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From
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/02/Wilkomirski080202.html
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New York, February 5, 2002
BOOKS
Real Horrors, Phony Claims
By TOM GROSS
THE tale of the man who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski is as
extraordinary as it is disturbing. It began with his memoir called
"Fragments," in which he presented himself as a Jewish Holocaust
survivor who had been subjected to Dr. Josef Mengele's horrendous
medical experiments as a child.
Wilkomirski described his terrible experiences at Majdanek, a
concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, and at Auschwitz,
including seeing his father beaten to death. "Fragments," published
in Switzerland in 1995, was almost immediately acclaimed a
masterpiece, and it soon became an international bestseller.
Wilkomirski won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography, the Prix Memoire de
la Shoah in France and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain. He even
received a cash award from the American Orthopsychiatric
Association.
As his fame grew, Wilkomirski received standing ovations throughout America, at
lectures organized by the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Newspapers cited him as an authority
on the Holocaust. Some compared him to Primo Levi. Hist
orians assigned "Fragments" to their students. And then he was exposed.
The author of the harrowing Holocaust memoir turned out to be an impostor. He was a
gentile who had spent the war in a comfortable Protestant home in Switzerland. Blake
Eskin's "A Life in Pieces" (Norton, 251 pages, $25.9
5) is a conscientious account of the "Fragments" hoax.
By setting the story out in detail, Mr. Eskin has given us a chance to revisit this
disturbing episode in our recent cultural history and to ponder how and why it
happened -- not that the answers are easy to come by.
Amazingly, the first public doubts about "Fragments" (aired as late as March 1998)
came not from some esteemed professor at one of the conferences that Wilkomirski
regularly addressed but from a reader who posted a review
on Amazon.com.
Michael Mills, a junior Australian government bureaucrat living in Canberra, found
certain dates in "Fragments" to be wrong and noted that some of Wilkomirski's
"memories" of Majdanek appeared remarkably similar to testim
ony already published by child survivors of Buchenwald. (Mr. Mills, it alarmingly
turned out, was a Holocaust revisionist who had caught out the experts.)
Other skeptics emerged. The first comprehensive case against Wilkomirski was put
together by Daniel Ganzfried, an Israeli-born Swiss writer whose own father was a
genuine Auschwitz survivor. Mr. Ganzfried delved deep into
Wilkomirski's past, going through his school records, tracking down his former
girlfriends and even finding family photographs of the "Holocaust survivor" from as
far back as 1946, taken in Switzerland, when Wilkomirski
claimed to be still in Poland.
As Mr. Ganzfried discovered, Binjamin Wilkomirski wasn't his name at all: It was Bruno
Grosjean, born to a single mother, a Christian, and brought up by his wealthy adoptive
family, the Doessekkers, near Zurich.
Bruno Doessekker, as those around "Wilkomirski" knew him before he published
"Fragments," was a clarinetist from Zurich, born not in 1939 but on Feb. 12, 1941, in
Biel, Switzerland. Mr. Ganzfried showed that the adult Do
essekker was fully aware of his real childhood circumstances -- indeed, he had fought
for and secured a share of his birth mother's estate in 1981.
"Wilkomirski" dismissed Mr. Ganzfried's claims and said that he was the victim of an
"anti-Semitic plot" involving Swiss government officials. But other investigative
reporters followed in Mr. Ganzfried's footsteps, unear
thing yet more damning evidence of the deception.
Mr. Doessekker now faces fraud charges in Switzerland. With such material it is not
surprising that "A Life in Pieces" is an absorbing book. Mr. Eskin tells the story
well, at times giving it the pace and excitement of a
detective story. He is also adept at describing the intrigues that have marred the
work of child Holocaust survivor groups, which too often dissolve into quarrels over
tactics and feuds over the nature of victimhood.
The book has some weaknesses, however. In particular, Mr. Eskin fails to come to any
conclusions about Mr. Doessekker's motives. Is he the mastermind behind a "coldly
planned fraud," as Mr. Ganzfried believes, or is he si
mply a deranged man who actually believes the myths he has constructed for himself?
And then there is the troubling question of just how those who believed him came to be
so easily fooled. Why were so many researchers, publishers, editors, agents, scholars
and critics taken in? You would think, given the
intensity of historical interest in the Holocaust, that someone might have spotted
the fraud early on.
It would be interesting, for example, to know how Holocaust historians such as Daniel
Goldhagen, who so lavishly praised the book, now feel. And what does the director of
the U.S. Holocaust Museum think of his having made
"Wilkomirski" a guest of honor at a $150-per-plate luncheon at New York's Hotel
Carlyle?
Mr. Eskin might have insisted on asking such questions of a host of
people who should have known better. It is a pity that he didn't. He
does, however, choose to write at length on the history of his own
family, which has been living in the U.S. for at least four
generations. The ostensible reason is that his great-great-
grandfather was called Wilkomirski, and at one stage it seemed that
the bogus Binjamin might be a distant relative.
In the event, of course, the supposed connection turned out to be a
red herring. It seems as if this chimera distracted him, at times,
from the main story.
Mr. Gross, who has worked as a journalist in Israel for the past six
years, is a co-author of "Out of Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth of
Shine" (Warner Books).
End<{{{
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