Binjamin Wilkomirski was a name which Bruno Dössekker (born Bruno Grosjean in 1941) adopted in his constructed identity as a Holocaust survivor and published author. His 1995 fictional memoirs, published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, were debunked in the late 1990s by a Swiss journalist.

The book

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski, a professional clarinet

Clarinet

The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

ist and instrument maker living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). In the book, he described what he claimed were his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust. The supposed memories of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 are presented in a fractured manner and using simple language from the point of view of the narrator, an overwhelmed, very young Jewish child. His first memory is of a man being crushed by uniformed men against the wall of a house; the narrator is seemingly too young for a more precise recollection, but the reader is led to infer that this is his father. Later on, the narrator and his brother hide out in a farmhouse in Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 before being arrested and interned in two Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 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 Krakow

Kraków

Kraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...

 and, finally, to Switzerland where he lives for decades before being able to reconstruct his fragmented past.

First publication

First published in German in 1995 by the Jüdischer Verlag (part of the highly respected Suhrkamp Verlag publishing house), Bruchstücke was soon translated into nine languages; an English translation with the title Fragments appeared in 1996, published by Schocken. The book earned widespread critical admiration, but nowhere was it as enthusiastic as in Switzerland and in the English-speaking countries, and won several awards, including the National Jewish Book Award in the United States, the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France, and the Jewish Quarterly

Jewish Quarterly

Jewish Quarterly is a UK literary and cultural magazine, published 4 times a year. It focuses on issue of Jewish concern, but also has interests in wider culture and politics. It was founded by Jacob Sonntag in 1955 and has published continuously since...

literary prize in Britain. The book sold well, but in contradiction to common belief it was not a bestseller. (Maechler, 2001a, pp. 111–128; Oels, 2004, pp. 376–9) Some critics even compared Wilkomirski to Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel

Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...

, Primo Levi

Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...

 and Anne Frank

Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.Born in the city of Frankfurt...

. He 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 (Majdanek

Majdanek

Majdanek was a German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, established during the German Nazi occupation of Poland. The camp operated from October 1, 1941 until July 22, 1944, when it was captured nearly intact by the advancing Soviet Red Army...

 and Auschwitz), and added that he had been the victim of unbearable medical experiments. (Maechler, 2001a, pp. 22–83)

Ganzfried's article

In August 1998, a Swiss journalist and writer named Daniel Ganzfried questioned the veracity of Fragments in an article published in the Swiss newsweekly Weltwoche. Ganzfried argued that Wilkomirski knew the concentration camps “only as a tourist”, and that, far from being born in Latvia, he was actually born Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child of an unmarried mother named Yvonne Grosjean from Biel in Switzerland. The boy had been sent to an orphanage in Adelboden

Adelboden

Adelboden is a municipality in the Frutigen-Niedersimmental administrative district in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland.-Geography:Adelboden lies in the west of the Berner Oberland, at the end of the valley of the Engstlige river, which flows in Frutigen into the Kander river.Adelboden is a...

, Switzerland, from which he was taken in by the Dössekkers, a wealthy and childless couple in Zurich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

 who finally adopted him.

Wilkomirski became a cause célèbre

Cause célèbre

A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...

 in the English-speaking world, appearing on 60 Minutes

60 Minutes

60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....

and the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 and in Granta

Granta

Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...

 and The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

. 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, however, presented further evidence to support his theory. The beleaguered Wilkomirski could not verify his claims, but Ganzfried too was unable to prove his arguments conclusively. (Maechler, 2001a, pp. 129–164; Eskin, 2002, pp. 104–153)

Exposure

In April 1999, Wilkomirski's literary agency commissioned the Zurich 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 contradicted historical facts.

Maechler described in detail in his report how Grosjean-Wilkomirski had developed his fictional life story step by step and over decades. Most fascinating was his discovery that Wilkomirski’s alleged experiences in German-occupied Poland closely corresponded with real events of his factual 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 Grosgean-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. 67–9) Amongst other things, Maechler revealed that a Holocaust survivor which Wilkomerski had claimed to have known in the camps, a woman named Laura Grabowski

Laurel Rose Willson

Laurel Rose Willson was an American woman born in Washington, whose allegations of satanic ritual abuse were published under the alias Lauren Stratford, which she would later adopt as her legal name...

