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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 fabricatio