Remembering True and False TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES.

• Author: CUNNINGHAM, SONIA

A false memory is created when an event that really happened becomes confused with images produced by trying to remember an imagined event.

IN 1987, Donald Watt told his wife of seven years that, during World War II, he had been a stoker at Auschwitz. In his autobiography, Stoker, he relives how, for the first time, he revealed to his wife that he had escaped from Stalag 357 (a prisoner of war camp), only to be recaptured later by the Nazis, tortured, and then sent to a concentration camp to stoke the furnaces of the death chambers. Watt paints a graphic picture of his journey first to Bergen-Belsen and then on to Auschwitz. He recounts the horrors of seeing a trainload of Jews who fought over a piece of bread, and how he watched as many were trampled to death. Watt goes on to describe how he managed to escape the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, only to end up at Auschwitz. It was there, he remembers, that he was a stoker of the crematoria that disposed of the thousands who had been exterminated.

It was an unspeakably horrifying ordeal for anyone at Auschwitz, and what made it worse for Watt was that, as a stoker, he helped the Germans murder thousands of innocent people. It is a terrible memory for a proud veteran to face up to. It is a burden that Watt does not have to bear, because he was never at Auschwitz. The many errors in his recall are evidence that his memories are false.

Many of these errors have been uncovered by Konrad Kwiet, deputy director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquafie University in Sydney, Australia, an advisor to the Australian government on war crimes, and his student, Darren O'Brien. For example, at the time Watt claims he saw a deportation train full of Jews, they were not required to wear the yellow Star of David, so he could not have identified these people as Jews. He could not have had to escape from the gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, because there were no gas chambers at that concentration camp (although he has since admitted to O'Brien that he was wrong on this point), and the way he describes the layout of Auschwitz, including a hut close to the crematoria, is simply not accurate.

How can it be that Watt remembers such a horrible, yet utterly false, experience? In recent years, much attention, both in the popular press and in more scientific circles, has been devoted to understanding repressed memories. Indeed, in his autobiography, Watt says that "I just wanted to forget about it." Forty years later, according to the book's introduction, "Repressed memories, long buffed in his subconscious, came back to haunt him." Thus, his World War II story evolved as he gradually recovered memories, a technique Watt believed helped him accept the reality of his...