, had been earlier unearthed as a fraud, and had previously used the name Lauren Stratford to write about alleged satanic ritual abuse

Satanic ritual abuse

Satanic ritual abuse refers to the abuse of a person or animal in a ritual setting or manner...

 - a story which itself had been debunked nearly a decade earlier.

Maechler’s first report was published in German in March 2000; the English edition appeared one year later (Maechler, 2001a) 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 (Maechler, 2001b, 2002), while Ganzfried (2002) published his own controversial version of the case (s. Oels, 2004; Maechler, 2002). The writer Elena Lappin (1999) and the journalist Blake Eskin (2002) covered the affair as well; Lappin published an extensive report in May of 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. 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 Verdingkinder (or "earning children") - in other words, that they had been part of the old Swiss institution of orphaned children working for families, with overtones of child slavery. Eskin’s interest in Wilkomirski had its origins in genealogy: his family had ancestors in Riga and, initially, they believed that the author of Fragments could perhaps be a long-lost relative. In the same year (2002) the public prosecutor of the canton of Zurich announced that she found no evidence of criminal fraud. She added that a DNA test she had ordered had confirmed that Wilkomirski and Grosjean were the same person.

Aftermath

The disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications altered the status of his book. The words are the same, but the work is not. 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 in 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 autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

, the aesthetics of a literary work’s reception, oral history

Oral history

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...

, witness testimony, memory

Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

 research, trauma therapies, and the like.

Books

• Ross Chambers: “Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair," in: Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (eds.) Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, Urbanan and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, pp. 92–111
• Blake Eskin: A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, New York and London: Norton, 2002, ISBN 0-393-04871-3
• Daniel Ganzfried: Die Holocaust-Travestie. Erzählung. In: Sebastian Hefti (ed.): ... alias Wilkomirski. Die Holocaust-Travestie. Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 2002, pp. 17–154, ISBN 3-934658-29-6
• Yiannis Gabriel: “The Voice of Experience and the Voice of the Expert – Can they Speak to each Other?” In: Brian Hurwitz, Trisha Greenhalgh, Vieda Skultans (eds.): Narrative Research in Health and Illness, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, ISBN 9780727917928, pp. 168–186
• Lawrence L. Langer: Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-253-34745-9
• Elena Lappin: “The Man with Two Heads,” Granta 66 (1999), pp. 7–65
• Stefan Maechler (2001a): The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, Translated from the German by John E. Woods. Including the text of Fragments, New York: Schocken Books, ISBN 0-8052-1135-7
• Stefan Maechler (2001b): Wilkomirski the Victim. Individual Remembering as Social Interaction and Public Event. In: History & Memory, vol. 13, no. 2, fall / winter 2001, pp. 59–95
• Stefan Maechler: Aufregung um Wilkomirski. Genese eines Skandals und seine Bedeutung. In: Diekmann / Schoeps (eds.): Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom. Eingebildete Erinnerungen oder Von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein. Pendo: Zurich and Munich 2002, ISBN 3-85842-472-2.), pp. 86–131
• David Oels: A real-life Grimm’s fairy tale. Korrekturen, Nachträge, Ergänzungen zum Fall Wilkomirski. In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik, N.F. 14 (2004) vol. 2, pp. 373–390
• Susan Rubin Suleiman: Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge etc.: Harvard University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-674-02206-8
• Matthew Wickman: The Ruins of Experience. Scotland's “Romantik” Highlands and the Birth of Modern Witness, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8122-3971-3
• Binjamin Wilkomirski: Fragments. Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996 (reprinted in Maechler, 2001a, pp. 375–496)
• Froma Zeitlin: “New Soundings in Holocaust Literature: A Surplus of Memory.” In: Moishe Postone and Eric Santer (eds.): Catastrophe and Meaning. The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 0-226-67611-0, pp. 173–208

External links

• Why One Would Pretend to be a Victim of the Holocaust: The Wilkomirski Memoir by Renata Salecl published in Other Voices, v.1 n.3, 2000.