'An
impossible but true story of the
Holocaust' Impossible?
Probably. True? The jury is out
Martin
Daly
>>>Two
earlier stories on this
scandal ![[]](../../std/dings/ballblue.gif)
1 . . .
2
A
highly acclaimed book on the
Holocaust may be a fraud and the
work of a Gentile
HOLOCAUST survivors sometimes have
difficulty believing in miracles but
for many victims of Nazi oppression
Binjamin Wilkomirski was one of
them.
He wrote a chilling account of
survival that few who came out of
extermination camps thought possible
and later won praise worldwide for his
work as wrenching memoir, created from
fragmented memories of a terrified
child.
Floris Kalman who runs a
Holocaust child survivor group in
Melbourne read his book and was
fascinated by the "very moving and
terrible" account of a child so
accustomed to murder, starvation and
terror that he considered it
normal.
Documentary makers, journalists,
psychologists and historians sought out
the author of a 155-page
Fragments:
Memories of a Wartime Childhood,
that ranked him among the towering
figures of Holocaust literature,
Elie Wiesel and Primo
Levi.
Translated into 12 languages, the
book was praised by The New York Times
for its "poetic visions". Neue
Züricher Zeitung referred to it as
"carrying the weight of an entire
century" and The Sunday Age described
it as an "impossible but true story of
the Holocaust".
The reason for such lavish praise
was that Wilkomirski, a well-known
classical musician in Switzerland, was
aged three or four when he was taken to
Majdanek extermination camp in Poland
and, without the protection of parents
in a camp where children that age were
killed almost on arrival, he survived
to tell the world of the horror through
a child's eyes.
Wilkomirski was hailed by exponents
of psychotherapy when it was revealed
the fragments of memory people told him
to forget, were carefully and painfully
pieced together to produce a unique
child's truth told often as would the
child, but with the powerful literary
expressiveness of the adult.
The book won the National Jewish
Book Award in the United States, the
Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in
Britain for nonfiction and the Prix
Memoire de la Shoah in France and was
placed on The New York Times list of
notable books for 1997.
Two
documentaries were made on the life
of the author, who also gave oral
evidence to Steven
Spielberg's Shoah Foundation
that is documenting survivors'
history worldwide. The book, The New
York Times noted, became the biggest
Swiss literary success since Heidi.
Wilkomirski travelled widely,
talking of his experiences as readers
were stunned by the simple but graphic
words of the Latvian Jewish child who
described witnessing his father's
murder in Riga by Latvian auxiliaries
and how his mother and brothers
disappeared in the Nazi genocide
against the Jews.
Now, there are strong claims
Wilkomirski's work is a fraud.
Increasing evidence appears to show
that he was not in an extermination
camp, he is not who he claims to be and
that he was not even born a Jew, but
one of what Professor Colin
Tatz, director of the
Centre for
Comparative Genocide Studies at
Macquarie University, describes as a
genre that appropriates other people's
histories: a genre, says Professor
Tatz, that Jews do not need when it
comes to the Holocaust.
The initial dilemma for some on an
issue that has become a raging
controversy was that a four-year-old
could not possibly remember events of
more than 50 years ago, particularly to
describe them as graphically as does
Wilkomirski on the death of his
father.
"...Suddenly he face clenches, he
turns away, he lifts his head high and
opens his mouth wide as if he's going
to scream out," Wilkomirski writes.
"...all I see is the line of his jaw
and his hat falling backward off his
head. No sound comes out of his mouth,
but a big stream of something black
shoots out of his neck as the transport
squashed him with a big crack against
the house."
There
are powerful accounts in the book of
bloodied rats crawling from bodies
in the camps, of a woman, possibly
his mother, giving him her last
scrap of hardened bread and of
babies who chewed their fingers to
the bone before dying - all
presented by Wilkomirski in the name
of a truth he says he had been told
to forget.
If Wilkomirski's history is false,
then the most acclaimed book on the
Holocaust in recent times presents a
story that did not happen, giving
Holocaust deniers a ready-made case to
support their groundless claims that
some events in the concentration and
extermination camps have been made
up.
There were concerns from the early
stages about Wilkomirski that should,
in retrospect, have signalled
resounding alarms. The suggestion is
that, as fact sells better than
fiction, the Wilkomirski work was too
good an opportunity to let slip,
despite the doubts.
Months before the German edition was
published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1995, a
Swiss newspaper journalist, Hanno
Helbling, told the publisher that
friends of Wilkomirski had said the
manuscript was fiction. The publisher
replied they were satisfied with its
authenticity.
The accolades rolled in. The book
was hailed as a masterpiece and
Wilkomirski was happy to talk about the
child survivors of the Holocaust who
had been forced to forget about what
happened to the degree some did not
believe it had happened at all.
But Swiss author Daniel
Ganzfried, the son of a Holocaust
survivor who had been commissioned to
write a profile of the author, noted in
tape recordings of Wilkomirski that the
author has claimed he had not been
adopted, when there was evidence to the
contrary. Then in an interview, the
author told him he had been
circumcised, while Wilkomirski's
ex-wife and girlfriend said that was
not the case.
"In one film, he claimed to have
lived in Switzerland only from 1948,
and he describes all these scenes after
the war," Ganzfried told The New York
Times. "Then I found in the local
school files of Zürich that he had
attended first grade in April 1947. I
found a picture of him in the summer of
1946 in the garden of his adoptive
parents from a photo book of his
relatives."
