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A case of past imperfect
An award-winning Holocaust memoir was not what it seemed
U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 2002
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26false.htm
BY VICTORIA POPE
Before the outrage there was the story, pitiful and compelling, of the Jewish boy from Riga left to fend for himself amid the monsters and monstrosities of the Holocaust. Fragments chronicles young Binjamin Wilkomirski, exiled from his Latvian home, shipped to concentration camps, then to an orphanage in Krakow, Poland.
After the war, he is given a new identity as the adopted son of a gentile family in comfortable, complacent Switzerland–a torture, too, for someone chased by a past that would not allow for comfort or complacency. When the book was published in 1995, child survivors marveled at how Wilkomirski had captured not only their actual suffering but, more remarkably, their way of remembering–fitful, off kilter, and incomplete. I was in half darkness, and I was the only child on earth. No other human being, no tree, no grass, no water–nothing. Just a great desert of stone and sand. Psychologists exulted over Binjamin’s exquisite sensitivity; his story was a textbook on childhood trauma come alive. When the author made public appearances, he would exude the vulnerability of a scared child. “I thought the world ended at the fence of the camps,” he said as he accepted the National Jewish Book Award in New York City. “I thought the world was gone.”
But his past–his actual past–finally caught up with him. Not initially because of anything he wrote in Fragments, though there were a few early skeptics who pointed to inaccuracies in the text. In fact, if his memoirs had been his only fabrication, Wilkomirski might still be savoring the accolades. But the author had a history of spinning the truth, Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried learned in 1998, when he began talking to Wilko-mirski’s family. An instrument maker and concert clarinetist, Wilkomirski had begun his career as Bruno Doessekker. In a progression of lies, he told friends that he was a refugee from the Baltics, then that he was a Jew. He said that his family members perished in the camps, later that he himself had endured the Holocaust. When nagging questions about his narrative became full-fledged accusations, Wilkomirski’s literary agent commissioned Swiss historian Stefan Maechler to deconstruct Fragments and learn the truth about its author. Swiss documents show that Wilkomirski was born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1941. His birth mother was a Swiss factory worker forced by dire circumstances to place him in foster care, where he was abused. He was later adopted by a couple named Doessekker. (Court-ordered DNA testing would later confirm his biological father as Swiss.) Maechler quickly learned that Wilkomirski was a troubled man, plagued by nightmares, who had turned to recovered-memory therapy to come to terms with his demons. He described to Maechler, who spent five days with him at his home outside Zurich, the variety of visualization techniques he used to recall childhood terrors. Did these exercises unlock memories stored deep in his consciousness, as proponents of this therapy believe? Did he “recover” memories that never occurred?
Blank slate. Even today, Maechler refuses to speculate about how consciously Wilkomirski perpetrated his identity theft. But clearly his therapy unleashed a torrent of emotions. At the heart of his deception, says Maechler, was the burning desire to replace the blank slate of his past, which his adoptive parents refused to share with him, with a new biography. “There was no story of his life,” Maechler explains, to help Wilkomirski make sense of his psychic anguish. By remaking himself as a Holocaust survivor, “he used the most powerful metaphors of suffering that we have today,” Maechler says.
And he chose a historical moment ripe for rip-off, as the “Hitler diaries” and writer Jerzy Kosinski’s alleged exaggerations of his war trauma show. The Holocaust represents bottomless horror; no act ascribed to it would strain credulity. And for those seeking victimhood, it offers constant gratification. In one of the stranger twists of Wilkomirski’s short life as a celebrated Holocaust survivor, he meets Lauren Grabowski at a meeting in California and the two of them embrace, recognizing each other as old friends from Auschwitz. Grabowski has since been unmasked as an impostor who had earlier written about her supposed sexual subjugation in a satanic cult. When the controversy over Fragments began, Grabowski sidestepped. “He and I corroborate each other with memories of the heart,” she wrote.
Wilkomirski has not recanted, but his book was recalled and charges of fraud against him are still pending. He was quoted not long ago in a Swiss newspaper, his first public comment after a long silence, saying that he believed in his memories and that whether his traumas occurred in a concentration camp or in a barn was hardly the point, an indication that he still blurs the line between metaphor and truth.
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