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?"