In an epilogue to some editions of
the book, the author says he spent his
childhood after the war in Switzerland.
He had been given a new name, Bruno
Doessekker, to help erase his past
and was adopted. His publisher is
quoted by various media saying that
only with psychotherapy and the passage
of time did Bruno Doessekker recover
the memories of his true self, the
extermination camp survivor, Binjamin
Wilkomirski.
The scenario could be acceptable in
the context of such memoir, if it were
true. Ganzfried says it is not. He says
Wilkomirski did not spend any of his
childhood in Eastern Europe but grew up
in Biel and Zurich, Switzerland, that
he was the son of an unmarried
Protestant mother, Yvonne
Grosjean, and that he was then
adopted by the middle-class Doessekker
family. In short, Ganzfried claims
Bruno Doessekker imagines himself to
have been a Riga Jew in the camp and
adopted the persona of a Binjamin
Wilkomirski, not the other way
around.
More doubts about the author's
claims come from his former lawyer,
Rolf Sandberg, who has asked for
verification of Wilkomirski's story by
the publisher before publication. "I
told them I don't doubt what his memory
had to say," Mr. Sandberg told The New
York Times. "But I had to leave it to
them what to make of this whole story.
I could only say I have these documents
and they prove he is the son of Ms.
Grosjean."
Wilkomirski has been elusive since
the story broke and his published
responses appear to be taken largely
from an afterword in the book that had
been inserted, reportedly at the
request of the publisher, to explain
apparent discrepancies.
But in a faxed response to questions
from the French daily Le Monde, the
author said that "in due time" he would
answer in detail and would present
documents to support his case. He
implied those who questioned his work
were "first generation" historians of
the Holocaust "for whom the children of
the Shoah had never been explicit
subjects for research".
Wilkomirski said a response now was
not possible because of his health. He
said his critic, Ganzfried, as the son
of a Holocaust survivor "has been
psychologically affected by a difficult
by a difficult childhood. I think he
needs ersatz (a substitute) for a
father that he can destroy and make
responsible for his distress."
The author described the controversy
as "tiresome" and said it had to be
seen in the context of a "painful
confrontation between historians and
witnesses of genocide" as the survivors
and witnesses of the Holocaust die.
"The
authenticity of the traces and
testimonies left by the victims are
regularly subject to dispute. In the
past the Anne Frank diary had
the same experience. Long and
regularly suspected to be a ... fake
by Otto, the father of Anne Frank,
this manuscript had to await long
and expensive expert evaluation for
it to be once more considered, in
1986, to be an autobiographical book
written between 1942 and 1944," he
told Le Monde.
In the afterword to his book,
Wilkomirski explains he grew up at a
time society did not want to listen, or
perhaps was incapable of listening to
children, and that he had been told
repeatedly that the fragments of memory
about his past did not happen. This was
done to make him "erase my past and
make me keep quiet".
But the inner voice persisted,
telling him he was someone else and
that he had, in fact, lived another,
terrible life. he contacted historians,
psychologists and survivors.
"Countless conversations with
specialists and historians have helped
me to clarify many previously
inexplicable shreds of memory, to
identify places and people, and to find
them again and to make a possible, more
or less logical chronology out of it",
writes Wilkomirski.
He says that after the war, he was
given "a new identity, another name,
another date and place of birth". His
birth certificate stating he was born
on 12 February 1941. "has nothing to do
with either the history of this century
or my personal history. I have now
taken legal steps to have this imposed
identity annulled," he writes.
There is considerable support for
psychotherapy in helping people recall
incidents buried in the deepest reaches
of the mind, as Wilkomirski claims
happened in his case. But many camp
survivors doubt his story because they
have never heard of a child so young
surviving an extermination camp when it
was not protected by parents.
Wilkomirski claims he was protected by
women in the camp. His book says he was
in two camps and says he was part of a
medical experiment. He does not name
the second camp in the book but media
reports say it was Auschwitz.
An
estimated 1.5 million Jewish
children were murdered in the
Holocaust. Children even walked out
of Auschwitz, but they had been kept
alive for medical experiments.
Otherwise, survival among children
was rare and survival among very
young children without protection
from parents or others in an
extermination is, according to
Floris Kalman, "a miracle ... one in
1.5 million".
Sam Goodchild, of Caulfield,
who survived Majdanek, Auschwitz and
Buchenwald, has not read Wilkomirski's
book but he doubts it is true.
Goodchild was 17 when sent to the
camps. He does not recall a barrack for
children at Majdanek. "In Auschwitz you
had a chance if you could work. In
Majdanek, you did not have a chance.
You got beaten to death," he says.
There is a conviction among those
who have met or know Wilkomirski that
he believes what he has written but
that he is reliving the accounts of
others and, through psychotherapy, he
has been led to believe his imaginings
are true. Or perhaps he is suffering
Munchausen syndrome, where a person
takes on a whole false identity.
"It (Munchausen) is very rare and
does not discredit the type of person
or experience that is portrayed, that
is why they are so believable," says
Dr. Paul Vincent, from the
department of adult psychiatry at
Monash Medical Centre and expert in
childhood trauma.
Dr. Vincent, a child
survivor and president of Child
Survivors of the Holocaust, reviewed
Wilkomirski's book for the Holocaust
Centre's magazine and concluded:
"Wilkomirski shows us how to listen to
a child traumatised to extremes... It
is worth reading this book."
