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Putting the Pieces Together
Samuel Apple
The people who brought you the Holocaust memoir 'Fragments,' and then withdrew it when it was proved a hoax, now want to sell you a report that definitively debunks their book ...along with a reprint of the original
"Fragments" was every publisher's dream. The Guardian called Swiss clarinetist Binjamin Wilkomirski's 1995 memoir "one of the great works about the Holocaust" and compared Wilkomirski to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. A critic for The Nation wondered whether he even had the right to try to offer praise for a work "so profoundly moving, so morally important, and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all." In the years following its publication, "Fragments" - in which Wilkomirski recorded his episodic childhood memories of the cruelties he suffered at the hands of the Nazis - was translated into nine languages and Wilkomirski received the Prix de M�moire de la Shoah in Paris, a Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in London, and a National Jewish Book Award in New York.
But even as Wilkomirski traveled the world to collect his prizes and to promote "Fragments," something was bothering his American publisher. Wilkomirski couldn't stop crying at the readings. "I know a lot of survivors," Arthur H. Samuelson of Schocken Books told Philip Gourevitch in his 1999 New Yorker feature on Wilkomirski, "and one thing they have in common is they don't cry."
Unfortunately for Samuelson, his skepticism did not go beyond wondering about Wilkomirski's tears. He found himself as surprised as Wilkomirski's other admirers when in August of 1998, Swiss Jewish novelist Daniel Ganzfried denounced "Fragments" as "an internalized collection of images by a man whose imagination has run away with him." Writing in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, Ganzfried insisted that official Swiss archives reveal Wilkomirski as one Bruno Grosjean, a non-Jewish orphan who was raised by a well-off Swiss family and who "knows Auschwitz and Majdanek only as a tourist."
The accusations created a media sensation, with everyone involved scuttling to take sides. Wilkomirski defenders, among them many survivors who heard echoes of their own stories in "Fragments," believed him wholeheartedly. No one, the argument went, could have written so movingly about fabricated anguish. Besides, Wilkomirski did offer a seemingly plausible response to the charges. He referred his accusers to the book's afterword, in which he explains how, like many other unidentifiable child survivors, he was given false papers after the war. To this day Wilkomirski maintains that the documents Ganzfried uncovered have nothing to do with him, but instead belong to a different boy, named Bruno Grosjean.
Skeptics countered that the false papers could not explain all of Ganzfried's discoveries. If Wilkomirski was not Bruno Grosjean, why had he accepted an inheritance when Bruno's mother, Yvonne Grosjean, died in 1981? How could he explain the photograph Ganzfried found of him in Switzerland in 1946, when he claimed to have arrived only in 1947 or 1948? And, for that matter, what ever happened to the real Bruno Grosjean?
Wilkomirski's awkward responses to these questions only ensnared him in further contradictions. He suddenly realized he had arrived in Switzerland by 1945, but then could not explain how he had spent time at a Krak�w orphanage that only opened in the summer of 1946. He said that the real Bruno Grosjean had been a former foster child of his adoptive parents, but was unable to account for his disappearance.
As the controversy swirled, calls came for "Fragments" to be taken out of circulation, or at least reclassified as fiction. Wilkomirski's various publishers worldwide made the dubious decision to leave "Fragments" in print and hired a Swiss historian, Stefan Maechler, to investigate Ganzfried's charges. Maechler's findings, which first appeared in German last year have now been published in English by Schocken. The 512-page volume comes complete with the original text of "Fragments," which, after selling nearly 40,000 copies, was finally withdrawn by Schocken in November of 1999 - 15 months after Ganzfried published his article.
The meticulously researched report not only confirms all of Ganzfried's accusations, but is also rife with countless other discoveries of Wilkomirski's lies. Maechler leaves no detail of his story unchecked. And so we learn that he only took on the name Wilkomirski in 1972 when a friend noted how much he looked liked the violinist Wanda Wilkomirska. And that despite the fact that there was never a plague of rats at Majdanek, Wilkomirski's memories of the hordes of rats at the camp still cause him to move his feet in his sleep.
IF THESE CONCLUSIONS OF "THE Wilkomirski Affair" put to rest any questions about Maechler's integrity despite his being an agent of interested parties, one might still justly begrudge Schocken the $17 cover price. It hardly seems fair that, after waiting so long to recall "Fragments," the publishing house should now be rewarded with sales of this book. In fact, it would seem much more proper, if unrealistic, for Schocken to offer a free copy of the report to all who sent in the copies of "Fragments" they purchased under false apprehensions.
