EXCLUSIVE Holocaust survivor, 95, has 'life story stolen' by AI fraudsters who rewrote her emotional bestseller and sold it online using 'anti-Semitic' pen names

Daily Mail​

01-05-2025

A Holocaust survivor has called out fraudsters who 'stole my life story' after her emotional memoir retelling her experience at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen was rewritten by AI fraudsters and sold online.
Renee Salt, born in Zdunska Wola, Poland and now living in north London, was aged just 10 when she was forcibly removed from her home and hauled from one ghetto to another before witnessing horrific mass murders at two Nazi death camps.
Barely alive by the time she was liberated in 1945, Renee suffered the heart-breaking losses of both her parents and her beloved younger sister, as well as 200 extended family members.
It took eight decades before Renee could finally tell her story with the recent publication of A Mother's Promise, co-written with journalist Kate Thompson.
But Renee and Thompson were left horrified after learning the bestseller - which involved hours of interviews and copious research over 18 months - had been run through an AI tool and rewritten in a matter of 'mere moments'.
To add to their insult, the fake versions have been seemingly written under pen names that are 'blatantly anti-Semitic', according to both Thompson and the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).
The charity additionally warned the incident should sound alarm bells around protecting Holocaust testimony and said AI versions 'put the integrity of the past at risk.'
Despairing at the news, Renee emotionally told MailOnline: 'They have stolen my life story. I just don't believe it - it's outrageous.'
Thompson, a journalist and author from Surrey, explained she first noticed a book being sold on Amazon and Goodreads under the barely-disguised title, 'Renee Salt memoir: A Mother's Promise: A Holocaust survivor's story of love, loss and unbreakable hope' by author Jude Williams, just days after the authentic version was published in February.
After making a complaint to both platforms, the book disappeared shortly afterwards on Amazon, but remained on Goodreads.
Thompson was told the platform was looking further into her claim, adding that 'copyright protections do not extend to the title of a given work and only cover your own particular expression of an idea.'
Goodreads had felt there was no clear infringement of copyright laws, because the AI version had shuffled the sequence of original text - and therefore it was not 'plagiarised' - while there was also nothing to stop other authors using the same title.
After pursuing the matter again, Goodreads removed the book, but it was at this point Thompson realised a second AI version had appeared on both platforms.
This time the book had been called, 'From Darkness To Light: The Remarkable Journey of Holocaust Survivor Renee Salt', by author Penny Pincher.
Thompson was outraged that Renee's memoir had now been copied twice by AI using author names that she believes have 'an anti-Semitic slant'.
'Jude is German for Jew. Under the Nazi regime, Jewish people were forced to wear identifiers such as Star of David armbands or badges with the word 'Jude' on it.
'The 'Jude' badge was used to stigmatise, humiliate and persecute Jewish people. It also facilitated their deportation to ghettos, concentration and extermination camps across the Reich.
'Why did the author give themselves the pseudonym 'Jude'?
Renee, pictured with Prince William at a meeting last year, never spoke about her ordeal - which saw the heartbreaking loss of her parents and sister - until her later years
Angered by the situation, Thompson decided to pen an open letter to 'Jude' earlier this week - prior to discovering the existence of the Penny Pincher version - to vent her anger at their actions.
In the heartfelt letter, she wrote: 'I spent most of 2024 travelling across Europe, visiting the sites of former concentration camps and ghettoes, standing inside gas chambers and barracks, clambering down rickety steps into old basements, trawling through prisoner records, listening to testimonies and watching footage that I will never be able to unsee.
'When I wasn't travelling and researching, I was sitting with Renee listening as her past burst out, an unfiltered gush of history that at times threatened to overwhelm her.
'I learnt that her trauma was a living thing. On many occasions, she would sit and weep, and I would hold her hand in silence, for what words of comfort could I possibly offer?
'You, 'Jude', were spared all that messy, human emotion. Because it took you the work of mere moments to copy the book title, input it into ChatGPT and reproduce a copy.'
She continued: 'I had no way to explain to Renee that all our hard work, the trauma she heroically relived, her very personal story, was fair game for anyone with a reasonable knowledge of AI and what books were selling well on Amazon.
