DOCUMENTATION vs. STORY TELLING

ARE THEY NOT THE SAME THING?

After my tutorial, I got to thinking about the difference between documentation and story telling. Is there a difference? 

Documentation, to me, is the recording of events, of facts, of things that have really happened.

Story telling, on the other hand, can be lies. The bending of the truth. A fiction - a novel etc. 

However, when I look at the artwork of the Holocaust and put it up against the stories told by survivors and the facts and statistics that have been gathered over the years since the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, the sketches and watercolours and inks etc are basically documenting what they saw, what they heard and what they thought and what they knew. But, they are also telling their own true stories. 


Does knowing a survivor's story effect the way that we look at an artwork by them?