Assuming that's not going to happen, Maechler's exceptional report is at least worth a trip to the library. Perhaps the strangest story to emerge from the affair is Wilkomirski's reconnection with fellow survivor Laura Grabowski, whom he claimed to remember from Birkenau. After a tearful reunion with Grabowski at a meeting of the Holocaust Child Survivors Group of Los Angeles, Wilkomirski told a BBC reporter that he recognized Grabowski by the shape of her face. There was only one problem. It turns out that before Laura Grabowski was a child victim of the Nazis, she was Lauren Stratford, a child victim of an evil satanic cult, the story of which she documented in her best-selling and patently fictional autobiography, "Satan's Underground."
If Grabowski is the strangest element of the story, the most fascinating is the way in which Wilkomirski created his collage of memories by gleaning scenes from books, movies, and documentaries about the Holocaust. Jerzy Kosinski, who himself came under attack for suggesting that his Holocaust novel, "The Painted Bird," was a true account, appears to have been Wilkomirski's major influence. Maechler notes that both books are broken into disconnected episodes that are narrated from a child's perspective. And both use simple language and similar images to tell the story of a frail, sometimes mute, boy who, separated from his family, miraculously overcomes a litany of Nazi atrocities in Poland. Kosinski's central metaphor is a bird. Wilkomirski writes about playing with a toy glider.
AFTER READING MAECHLER'S report, one is left wondering not if "Fragments" is completely fictional, but whether Wilkomirski is delusional or, rather as Ganzfried argued in a follow-up to his initial expos�, guilty of effecting a "coldly planned swindle."
On the one hand, Wilkomirski is without question a deeply troubled man. When Ganzfried's article first appeared, Wilkomirski is reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown that left him sitting alone and screaming for bread. Moreover, many of Wilkomirski's "memories" became accessible to him only via "recovered memory" therapy, a controversial technique that is well known for convincing people that they have experienced events that never took place.
On the other hand, some of Wilkomirski's childhood friends remember him as a notorious liar. And then there's the question of his circumcision. In one of the more sordid twists of this saga, Ganzfried asked two of Wilkomirski's former partners if his foreskin was intact. Both said that it was. Wilkomirski will not answer questions on this matter. He also has refused to allow for a test that would compare his DNA to that of Bruno Grosjean's living uncle.
Maechler seems undecided on the question of Wilkomirski's belief in his account. Discussing the dramatic intensity that would overcome both Wilkomirski and his audiences at speaking events, Maechler concludes that "perhaps he did not really believe his story, but he did believe his own telling of it."
In the end, the more interesting question may not be whether Wilkomirski is a liar or deeply deluded, but how he managed to fool so many intelligent people. After all, it seems incredibly unlikely that a small child on his own in the camps could have survived the vicious beatings Wilkomirski described in "Fragments."
So why was everyone so easily duped? Maechler points to the structural and rhetorical devices in "Fragments." Wilkomirski offers images, such as plagues of rats and the hoarding of food, that already resonated in the cultural memory of the Holocaust and so seemed credible to readers. Moreover, Wilkomirski's presentation of the book as a collection of fragmented childhood memories allowed readers to give him the benefit of the doubt on questions of historical precision.
But Maechler argues that readers of "Fragments," too, played an active role in their own betrayal, identifying with little Binjamin as the hero in a "fairy tale about a small child who strays into the clutches of evil, but survives." Wilkomirski picked up the story where Anne Frank left off and gave it the happy ending readers longed for.
Maechler suspects non-Jewish Europeans were particularly apt to identify with Wilkomirski because it allowed them to view themselves as critics of the past and to "avoid the question of how they should deal with the responsibility or guilt of their parents." By contrast, the alarmingly naive reception of "Fragments" in America (Wilkomirski even went on a fundraising tour for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), in Maechler's view, is one more example of a dangerous trend in which the Holocaust is sentimentalized and commercialized to the point where it runs the risk of being severed from its historical links.
And here we may have arrived at the real debate. For some commentators, it doesn't matter if "Fragments" is a work of fiction because, they say, Wilkomirski captured the "emotional" or "psychological" truthfulness of the experience. This attitude focuses on the Holocaust not so much as concrete historical event, but as a universal metaphor for evil and suffering that transcends facticity.
The problem with this position is that the Holocaust is a fact before it is a metaphor, and the further we move from its factual understanding the less likely we are to grasp its meaning and lessons. Binjamin Wilkomirski may or may not be malicious, but he is without question dangerous.
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