'Creaming profit off the hard work of a 95-year-old who escaped the gas chambers is about as low as it is possible to get.'
Speaking to MailOnline, Thompson described the AI copies as 'creative leeching' and said: 'I think it's just diabolical - to take a Holocaust survivor's testimony for your own profit is beyond reprehensible. It's about as low as humanity can go.
'I just feel quite despairing that as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, there are people out there thinking this is acceptable behaviour.
I wonder whether 'Jude' or 'Penny Pincher' have ever been to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, or Bergen-Belsen?
'Have they educated themselves about the Holocaust?
'Do they even understand what they're doing and how offensive it is to people who perished in the Holocaust and for the last survivors?
'I spent most of 2024 travelling across Europe, visiting the sites of former concentration camps and ghettoes, standing inside gas chambers and barracks, trawling through prisoner records, listening to testimonies and watching footage that I will never be able to unsee.
'It took 18 months of exhaustive research and multiple drafts to write A Mother's Promise and came at a high cost to Renee as she was forced to relive every detail of her trauma and grief. '
''Jude' reproduced it after a few clicks, at a fraction of the cost, financially, physically, mentally and emotionally.'
Following her open letter, Thompson said she was contacted by another author who said her books had also been copied by AI fraudsters and sold on Amazon.
She told Thompson this was becoming a more regular occurrence within non-fiction titles, with the onus being placed on the authors themselves to flag any pirated versions.
Renee's father Szaja (right), a chief accountant for a prominent textiles firm, disembarked from the train at Auschwitz and was never seen again; her mother Sala (left) was by Renee's side until they were liberated. She died just a few days later
'Apparently this has been going on for a while now. There needs to be stronger policy and practise in place at Amazon, alongside broader legislation, new literacy and critical thinking skills around AI. All of which would help us to become better and more savvy consumers of AI products.
'I suspect this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.'
As a case in point, while the Penny Pincher version of Renee's memoir has now been taken down, other titles by the 'author' remain, which are also apparently copies of bestselling history books.
MailOnline has found Pincher's title, Beneath the Floorboards: The Untold Truth Behind the 10 Rillington Place Murders, to be an AI version of Kate Summerscale's book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place.
Summerscale's book came out in hardback on 3 October 2024. Pincher's version was published just days later on 19 October 2024.
Reviews on the Pincher version describe it as 'a very shoddy piece of work written in haste' and 'a poorly written book with incorrect information'.
Aside from being poorly composed however, Holocaust advocates have warned that the rewriting of memoirs like Renee's amounts to 'revisionism' and 'a distortion of the past'.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of HET said: 'To see Renee's painful experience of the Holocaust rewritten by AI under blatantly anti-Semitic pen-names is disgusting.
Reviews on the Pincher version of Kate Summerscale's bestselling book describe it as 'a very shoddy piece of work written in haste' and 'a poorly written book with incorrect information'
'These fake versions and abuse of her testimony put the integrity of the past at risk.
'This is an insidious form of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, causes distress to Holocaust survivors and sets alarm bells ringing for all of us whose greatest fear is the distortion of the past.
'Renee Salt was just a child when she endured unimaginable horrors in the Nazi ghettos and death camps. She and her family, and the 6 million murdered by the Nazis, were targeted simply because they were Jewish.
'At the age of 95, having spent years sharing her testimony in schools, Renee decided to share her powerful story with the world in A Mother's Promise.
'We owe it to Renee and to all who survived the heinous crimes of the Nazis to uphold the truth of the past.'
After being contacted by MailOnline, Amazon confirmed the fake Renee memoirs were no longer for sale on its platform and said all publishers are required to follow content guidelines and the terms and conditions of its service.
A spokesperson said: 'We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not.
Renee with Charles Salt, her second cousin and by coincidence, a British military policeman sent to Bergen Belsen after the camp's liberation. The couple later went on to marry
'We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines.
'We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools.
'We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in publishing.'