Fragments of a fraud
"Did I have five brothers or four. Which seems righter? I can't say for sure anymore..."
- from Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski
Christopher Hope called it "achingly beautiful"; the New York Times said it was written "with a poet's vision; a child's state of grace"; Anne Karpf in this paper described it as "one of the great works about the Holocaust"; all were agreed it was a masterpiece. There is just one problem - Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of surviving as a Jewish child alone in the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz was a fabrication, invented from beginning to end, one of the great hoaxes in publishing history.
Except that hoax is really the wrong word: it suggests The Hitler Diaries, an attempt to make money from a fraudulent literary endeavour, a conscious attempt to dupe publishers and the public. No one, so far, is accusing Wilkomirski of that: all agree that he is a damaged individual who appears to believe the extraordinary story he told in Fragments: Memories of a Childhood (1939-1948). But his apparent sincerity does not make it true, and yesterday his German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, chose the global stage of the Frankfurt book fair to announce that it was withdrawing hardback copies of the book it published to worldwide acclaim in 1995 because it was no longer convinced that the author's account was accurate.
Heide Grasnick, a spokewoman for the publisher, announced the decision with sorrow: "I feel pity for him because I know him personally. He is not a happy person. But what do you do when you have an author who maintains that this is his identity and still believes it, and there are these documents?"
What you do is express sympathy for the troubled writer, but move to distance yourself from a book which for four years you have been offering to the world as a searing first-hand account of the Holocaust. Picador, which published the UK edition, and Knopf in the US now face the same question: whether to stand by their author or side with his accusers.
The documents that Grasnick referred to have been unearthed by a Swiss historian, Stefan Mächler, and are said to show that, far from having been a child in the concentration camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz, Wilkomirski had lived in comparative comfort in Switzerland throughout the war. Mächler has so far presented only a provisional report - hence the German publisher's decision to withdraw the hardback but carry on selling the paperback - but everything points to Fragments eventually being declared a work of invention. That verdict will be a profound shock to readers around the world who had been moved by its child's-eye depiction of the horrors of the camps.
Wilkomirski's book caused a sensation when it was published in German in 1995. It was rapidly translated into 12 languages, was published in the UK and the US in 1996, won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in the UK, and the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah in France. It purported to be the story of a young Jewish child born in Latvia whose family was slaughtered in a massacre in Riga, and who was taken to the death camps of Poland, where he somehow survived the war. Readers were horrified by the descriptions of the vile conditions in the camp, but they were also moved by his description of a child who could not understand that this was not how life was. The Binjamin in the book is so young that the camps are all he knows: hell is his only reality.
After the war, according to the book, he was taken to an orphanage in Switzerland and eventually adopted by a Swiss couple called the Dössekkers, who, he claimed, had no sympathy for what he had suffered, suppressed his memories and attempted to reconstruct his identity. He was a double victim and only started to reconstruct the fragments of his former life in middle age when he underwent psychotherapy, in effect recovering his memories of life in the camps.
So far, so sensational: the book was harrowing and brilliant; reviews were reverential; plaudits and prizes poured in; Holocaust historians hailed a masterpiece; sales were considerable. Wilkomirski toured the world relating his life story, breaking down as he told it, moving interviewers, audiences, hard-bitten journalists to tears. Except one: Daniel Ganzfried, a young Swiss Jew who was sent to interview Wilkomirski by a magazine called Passages. The interview should have been a routine piece for a regular column about a creative person who has achieved success in another discipline (Wilkomirski was a musician being fêted as a writer). But Ganzfried, who had written an account of his father's experiences in Auschwitz, didn't believe Wilkomirski's account, and dug a little deeper.
What he discovered was astonishing. According to Ganzfried, Wilkomirski was not Latvian but was born in a village close to the Swiss capital of Berne in 1941. His mother, Yvonne Grosjean, was unmarried and placed her son, named Bruno, in an orphanage. In 1945, he was adopted by the Dössekkers and went to live in a relatively prosperous home in Zurich. Wilkomirski was not Latvian, had never been in the camps, was not even Jewish.
