Rosemarie Pence
Rosemarie Pence (formerly Hannah Pence; born c. 1938) is a American woman who posed as a child Holocaust survivor from the Dachau.
Life
Pence also made various other remarkable claims regarding her life. Pence became the subject of a fake biography titled Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond published in 2005. At the University of Colorado, impostor Pence led a seminar called "A Horrifying Experience". Her fabrications were discovered in 2009. Pence's real life ex-husband, from whom she was estranged, confirmed to the media that none of her stories were true. Pence fled Longmont, Colorado and was found working as a Super 8 Motel desk attendant in Butte (Boulder County), Montana.
- Pence claimed that as a three-year-old she was taken from her family of German Jews and deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp during World War II. While at the camp, she was the subject of medical experimentation and starvation before being freed by American forces. After liberation, she went to live in a convent with nuns who taught her how to ski. Using those skiing skills, Pence claimed that she competed on Germany's 1956 Olympic ski team in the 1956 Winter Olympics. Other claims included living in a kibbutz in Israel, her fighter pilot husband being shot down during the Vietnam War, "a scare during the 1972 Olympics, an audience with the Pope, an encounter with Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall and an airplane hijacking by a Palestinian terrorist." She also claimed that she was to be awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oklahoma by her "old friend, the Queen of the Netherlands."
Author Messinger had not verified the stories that Pence had told her, but instead took Pence's stories as factual. Later, when it was revealed that Pence had lied, the biography was then branded as fictional. Messinger commented, "I was terribly embarrassed. Not only for me, but for everyone else touched by this." Messinger further stated, "I regarded this woman as a sister for the years I have known her. This revelation is shocking and disappointing to all of us who knew her and loved her, and counted her as a trusted friend."
Family and friends
- The tales Pence spun to rapt audiences in private and in public unraveled when the husband she said was MIA in Vietnam — and whose name she added to a headstone in Loveland — was discovered to be a retired Air Force master sergeant alive, well and ever searching for the son Pence took when the boy was still a toddler. He revealed that his ex-wife was, indeed, German, not Jewish. She was never a Holocaust victim or an Olympic athlete. He also told his ex-wife’s Longmont benefactors that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and briefly institutionalized in the 1960s. [...] Pence also recounted meeting and marrying a young Air Force officer — Wayne Pence. Together they had a son, Brian. When the boy was 4, she said, Pence was lost in Vietnam. Later in the book, she talks about Brian’s death in an airplane crash in California. Local researchers have turned up a newspaper account of the death. It turns out that was one of the few things she was truthful about, they said. He died in March 1993. [...]
- David Kicera said they looked into some of her claims and found she was not listed as a member of Germany’s Olympic ski team in 1956. Some Internet work led him to Wayne Pence’s Facebook profile, and the two started to correspond. Wayne Pence confirmed that he was married to Rosemarie Pence and had been in the Air Force, but he said she had left and taken their son. He was never an officer or missing in action, he told Kicera. Wayne Pence told Kicera he knew Rosemarie Pence’s family in Germany and they were not Jewish and that she was never in a concentration camp. Melissa Pence-Antcliff, Wayne Pence’s daughter, said the news of Rosemarie Pence’s presence in the United States and word that Brian Pence had been killed in 1993 has rattled her father. She spoke to the Times-Call on behalf of her family. She and her sister grew up knowing they had a half-brother. “My father and my mother had been looking for him for years with no luck,” she said. When they were contacted by David Kicera, who used a pseudonym, she said, her father was suspicious that it could be Rosemarie Pence trying to get in touch or even Brian. He turned over correspondence to his daughter. Kicera had tried to call, but Pence-Antcliff said her mother panicked and told him he had the wrong number. “I called (David Kicera) up, and we just laid everything out on the table, and I was shocked to find that there was this book out there that said my dad was MIA in Vietnam,” she said.
- Armed with new information, Kicera decided to confront his houseguest. Kicera is a Boulder police officer, and so he felt he should not be alone with her. He called the Longmont police, and two officers stood by as he confronted her. “I didn’t want her to make any accusations that I assaulted her,” Kicera said. “I said, ‘I know it is all lies, and I talked to Wayne.’” She told him she didn’t know what to say, he recalled. “Say it isn’t true,” Kicera remembered telling her. The woman did not reply. She went to her room, packed and left. The Boulder officer said Pence also told his family about pending movie deals and honorary degrees, adding to those she claimed she already had earned. “It is like an onion,” he said. “You peel it back, and you find more underneath.” Calls to two phone numbers Rosemarie Pence used went unanswered. One of the numbers indicates the voice mail box is full and cannot accept messages.[1]
Further reading
- Jean Goodwin Messinger: Hannah – From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond, 2005
External links
external sources listed in the articles on the particular Holocaust camps and/or other Holocaust phenomena the individual is associated with.
