his entire life. In a word, she is a super Jew, who learned the lesson from the "College Auschwitz".
Jennifer Pyka, a dogged investigative journalist in Munich, obtained evidence that contradicted Wachendorff’s alleged Jewish identity. In a long essay that appeared on the German website Die Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good), Pyka uncovered a series of alleged half-truths and lies. Spiegel Online and the cultural website Perlentaucher cited Pyka’s expose as one of the top blog entries of the week.
Pyka asked the press spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, whether Irena Wachendorff (also her maiden name) had ever served in the Army. The answer came promptly and was unequivocal: "The name Wachendorff is not known."
According to Pyka’s research, there is no documentation supporting Wachendorff’s assertions that she is Jewish or a member of a German Jewish community. Wachendorff has said that she considered her ties to the liberal Jewish community in Cologne to be very important. But Rabbi Walter Rothschild from this Jewish community said he had not heard or seen Irena Wachendorff.
Wachendorff described her mother's family as having lived in Silesia where they experienced pogroms when farmers attacked and burned the homes of Jews and Jews were beaten half to death from trivialities. Her father's family, she said, settled in the Rhineland, where the Catholic population each year at the Easter Vigil engaged in a rampage against Jewish homes to express their displeasure with the "murder of Jesus by the Jews."
Wachendorff told about her mother during WWII spending 3 years in hiding, and 4 months in Auschwitz, and then released half-dead, the only survivor of a large family. I grew up with her numbers in the arm. And because of the holocaust, she does not have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family.
A search of the Yad Vashem database, where there are four of the six million Jewish Holocaust victims listed, using the maiden name of the mother (whose entire family was killed allegedly!) produced not a single hit.
A call made by Pyka to Barbara Wachendorff, mother of Irene, about her time in Aushwitz, brought about an immediate reply: "Auschwitz? No, I was not there. But my husband, Mr. Wachendorff was in Auschwitz [more about this later].
She described her father spending his youth in England after being deported in 1936. In addition, she said that her father was a consultant to a rabbi of a reformed congregation from 1950 until the mid-70's years.
Pyka looked up the father’s obituary. She learned that the late Raymond Wachendorff, Senior Director of Agriculture and former holder of the Federal Cross of Merit, was buried on 26/05/2009. The funeral urn was placed at the non-Jewish cemetery Bad Godesberg Castle and a memorial service was held at the Protestant Church of Mary Forster.
Pyka further discovered in the "Journal of Agriculture" obituary for Raymond Wachendorff, that his youth and school years were spent in Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, before he was drafted into military service in 1940 and released in 1945 as an officer. It is possible that he was a guard at Aushwitz.
Furthermore, Pyka contacted Dr. Boehmer of Bonn, Plant Variety Protection Office, who reacted in great surprised about any aushwitz connection though he knows the family quie well.
The Jerusalem Post contacted Wachendorff who repeatedly said that: “I am Jewish. I am member of a liberal Jewish community and I am not anti- Semitic.”
She however acknowledged that she fabricated her supposed service in the IDF during the First Lebanon war. “I said I was in the IDF,” but “it was a lie.” As an 18-year-old, she said, she left Germany for Israel and wanted to serve in the army, adding that she was in Israel when the IDF went into Lebanon to stop cross-border terrorist attacks, in a preliminary to the First Lebanon War, and departed Israel after six weeks.
Wachendorff admitted to the Post that her father was an officer in the Wehrmacht. Wachendorff wrote on Facebook that her mother was “four months in Auschwitz” and has a “tattooed number on her arm.” Wachendorff, however, told the Post that she could not recall the name of the extermination camp where her mother was imprisoned and that there is “something” on her mother’s arm, but she cannot identify whether it is a number.
Pyka sharply criticized Wachendorff for having traded on the tragedy of the Holocaust for personal and commercial gain. It is “perverse and brazen that Wachendorff presents herself as a Jew and the daughter of Holocaust survivors and engages in educational work in schools about anti-Semitism and Jewish life in the Third Reich,” she said.
“Six million dead Jews serve her own publicity and at the same time she undertakes a perfidious victim-perpetrator inversion to damage Israel and all Jews,” the journalist said.
Pyka summed up the growing scandal: “The entire thing is a Grusical [comic horror musical] that is made in Germany and only those who are themselves fake Jews or anti- Semites can stage and applaud the Grusical.”
