Fragments : Memories of a Wartime Childhood

Rating:
Summary: Whose childhood?
Review: FYI " subsequent research indicated Wilkomirski was really a Swiss citizen named Bruno Doessekker who cannot claim Jewish identity. In 1999, the German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag withdrew the hardcover version of ``Fragments'' from bookstores. Last summer, the Culture Administration in Zurich issued a statement saying that recent research had made clear that ``Fragments'' was a ``freely invented autobiography.''

Rating:
Summary: Memories of a Wartime Childhood
Review: It is in Fragments now, a total hoax.

A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.

In Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski describes his ordeal as an infant in the Jewish ghetto of Riga (Latvia), where his earliest memory is of seeing his father being killed. Wilkomirski also tells how he survived the terrible rigors of wartime internment, at the age of three or four, in the German-run concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.

First published in German in 1995, Fragments has been translated into twelve languages. In Switzerland, the country where Wilkomirski lives, the book has been a major best-seller. Two documentary films and numerous personal appearances by the author in schools throughout the country have helped promote the memoir.

The American edition was published by Schocken, an imprint of Random House, which heavily promoted the book with teachers' study guides and other supplementary materials.

Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.

This past summer, though, compelling evidence came to light exposing Wilkomirski's memoir as an literary hoax.

Although he claims to have been born in Latvia in 1939, and to have arrived in Switzerland in 1947 or 1948, Swiss legal records show that he was actually born in Switzerland in February 1941, the son of an unwed woman, Yvette Grosjean. The infant was then adopted and raised by the Doessekkers, a middle-class Zurich couple. Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried, writing in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, also reports that he has found a 1946 photo of the young Bruno Doessekker (Wilkomirski) in the garden of his adoptive parents.

Comparisons have been drawn between Wilkomirski's Fragments and The Painted Bird, the supposedly autobiographical "Holocaust memoir" by prominent literary figure Jerzy Kosinksi that turned out to be fraudulent.

Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.

In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves."

Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).

Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful."

Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust."

American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998):

Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct.

Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."

Rating:
Summary: pass over the scramble to "fix" this into nonexistence
Review: read this book before reading the spew about its "authenticity". don't concern yourself with where the pieces go in what you know, they don't belong to your understanding. to frame the story in history, geography, society, is to try and correct the narrative -- for whose benefit? "fragments" captures the essence of "screen memory" like no textbook on the subject possibly could; attempts to convey it by those who've come to terms with it for what it is rarely get past the attempt.
regardless of why the book was written, or how the authour came to possess these images; real, imagined, conjured, who knows, maybe not even the writer, the story of this binjamin doesn't unfold, it simply carries the ground of its own consciousness, in recollections of a childhood unmitigated by whatever closure of comprehension comes in adulthood. memories stored and recalled in items of the senses, intense and unfiltered perceptions with minimal coherent external context in which early cognative development makes distinctions, signifies, aligns, scales -- makes sense and story of memory.
the allegory is there in the book itself, plain as day, at least twice; in the beginning with the "big picture" abstraction in binjamin's persistent nightmare, and near the end, where the abstracted "big picture" manifests in a shared experience of total "incomprehension" of situation. what you know or can surmise is irrelevant, there are only these fragments.

Rating:
Summary: pass over the scramble to "fix" this into nonexistence
Review: read this book before reading the spew about its "authenticity". don't concern yourself with where the pieces go in what you know, they don't belong to your understanding. to frame the story in history, geography, society, is to try and correct the narrative -- for whose benefit? "fragments" captures the essence of "screen memory" like no textbook on the subject possibly could; attempts to convey it by those who've come to terms with it for what it is rarely get past the attempt.
regardless of why the book was written, or how the authour came to possess these images; real, imagined, conjured, who knows, maybe not even the writer, the story of this binjamin doesn't unfold, it simply carries the ground of its own consciousness, in recollections of a childhood unmitigated by whatever closure of comprehension comes in adulthood. memories stored and recalled in items of the senses, intense and unfiltered perceptions with minimal coherent external context in which early cognative development makes distinctions, signifies, aligns, scales -- makes sense and story of memory.
the allegory is there in the book itself, plain as day, at least twice; in the beginning with the "big picture" abstraction in binjamin's persistent nightmare, and near the end, where the abstracted "big picture" manifests in a shared experience of total "incomprehension" of situation. what you know or can surmise is irrelevant, there are only these fragments.

