Counter Claims
Since Coward's death his claims have been treated with some scepticism. One major difficulty is that there are no known surviving fellow escapees, and it is possible that all were recaptured and killed. When Coward himself was questioned by Yad Vashem researchers in 1962 he offered few details about their identities or fates saying "It is not known exactly how many of these people regained their freedom, because some people went different ways and to different countries." He added: "And naturally no records were kept of them because once they arrived in their new country, special papers were given to them and perhaps different names, etc." The revisionist position is that Coward may have saved a few Jews, but certainly not hundreds.
A fellow inmate of Coward's, Doug Bond, appears to doubt Coward's claim to have smuggled himself into Auschwitz for one night.
Read more about this topic: Charles Coward
Famous quotes containing the words counter and/or claims:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)