May 17, 2002.
"A genuine fake?"
Review
by Elaine Glazer of A Life in Pieces by Blake
Eskin (Aurum, 2002; 245pp.. £16.99)
IN 1995, a Holocaust memoir entitled Fragments was
published in German to instant acclaim. Its author,
Binjamin Wilkomirski, purported to be a Jewish
child survivor whose parents were brutally murdered in a
massacre in Riga, Latvia.
Wilkomirski described how he was taken to
concentration camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz,
placed in a Swiss orphanage after the war, and eventually
adopted. Translated into twelve languages, it was
published in Britain and the United States the following
year, winning numerous
prizes.
Wilkomirski was invited to
address Holocaust conferences, university
departments and survivor groups around the world. Not
everyone believed his account, however, and in 1998 a
Swiss journalist, Daniel Ganzfried, claimed the
memoir was a fake. According to Ganzfried, Wilkomirski
was in fact Bruno Doessekker, born near the Swiss
capital of Berne in 1941 to an unmarried mother. She had
placed him in an orphanage, and he was later adopted by
the Doessekker family, who brought him up in their
middleclass, nonJewish Zurich home. In 1999, Fragments
was withdrawn by its publishers.
A Life in Pieces documents the rise and fall of
Wilkomirski's memoir, an extraordinary case in which
Blake Eskin also has a personal interest. He is a
member of a large New York Jewish family, and his
mother's ancestors came from Riga, where they were called
Wilkomirski. When Binjamin came to New York on his book
tour, he met Eskin's family in the hope that they could
establish a connection. This is a story of confidence
tricks and disappointment, in a personal as well as a
public context, as it gradually turns out that Eskin's
relatives are just some of the many people with whom
Wilkomirski constructed bogus relationships.
Threaded through this book are Eskin's attempts to
discover the European origins of his own family, and it
is also a detective story which lays out the paper trail
of Wilkomirski's undoing. Eskin collates evidence from
previous accounts, such as Elena Lappin's essay in
Granta (1999), but his version is distinctive
because he makes significant use of his personal
connection to the story, and his tone is astute and
sympathetic in equal measure. He has also assembled a
wealth of speeches, correspondence and interviews which
reveal in subtle and complex ways the investments and
delusions of those involved.
The prime contribution of this book, however, is that
its scope is much broader than the case itself. It
explores the relationship between history and fiction,
the revelation of SwissNazi collaboration, and
controversies over recovered memory and Holocaust
commemoration. Eskin discusses the motivations not only
of Bruno Doessekker, but also of the world which was so
eager to embrace him.
There was much at stake in protecting the identity and
history of Binjamin Wilkomirski. Between the lines of
Eskin's humane and compassionate book, there is a latent
critique of a 
certain
branch of the Holocaust memory
industry that privileges the individual testimony
of survivors. This testimony is thought to "break
through" history, to provide immediacy and sentiment
rather than mere knowledge. According to this belief,
those child survivors who choose not to record their
memories are accused of "collaborating in the erasure of
our past", and those who question
their veracity are accused of denying the Holocaust.
This emphasis on subjectivity
is increasingly the foundation on which the
reputations of many academics, psychologists and
organizations rest. The concomitant downgrading of
history made it easy for Wilkomirski's fake to pass as
truth, and the value placed on emotional rather than
intellectual response led commentators such as the
American academic Deborah Lipstadt to declare
that for it to be a false memoir "might complicate
matters somewhat, but it's still powerful".
So when the truth was revealed, the myth refused to
die. Bruno Doessekker had the perfect defence; he argued
that he, like many postwar refugee children, had simply
been given a new seamless Swiss identity. His prose style
was, as the title suggests, fragmentary like Anne
Michaels's post-Holocaust novel Fugitive
Pieces, he was alluding to the elusive and
discontinuous nature of memory. This applies especially
to the recollection of childhood impressions, and indeed
he explicitly set aside "the ordering logic of
grownups".
Doessekker thus preempted accusations that his memoir
did not hang together, and at the same time capitalized
on the inherent fragility of childhood memories, which
prompts survivors, as well as concerned professionals, to
defend them at all costs. In the resulting feedback loop,
Wilkomirski's words aped those of child survivor
accounts, and in a dark irony, genuine survivors felt
that his memoir expressed their own experience.
In various Holocaust education projects, the attention
paid to memory alongside history appears to chime with
progressive historical techniques that take into account
subjective testimony as well as traditional
documentation. But where that methodology stresses the
ultimately unknowable nature of the past, this emphasis
on testimony does precisely the opposite -- it seeks to
discover the absolute certainty of the past, embodied in
eyewitness accounts.
Eskin reveals, however, that on a personal level the
quest, as a Jew, to establish one's European family
history at first hand can be both compelling and
meaningful. The acknowledgement of his own desire to
trace an ancestral link to the great tragedy of the
twentieth century enables him to portray with sympathy
the ease with which so many people were deluded.
Intelligent, expertly written and gripping from start to
finish, this book addresses the problem of how to live
with the inherent uncertainties of identity, authenticity
and history.
write
to David Irving