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1995 faux memoir by Binjamin Wilkomirski

Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a 1995 book, whose author used the pseudonym Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be a memoir of the Holocaust. It was debunked by Swiss journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried [de] in August 1998. The subsequent disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications sparked heated debate in the German and English speaking world. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. Swiss historian and anti Semitism expert Stefan Maechler later wrote, "Once the professed interrelationship between the first person narrator, the death camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch."

Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose real name is Bruno Dössekker (born Bruno Grosjean; 12 February 1941 in Biel/Bienne), is a musician and writer who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor.

In 1995, Wilkomirski, a professional clarinettist and instrument maker living in the German speaking part of Switzerland, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France, and the Jewish Quarterly literary prize in Britain. The book sold well, but in contradiction to common belief it was not a bestseller. Wilkomirski was invited to participate in radio and television programs as a witness and expert, and was interviewed and videotaped by reputable archives. In his oral statements Wilkomirski elaborated on many aspects which remained unclear or unexplained. For example, he provided the names of the concentration camps in which he claimed to have been interned (Majdanek and Auschwitz), and added that he had been the victim of unbearable medical experiments.

In August 1998, a Swiss journalist and writer named Daniel Ganzfried [de] questioned the veracity of Fragments in an article published in the Swiss newsweekly Weltwoche. Ganzfried argued that Wilkomirski knew the concentration camps "only as a tourist", and that, far from being born in Latvia, he was actually born Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child of an unmarried mother named Yvonne Grosjean from Biel in Switzerland. The boy had been sent to an orphanage in Adelboden, Switzerland, from which he was taken in by the Dössekkers, a wealthy and childless couple in Zürich who finally adopted him. Wilkomirski had become a cause célèbre in the English speaking world, appearing on 60 Minutes and the BBC and in Granta and The New Yorker. Maechler's first report was published in German in March 2000; the English edition appeared one year later and included the original English translation of Fragments which had been withdrawn by the publisher after Maechler's report. Subsequently, the historian published two essays with additional findings and analysis, while Ganzfried (2002) published his own controversial version of the case. Journalist Blake Eskin covered the affair. Prior to the exposure, Eskin wrote and told the story of Wilkomirski's trip to the US to become reunited with people he claimed to be distant family, of which Eskin was a part. This story was aired in act two of This American Life episode 82, "Haunted". The writer Elena Lappin published an extensive report in May 1999. She had become acquainted with Wilkomirski two years before, when the Jewish Quarterly awarded him its prize for nonfiction. At the time, she was editor of that English magazine. In the course of her research, she identified a number of contradictions in Wilkomirski's story and came to believe that Fragments was fiction. (Lappin 1999)

In addition, she reported that Wilkomirski's uncle, Max Grosjean, said that as children he and his sister Yvonne (Wilkomirski's biological mother) had been Verdingkinder (or "earning children") — in other words, that they had been part of the old Swiss institution of orphaned children working for families, with overtones of child slavery. Eskin's interest in Wilkomirski had its origins in genealogy: his family had ancestors in Riga and, initially, they believed that the author of Fragments could perhaps be a long lost relative. In the same year (2002) the public prosecutor of the canton of Zürich announced that she found no evidence of criminal fraud. She added that a DNA test she had ordered had confirmed that Wilkomirski and Grosjean were the same person.

The disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications altered the status of his book. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. "Once the professed interrelationship between the first person narrator, the death camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch" (Maechler, 2000, p. 281). But for a few scholars, even as a pseudomemoir, the merits of the work still remain. "Those merits reside in a ferocious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of indelible images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child's voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world, during the war and thereafter" (Zeitlin, 2003, p. 177, see also Suleiman, 2006, p. 170). The Wilkomirski case was heatedly debated in Germany and Switzerland as a textbook example of the contemporary treatment of the Holocaust and of the perils of using it for one's own causes. However, the affair transcends the specific context of the Holocaust (see e. g. Chambers, 2002; Gabriel, 2004; Langer, 2006; Maechler, 2001b; Oels, 2004; Suleiman, 2006; Wickman, 2007). Wilkomirski's case raises questions about the literary genre of autobiography, the aesthetics of a literary work's reception, oral history, witness testimony, memory research, trauma therapies, and the like. The case is discussed in great detail by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson as an interesting case of self inflicted false memories (Tavris and Aronson, 2007, pp. 82ff.)

Elena Lappin: 'The Man with Two Heads,' Granta 66 (1999), pp. 7–65; published in abridged form as:

Timothy Neale (2010): ". . the credentials that would rescue me': Trauma and the Fraudulent Survivor". In: Holocaust & Genocide Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 431–48