Customer Reviews

Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood

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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.

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.

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.''

The New Yorker article, as well as one in Granta Magazine, are quite convincing that Wilkomirski's memoir cannot be discussed as an accurate autobiographical account. The first time I read this powerful narrative, I was struck by how "truthfully" he represents emotional fragmentation resulting from trauma in language. As a reader, however, I confess I feel betrayed by the false claims of authenticity--and wonder at the psychological disruption which could have engineered this sort of falsity--which BW seems to believe. Assuming that the memoir is indeed fiction, I'm left to sort out what the text becomes. Total fraud? How is one then determining truth and memory? Those who actually died and those who survived the camps are betrayed, it seems to me, by Wilkomirski adopting the Shoah as metaphor. How does this change if we view FRAGMENTS as fiction? Wilkomirski clings to his narrative as true (mostly)-- it has, at any rate, become true for him. Is it productive to move from a discussion of verifiable authenticity (according to documents and such) into one which would examine what we mean when we say "truth"--??--especially in language? Outrage @ this false posture does indeed seem appropriate--but I'm struck by how, even after reading the "truth" about Wilkomirski--there are so many questions remaining.

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."

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

I am amazed that there are so many people posting reviews on here who still think this book is true!People's desire to deceive themselves is strong indeed. I know this book was put out by Random House at first, but who is publishing it now?

Anyone thinking about buying this book should know that, while the author may be sincere in his recollections, none of it is actually true. Wilkomirksi did not spend any of his childhood in concentration camps, he is not Jewish, and his name is not even "Wilkomirski." His mother was an unmarried Swiss woman who gave him up for adoption in Switzerland, as described in an article by Philip Gourevitch, "The Memory Thief," in the The New Yorker (June 14, 1999). Gourevitch writes: "Wilkomirski has . . . decked himself out in second-hand memories, borrowed memories, and outright stolen memories. I am thinking of a testimony he gave to the Holocaust museum, where he held up a picture of a little blond-haired, Jewish boy in a Krakow orphanage after the war, and said, 'I know that's me.' Who was that child before Wilkomirski clipped his little head and put it on his own shoulders?"

I read the book and believed it.NOW IT TURNS OUT TO BE FICTION!!!!
MORE AMMUNITION FOR THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS.
IF AMAZON IS TO SELL...PLACE IT IN FICTION PLEASE...!!!!

Look up the 60 Minutes story shown February 7, 1999. This guy was proven to be a compulsive liar. Among other lies, he claimed to be terrified of ski lifts because of his war-time memories. Not so, says the ex-girlfriend who knew him from the age of 7 until becoming his 4year-girlfriend at 15. There were photos shown of "Wilkomirski" skiing and laughing with her as a teen-ager. Before you buy this book and support this man, investigate. It demeans the memory of real survivors, to not demand truth.