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The Mystery of Sophie: A Beautiful and Tortured Soul

[additional-authors]
October 23, 2019

This may be the most challenging thing I have ever written, and yet I feel compelled to write something. Most of my writings, whether happy or sad, are simple. There is a start, the narrative takes over, and then it comes to its natural conclusion. I must admit that I am struggling to come up with the right words to describe my dear friend, because what I knew of her was simply not the truth. Or at least it was always my truth, and likely ours as a family, but due to external and more so internal struggles, her truth was forever fluid. So let me ramble and attempt to tell you my truth of Sophie.

Sophie Hingst came into my life on Aug. 1, 2011. She contacted me to inquire about staying at my parent’s home for six months. Her second message spoke volumes about her personality. 

Dear Boaz, thank you for your quick answer. I am preparing my PhD-thesis and got the chance to stay for 6 months at the Department of History at UCLA. 

I am from a Jewish-German family, grown up in France and Germany, studying and living in Berlin. Even though we are not living kosher, I am familiar with it and hope to be easily integrated. I am a non-smoker, really addicted to books, interested in culture and looking for a safe place to stay…

In the past, cats and I have been gentle neighbours…

Greetings,
Sophie

She was a brilliant, book-smart young lady, excited to live in my parent’s Jewish home, and often felt more comfortable with cats than humans. I read that over again now over eight years later, and it all has a way of making me feel warm inside, and yet at the same time, it also stings – a dichotomy of feelings. 

Between Sept. 13, 2011, and May 4, 2012, we had the absolute pleasure of having Sophie live with us. She became a member of my immediate family. She was just twenty-three when we met her, and during her studies, at UCLA my mother had a hip replacement. Before we knew it, she had started to look after my mother as her own. Day in and day out, this house guest started to be the best daughter one could ask for. She would cook food, bring it upstairs to my mother, help her to the bathroom, and bookend her studies by looking after her each morning and night. They would discuss literature, Judaism, music, and just about everything under the sun. She explained that her own mother had died, she was not close to her stepmother, and she had so many fascinating stories about her life as a Jew in Germany. She was frequently self-deprecating, but in that ironic and witty tone often reserved by authors and humorists. We could tell she was not a happy person, but none of us could see the depths of her mental illness.

Sophie Hingst took her own life on July 17th, 2019. Apparently, she had recently been exposed as a liar, a fraud – and it was on an international scale. For years she was living in Ireland, going to Trinity College in Dublin. She had allegedly submitted to Yad Vashem information she had researched about twenty-two Holocaust victims, many of whom were from her own family….except most were apparently made up. Her own mother, a woman she had told us was dead – from suicide no less – was and is, in fact, alive, and her alleged stepmother was, in fact, her mother. Confused yet? We definitely were. This news of falsified research was a huge scandal making headlines from Dublin to Israel, and back to Germany. Sadly, none of us here in Los Angeles were aware of any of it until a few months later when her body was found, and someone reached out to my wife, Adi, after seeing their connections on Facebook.

How do I wrap my head around the feelings that come crashing down, about someone we loved, someone I know truly loved us, and yet finding out about her unexpected death in the same breath as the discovery that much of what she had told us over the years were apparent fabrications. It appears likely that she was never intentionally lying, but rather mentally ill to the point of creating new fabrics of reality that became her new truths. Derek Scally wrote an in-depth piece on Sophie for the Irish Times, where her mother sadly told him, “My daughter has many realities and I only have access to one”.

I will never be able to talk to her again, but today I am writing this on what would have been Sophie’s 32 birthday, Oct. 20. And since all of the searches on Google result in depressing stories of her scandal, I would like to contribute a final birthday present, this love letter to the friend and family member we only partly knew but fully loved. My hope is that this finds its way near the top of her future search results so that she can be memorialized more fully. I want people to know the Sophie who spent a day in Ireland showing me and Adi around, including exclusive student access to the Trinity College Library where we got to see the Book of Kells! I want people to know the Sophie who feared we would get lost so she took the train miles in the wrong direction without us even realizing it was out of her way until she said goodbye (the last time we would ever see her I might add, on Feb 14, 2017, and what can be seen in the photograph above). I want people to know the Sophie who signed up for MealTrain while in Ireland, and sent us gift certificates after Adi had carpal tunnel surgery, soon after our daughter was born prematurely because she wanted to ensure we had a few fewer meals to worry about. And yes, I want people to know the Sophie who lived in my parent’s home for six months and yet spent much of that time helping my mother and becoming a surrogate family member. Even if many of the details she told us may have been part of a different reality than our own, her heart was always true.


Boaz Hepner grew up in LA in Pico/Robertson and now lives here with his wife and baby girl. Thus, the neighborhood is very important to him. He helped clean up the area by adding dozens of trash cans that can still be seen from Roxbury to La Cienega. When he is not working as a Registered Nurse in Santa Monica, he can be found with his wife and daughter enjoying his passions: his multitude of friends, movies, poker and traveling.

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