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Stolen Suffering ON a March day four years ago, a very old lady, striking, snowy-haired, unsmiling, was looking at me with disgust. A Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, she‟d been telling me how she and her young son had managed to keep a step ahead of the people who were hunting them down, and at the end of this stupefying tale of survival I‟d looked up at her and said, “What an amazing story!” It was at that point that she flapped her spotted hand at me in disdain. “„Amazing story,‟” she mimicked me, tartly. She fetched a heavy sigh. “If you didn‟t have an amazing story, you didn‟t survive.”

She was referring to literal survival, of course — survival at its meanest, most animal level, the mere continuance of the organism. At a time when Jews throughout Europe were being rounded up like livestock or hunted down like game, survival indeed depended on feats of endurance or daring so extreme, on accidents or luck so improbable, that they can seem too far-fetched to be true.

A Jewish couple who hid in the attic of a Nazi officers‟ club, forced to listen as the soldiers below joked and drank after a day‟s slaughter; two young brothers who hid in a forest, strapping the hooves of deer to their feet whenever they ventured into the snow to confuse those who were trying to find them; a youth who, the day before the Germans entered his Polish hometown, left home and just kept walking east, until he reached ... China.

I heard these stories firsthand five years ago, while researching a book about relatives of mine who didn‟t survive. But still they keep coming. Last Monday, I heard about an orphaned Jewish girl who trekked 2,000 miles from Belgium to Ukraine, surviving the Warsaw ghetto, murdering a German officer, and — most “amazing” of all — taking refuge in forests where she was protected by kindly wolves.

The problem is that this story is a lie: recounted in a 1997 international bestseller by Misha Levy Defonseca, it was exposed last week as a total fabrication — no trekking, no Warsaw, no murder, no wolves. (No Jews, either: the author, whose real name is Monique De Wael, is Roman Catholic.) To be sure, phony memoirs aren‟t news: in 1998 the acclaimed child-survivor memoir “Fragments” was proved a fake, and more recently James Frey‟s credibility infamously exploded into a million little pieces. But the trickle now seems to be a flood. Just days after the revelations about Ms. De Wael‟s book yet another popular first-person account of extreme suffering turned out to be a fraud. (This one, “Love and Consequences,” purports to be the autobiography of a young half-white, half-American Indian woman who was raised by a black foster mother in the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles.) This trend sheds alarming light on a cultural moment in which the meanings of suffering, identity and “reality” itself seem to have become dangerously slippery. Each of the new books commits a fraud far more reprehensible than Mr. Frey‟s self-dramatizing enhancements. The first is a plagiarism of other people‟s trauma. Both were written not, as they claim to be, by members of oppressed classes (the Jews during World War II, the impoverished African-Americans of Los Angeles today), but by members of relatively safe or privileged classes. Ms. De Wael was a Christian Belgian who was raised by close relatives after her parents, Resistance members, were taken away; Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences,” grew up in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood and attended an Episcopal day school.

In each case, then, a comparatively privileged person has appropriated the real traumas suffered by real people for her own benefit — a boon to the career and the bank account, but more interestingly, judging from the authors‟ comments, a kind of psychological gratification, too. Ms. Seltzer has talked about being “torn,” about wanting somehow to ventriloquize her subjects, to “put a voice to people who people don‟t listen to.” Ms. De Wael has similarly referred to a longing to be part of the group to which she did not, emphatically, belong: “I felt different. It‟s true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community.” (“Felt Jewish” is repellent: real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.)

While these statements want to suggest a somehow admirable desire to “empathize” with the oppressed subjects, this sentimental gesture both mirrors and exploits a widespread, quite pernicious cultural confusion about identity and suffering. We have so often been invited, in the past decade and a half, to “feel the pain” of others that we rarely pause to wonder whether this is, in fact, a good thing