Elie Wiesel Dies

[Rev. Rye]

I just got a message from the author.

Here's his response:

Firstly, taking a supremely conservative figure of 3.14 million survivors, the simple version of the model would predict that even will a very dedicated bunch of secret keepers, the conspiracy would hit a 95% chance of collapse less than 3 years into it, and essentially would fail with certainty in less than ten years. Bear in mind this is a rough picture; I could refine the mesh a little more and resolve it on a month by month basis but the over-all picture is clear, and attached! Now, I have a slightly different version of the model which considers the effect of conspirators dying off and if I get a chance I'll throw it in, but over-all this won't change the net result! Remember too this model assumes all agents are excellent secret keepers to an unrealistic degree..and even then, the whole thing would fail!

And here's the chart he gave:


As you can see, there would be a 63% chance of the conspiracy failing within the first year, 86% by 1947, and 95% by 1948. Within 5 years, the odds of it failing would be at 99%. If this model is correct, by the time Elie Wiesel published Night, it would have been dismissed as fiction by EVERYONE.

And, bear in mind, this is assuming only the laughably low number of 3.14 million survivors as conspirators, which doesn't even include the Allied forces who would presumably be driving this plan, the (relatively few, of course) Germans who would admit to actually taking part of it, or the millions who would presumably have been forced to fake their own deaths to keep it going. Taking those into account, things would have been even worse for the conspiracy's credibility.