Rating:
Summary: Whose childhood?
Review: The greatest lesson I've learned from Holocaust survivors, and I've known many, is we all construct our lives. Some told stories of great horror (watching as family members were killed), others recounted tales of great beauty (I once met a couple who are now married who fell in love at Auschwitz, as odd as that sounds), still others spoke of crushing monotony, guilt that they were surviving as workers while others were sent to their deaths, etc. All had made some peace with what had happened (to varying degrees) and exuded a level of humility which at first, to me, seemed baffling. But over time I came to understand that they were ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events. Every story was different but no one pretended to be something they were not.

This is a bad book, even as fiction. It's the Oprah version of the Holocaust, crafted to tug at the heart strings, the author attempts to present an archetypal experience when really there is no such thing. That he passed it off as the story of his life is shameful. One can have sympathy for a troubled soul (demons come in many forms) but that's it. Fictional works about the Holocaust are fine but those who loved this book, fraud revealed, should consider why they're being taken in. It's a pretty fable, that's all. Life can be beautiful (to mention another work which used a similar formula). When a poseur claims that horrific events make people more sensitive, noble, when they buy into this notion of the victim as hero, which is what the author of this book is selling, such a person is saying something I've never a genuine survivor say. Sad indeed.

Rating:
Summary: A case study
Review: There is now ample evidence that the story told in this book is false: the "60 minutes" special, the "New Yorker" article, the "Granta" investigation, and also a report by an historian hired by the author's literary agent. Therefore it is not respectful of authentic personal recounts of the Holocaust. It is an act of supreme bad taste. The fact that I believed in the story so completely makes me all the more upset. Yet, this book is a very interesting case of an individual substituting his memory with someone else's, probably in good faith. The book itself is not badly written at all, and it is still hard to believe for me that someone with little culture an historical knowledge could recreate facts in a way that has fooled many historians.

Rating:
Summary: Zero stars
Review: When I read this book several years ago, I did not understand how anyone could have believed it. Having known several true Holocaust survivors, and heard their stories, I certainly didn't.

Now, there have now been several clear and thorough exposes of the fraud perpetrated by Bruno Grosjean Dossekker, who falsely claimed here to be one Binjamin Wilkomirski, a child survivor of the Holocaust. Stefan Maechler, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes and several other publications prove beyond any doubt that Wilkomirski is no such person and that Fragments is a fiction.

Every possible lead has now been followed; each detail in Dossekker's narration of "events" has been compared with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, accounts of other child survivors, interviews with members of the Dossekker and Grosjean families and more.

The strongest evidence, unearthed by Stephan Maechler, is the fact that in 1981, Dossekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." Dossekker/Wilkomirski received a third of her estate.

Other evidence includes Dossekker/Wilkomirski's use of Laura Grabowski to "corroborate" his story. Grabowski claims to have known him in a children's home in Krakow. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Underground.

The Social Security number of said Lauren Stratford is the same as that of Grabowski, who subsequently used it to make a false survivor's claim. Furthermore, Satan's Underground and this volume contain startling similarities.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Rating:
Summary: baffling
Review: Wilkomirski's novel is truly affecting and touching. While it has been proven fairly conclusively that the author himself was not a prisoner at any Nazi concentration camp, the tale he tells is still significant.

We sometimes forget about survivors in our world that is so reliant on statistics. Moreover, we sometimes forget that children who survived the Holocaust could not have really understood what was happening in the world around them. This book reminds us that hiding from the past and the truth is scarring.

Unlike adults, children do not have knowledge of politics and cannot understand prejudice. Young survivors of the Holocaust were subjected to horrible cruelty without understanding why, and Wilkomirski gives us a scenario of what might have happened to one of these children.

The fact that "Fragments" may be a work of fiction does not, in my opinion, make it any less remarkable.