Koczy, Rosemarie

Rosemarie Koczy (5 March 1939 –12 Dec. 2007) was a German-American artist. Because of the claimed Jewish background of her parents, she stated that her entire family was deported in 1942 from Recklinghausen (Ruhr) to a subcamp of the Dachau Camp, when she was just three years old. She claimed to have experienced privations and abuse during that time. Historians point out, however, that the preserved deportation lists of Jews from Recklinghausen don’t have her family’s names on it. Moreover, her birth certificate proves that all her parents and grandparents were German Catholics, not Hungarian Jews, as she claimed. She herself was baptized Catholic. Furthermore, the Dachau subcamp she claimed to have been incarcerated in (Traunstein) was a pure adult-male labor camp. It never had any children. These revelations don’t stop her artist community from regarding her as a Holocaust survivor anyway. (See the entry on False Witnesses as well as Grenier 2017.)