Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood

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Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood
ISBN
9780805210897

Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a 1995 book, whose author used the pseudonym Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be a memoir of the Holocaust. It was debunked by Swiss journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried [de] in August 1998. The subsequent disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications sparked heated debate in the German- and English-speaking world. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. Swiss historian and anti-Semitism expert Stefan Maechler later wrote, "Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch."[1] The debates led to the creation of the term Wilkomirski syndrome for similar cases.

Author

Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose real name is Bruno Dössekker (born Bruno Grosjean; 12 February 1941 in

Holocaust survivor.[2]

The book

In 1995, Wilkomirski, a professional

concentration camps, where he meets his dying mother for the last time. After his liberation from the death camps, he is brought to an orphanage in Kraków and, finally, to Switzerland where he lives for decades before being able to reconstruct his fragmented past.[citation needed
]

First publication

First published in German in 1995 by the Jüdischer Verlag (part of the highly respected

National Jewish Book Award in the United States,[3] the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France, and the Jewish Quarterly literary prize in Britain.[4] The book sold well, but in contradiction to common belief it was not a bestseller.[5][6]

Wilkomirski was invited to participate in radio and television programs as a witness and expert, and was interviewed and videotaped by reputable archives. In his oral statements Wilkomirski elaborated on many aspects which remained unclear or unexplained. For example, he provided the names of the concentration camps in which he claimed to have been interned (

Auschwitz), and added that he had been the victim of unbearable medical experiments.[7]

Ganzfried's article

In August 1998, a Swiss journalist and writer named

Zürich who finally adopted him.[2][8]

Wilkomirski had become a cause célèbre in the English-speaking world, appearing on 60 Minutes and the BBC and in Granta and The New Yorker.[2] He insisted that he was an authentic Holocaust survivor who had been secretly switched as a young boy with Bruno Grosjean upon his arrival in Switzerland. His supporters condemned Ganzfried, who nonetheless presented further evidence to support his theory. Wilkomirski could not verify his claims, but Ganzfried was also unable to prove his arguments conclusively.[9][10]

Exposure

In April 1999, Wilkomirski's literary agency commissioned the Zürich historian Stefan Maechler to investigate the accusations. The historian presented his findings to his client and to the nine publishers of Fragments in the autumn of that year. Maechler concluded that Ganzfried's allegations were correct, and that Wilkomirski's alleged autobiography was a fraud.[2]

Maechler described in detail in his report how Grosjean-Wilkomirski had developed his fictional life story step-by-step and over decades. He discovered that Wilkomirski's alleged experiences in German-occupied Poland closely corresponded with real events in his childhood in Switzerland, to the point that he suggested the author rewrote and reframed his own experience in a complex manner, turning the occurrences of his real life into that of a child surviving the Holocaust.

It remained unclear to Maechler whether Grosjean-Wilkomirski had done this deliberately or if the writer actually believed what he had written, but he was skeptical that the writer was a "cold, calculating crook", as Ganzfried assumed. (Maechler, 2001b, pp. 67–69) Amongst other things, Maechler revealed that a Holocaust survivor Wilkomirski claimed to have known in the camps, a woman named

satanic ritual abuse — a story which itself had been debunked nearly a decade earlier.[11]

Maechler's first report was published in German in March 2000; the English edition appeared one year later[12] and included the original English translation of Fragments which had been withdrawn by the publisher after Maechler's report. Subsequently, the historian published two essays with additional findings and analysis,[13][14] while Ganzfried (2002) published his own controversial version of the case.[15][14] Journalist Blake Eskin covered the affair.[16] Prior to the exposure, Eskin wrote and told the story of Wilkomirski's trip to the US to become reunited with people he claimed to be distant family, of which Eskin was a part. This story was aired in act two of This American Life episode 82, "Haunted".[17] The writer Elena Lappin published an extensive report in May 1999. She had become acquainted with Wilkomirski two years before, when the Jewish Quarterly awarded him its prize for nonfiction. At the time, she was editor of that English magazine. In the course of her research, she identified a number of contradictions in Wilkomirski's story and came to believe that Fragments was fiction. (Lappin 1999)

In addition, she reported that Wilkomirski's uncle, Max Grosjean, said that as children he and his sister Yvonne (Wilkomirski's biological mother) had been

DNA test she had ordered had confirmed that Wilkomirski and Grosjean were the same person.[18]

Aftermath

The disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications altered the status of his book. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. "Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch" (Maechler, 2000, p. 281). But for a few scholars, even as a pseudomemoir, the merits of the work still remain. "Those merits reside in a ferocious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of indelible images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child's voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world, during the war and thereafter" (Zeitlin, 2003, p. 177, see also Suleiman, 2006, p. 170).

The Wilkomirski case was heatedly debated in Germany and Switzerland as a textbook example of the contemporary treatment of the Holocaust and of the perils of using it for one's own causes. However, the affair transcends the specific context of the Holocaust (see e.g. Chambers, 2002; Gabriel, 2004; Langer, 2006; Maechler, 2001b; Oels, 2004; Suleiman, 2006; Wickman, 2007). Wilkomirski's case raises questions about the literary genre of

trauma therapies, and the like. The case is discussed in great detail by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson as an interesting case of self-inflicted false memories
(Tavris and Aronson, 2007, pp. 82ff.)

The debate led to the creation of the term Wilkomirski syndrome which has been applied to several other cases. The Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien [de] held a conference named Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom in Potsdam in 2001.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ Maechler 2000, p. 281.
  2. ^ a b c d e Moss, Stephen (15 October 1999). "Fragments of a fraud". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
  3. ^ "National Jewish Book Award | Book awards | LibraryThing". www.librarything.com. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
  4. ^ Holocaust Denial: A Sequel
  5. ^ Maechler 2001a, pp. 111–128.
  6. ^ Oels 2004, p. 376–79.
  7. ^ Maechler 2001a, pp. 22–83.
  8. ^ http://www.wolfgang-heuer.com/wp-content/uploads/heuer_wolfgang_wilkomirski.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  9. ^ Maechler 2001a, p. 129–164.
  10. ^ Eskin 2002, pp. 104–153.
  11. ^ Passantino, Bob; Passantino, Gretchen; Trott, Jon. "Satan's Sideshow: The True Lauren Stratford Story". cornerstonemag.com. Archived from the original on October 2, 2003. Retrieved September 13, 2016.
  12. ^ Maechler 2001a.
  13. ^ Maechler 2001b.
  14. ^ a b Maechler 2002.
  15. ^ Oels 2004.
  16. ^ Eskin 2002.
  17. ^ This American Life, Haunted 1997, Radio archives: episode 82.
  18. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 December 2002.
  19. ISBN 0-285-63683-9
    . In considering the question "Is Wilkomirski simply a liar?" Schachter feels there is a possibility that some of his Wilkomirski's detailed recollections may have been a case of suggestion.
  20. JSTOR 23976367
    .

Bibliography

Journal articles

External links
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