Deli Strummer

Deli Strummer said she was born Adele Aufrichtig in 1922 in Vienna, Austria, and was a survivor of five Nazi concentration camps in World War II. In 1988, she published a memoir, A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust. She was considered a local hero in her adopted home of Baltimore, Maryland. She was videotaped for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Steven Spielberg’s archive of interviews with survivors. She taped another interview for Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. She was a popular speaker to area schoolchildren and gave interviews to the Baltimore Sun. Then in 2000, details of her account were called into question by other survivors. It turned out that her husband Benno Strummer, whom she led people to believe was dead, was alive, divorced in 1947, and remarried in Vancouver, Canada. The Baltimore Jewish Council hired a team of experts to investigate her story, including Lawrence L. Langer, a professor emeritus of English at Simmons College and an expert in Holocaust testimony, and historian Raul Hilberg. They concluded that there were significant problems with her story. The Baltimore Jewish Council removed her from its list of recommended speakers.