Thank you. That's my understanding of the official story, but I'd like to ask, without being disrespectful- where did you hear this? What I know of the story is from press articles from the 1970's. I'm hoping to find independent corroboration of this from the Roma community- the grandchildren of the people he describes in the book are still alive, and surely this book would have caused a stir when it came out.

Also, his photos are from a later period, when he was an adult (50's or 60's, I do'nt have the book in front of me at the moment).

The reason I'm asking all of this is because I was considering working on the Wikipedia entry for Jan Yoors, fleshing out a bit of the information there with some info about that book, but I wouldn't want to do so if the story was mostly fiction. I'm struggling a bit with whether it's disrespectful to question it.

I think that what makes me concerned is that:
a) is it really possible that the event he described, his 'adoption', could have happened
b) At the end of the book he mentions the WWII fate of some of his friends, and the survival of some through the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no hint that he himself participated in the war. Afterwards, he went on to write a book about his own heroics in the French resistance, which if I understand right (I haven't read that one) included working with his Roma contacts. I'm surprised that in The Gypsies he gives no hint of this- almost makes me wonder if the second book is a fiction that he hadn't yet written at the time. He was certainly an amazing individual in every other respect and I wouldn't be surprised if an artist of this caliber could have written such a story just from doing independent research later.

I have to admit I feel bad about asking all of this without just asking his son, whom I've met in the distant past, and who curates the Jan Yoors website, but I would love to hear some independent corroboration of his story before working on institutionalizing it on the web.