Ganzfried's exposé, which was published last autumn in two parts, did not appear in Passages - as far as they were concerned, the project had spiralled out of control - but in the Swiss newspaper Weltwoche. Ganzfried called Fragments a work of fiction - he tried to take it seriously on those terms - and said Wilkomirski could never have been in a concentration camp "except as a tourist".
Ganzfried's articles provoked a rash of doubters and led Wilkomirski to have what was virtually a breakdown. He denounced journalists, refused to respond to the accusations, and said it was up to readers to respond to his memoir. "It was always the free choice of the reader to read my book as literature or to take it as a personal document," he said. "Nobody has to believe me." Fewer and fewer people did.
Elena Lappin, editor of the Jewish Quarterly when it awarded its literary prize to Wilkomirski, wrote a long article in Granta magazine examining his story and the reasons for his assumed identity. Philip Gourevitch fastidiously picked through the controversy in the New Yorker before declaring it a "feckless literary adventure. And, as the doubts grew and Jewish cultural organisations started to distance themselves from the memoir, Wilkomirski's Swiss agent, Eva Koralnik, hired Mächler to investigate her client's past. It is his report which appears finally to have convinced Wilkomirski's publishers to withdraw their claims that the book is a truthful account of childhood trauma.
When confronted by his own agent with 100 pages of documentary evidence proving he was not Binjamin Wilkomirski at all but Bruno Dössekker, he stood up and shouted, "I am Binjamin Wilkomirski!" The truth, however, according to Mächler, is that while "Binjamin" watched rats gnaw at the dead and dying in Auschwitz and babies suck their fingers to the bone in Majdanek, Bruno was being taught the clarinet in the comfort of his wealthy adoptive parents' villa in neutral Zurich.
"There is probably a part of him who believes he is Binjamin," Elena Lappin said yesterday. "It is a beautiful piece of work, but it is a fiction." Lappin's article in Granta was described by his publishers as "the hammer that drove the final nail in Binjamin's coffin. If only he would admit that he was a writer. He is obviously a good novelist, but he will never admit it. The whole point of the book was that he wasn't a writer, that it was just the fragmented memories of a child who had witnessed these appalling events and come through them. It would have been a very clever piece of writing if it wasn't so fraudulent.
"I find him very sad. I met him when I didn't suspect anything. Obviously, he has a lot of pain in his own life to write about. His childhood was traumatic enough without him having to take on this other Holocaust identity. Maybe he should do that rather than take on other people's history. We know nothing about him or what really went on his head."
It is Yvonne Grosjean's act of maternal "betrayal" which seems to have scarred the young Bruno. Wealth and a relatively successful career as a classical musician could not make up for the hole her implied desertion had left in his past. So he made up another even more tragic history to fill the one he had lost. "Betrayal by people close to him was something he talked about a lot," says a journalist who met him when he came to Britain to promote Fragments. It is ironic that it was the discovery that his natural father is still alive that provided the most devastating evidence against his son.
The publicist who accompanied him on his UK tour said that "every time he recounted his story to an interviewer it took a terrible toll on him. He is an emotionally scarred man; whatever you say about the book, there is no doubting that."
Picador said yesterday that they would not withdraw the book until they had read the full text of Dr Mächler's report. A spokesman said no decision would be taken without consulting his editor and translator, Carol Brown Janeway, at Knopf. Eva Koralnik said she was sending copies of the confidential report to all 30 countries where Fragments has been published. "It is the only way we can bring this matter to an end," she explains. "We owe it to everybody who has read the book." She has given Wilkomirski 20 days to reply to the dossier, but says she is not expecting any shock, last-minute turnarounds. Dr Mächler, who has already spent six months on the case, is likely to present his final analysis within a month.
Elena Lappin, however, says the strange case of Bruno/Binjamin cannot be put to rest if that report is kept secret. "I believe that truth heals, and this story will not be complete and the hurt will not go away unless we see what is in that report. It will be an absolute outrage if the publishers keep it to themselves. This is only the beginning."
Related article
15 October: Auschwitz bestseller a fraud