A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski

by Blake Eskin

A searing account of the rise and fall of the author of Fragments , told by a descendant of the Wilkomirskis of Riga. In 1997, Binjamin Wilkomirski arrived in New York to read from his prize-winning book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood , his memoir of an early childhood lost to the concentration camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz, and to raise money for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. This orphaned survivor also came as the guest of honor to the family reunion of the Wilburs (once Wilkomirskis). The Wilburs hoped to trace the unrecorded link between the Wilkomirskis of Riga in Latvia and the name that Binjamin remembered. The Wilburs and the media embraced Binjamin as a humanitarian whose eloquent story typified that of many child survivors.

One year later, however, Binjamin was publicly accused of being a gentile imposter: on August 27, 1998, a German novelist named Daniel Ganzfried announced to the world that he had uncovered documentary evidence proving that Fragments was an elaborate fiction. Yet Binjamin still insisted his wartime memories carried more weight than the documents against him, proclaiming, "Nobody has to believe me." Those who continued to believe Binjamin included child survivors, psychotherapists, and his publishers.

Who was Binjamin Wilkomirski? Why would someone want to be him? And why would so many of us want to believe him? Wilbur family member Blake Eskin recounts the dispute over Binjamin's authenticity through reportage, interviews with Binjamin's acquaintances, and a visit to Riga in search of actual Wilkomirski relatives. In his absorbing narrative Eskin records the reactions of the media, the child-survivor community, and the Wilburs themselves to reveal larger disagreements over the reliability of memory, the value of testimony, and the individual's relationship to history.

Part biography, part mystery, and part memoir, Eskin's A Life in Pieces is an important and lasting contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. 7 b/w photographs

Genres: Nonfiction, Holocaust

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Binjamin Wilkomirski"'s Holocaust "memoir" when it came out in English and loved it. I was just a college kid and I felt like a prize dupe when I found out it was a fraud. I also still felt somehow sympathetic to the author, who seemed like a tormented soul. When I happened upon this book in the library, I was very interested.

What makes Blake Eskin the perfect writer to tell this story is that he first met "Binjamin Wilkomirski" because his mother believed they might be distant cousins, as she genuinely had Wilkomirskis in her family tree, and so she invited him to come meet the whole family. So Eskin got to meet "Wilkomirski" untainted by controversy or doubt, although he still approached the meeting as a journalist.

I ended up feeling more angry toward "Wilkomirski" than I had originally, once I read about all the trusting people who were taken in by him. So many people lost family members in the Holocaust and are yearning to believe that someone might be their missing person or a piece of the puzzle that can help heal the wound. There was a man who genuinely believed "Wilkomirski" was his son even though it didn't really make any sense, there were sweet people like the author's mother who invited him into the family, there were Holocaust survivors who welcomed him into their community and trusted him, and the whole scandal just created fodder for creepy Holocaust deniers. I had forgotten the compelling evidence that proved "Binjamin Wilkomirski" was a fraud (he was uncircumcised, had accepted an inheritance from his Swiss birth mother, and there was a paper trail and witnesses going all the way back to his birth as a Swiss Christian, and the other child survivor who corroborated his story turned out also to be a fraud.) As a grown adult, I feel more comfortable feeling really angry and sympathetic at the same time and I understand that the villains are always also suffering.

If it wasn't so depressing, you could make a comedy about the two hoaxes unknowingly backing each other up. There was so much that was depressing about the story, but what really pulled it all together and made it uplifting was the author and his mother and their story of discovering family roots. His mother was great. I felt like he was too close to her to realize how great she was. He should write a book about her because I bet there's a lot of terrific material. In the beginning of the book, the author says that his family had no personal sense of loss from the Holocaust because they left Europe in the 1920's so it seemed like everyone had emigrated in time. I was totally stunned. I thought, wow, what an unbelievably lucky family; I've never met a Jew like that but I guess it's possible. Of course it turns out that this is not actually true and there had been much the family didn't want to dwell on. The author learns about the relatives who were left behind who were "taken by Hitler." The author and his mother ended up going to Riga, Latvia and looking up old records and visiting the family's old home, and having his own personal odyssey on his relationship to the Holocaust. This part was super interesting and made me want to go back to the old country and see the places my family came from and see if there are records on all the relatives who were "taken by Hitler," but I've been going back and forth on this idea my whole life.

What I didn't like about the book was the portrayal of Raul Hilberg. He's depicted as a meanie who doesn't care about Holocaust memoirs and thinks they're worthless. I think it would be more accurate to say that they weren't relevant to Hilberg's obsessive, lifelong quest to document the destruction of the European Jewry using only the kind of sources that can't be dismissed by deniers. ("There is, ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a [historical] record.") Without Raul Hilberg, there would be no studying the Holocaust at all--essentially he invented this field. I'm not saying he sounds like a warm, fuzzy guy but I was really surprised at the tone taken in describing him. It was striking that he was never identified in the book as a Holocaust survivor. I was also ticked off at Ellen Bass and Laura Davis' amazing book The Courage To Heal being linked with a fraudulent memoir and the fake Satanic Panic scandals of the '80s. That's like saying the NAACP is to blame for Rachel Dolezal. I also think the description of how Freud turned his back on his Seduction theory (ie the existence of sexual abuse) was lazy and essentially upside down.

In one section, the author meets with someone from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. who says that the more survivors die, the more "kitschy" the response to the Holocaust is "and it's going to get stranger." I thought that was a pretty profound remark now that this book itself is twenty years old. In the book, there's a big divide between adult survivors and child survivors, and the child survivors feel they aren't taken seriously. Now most survivors who are still alive are de facto child survivors. "Survivor" also used to mean lived through the death camps and maybe hidden children counted too. Now there's more attention paid to "indirect" survivors--people who had to flee or whose families were killed. I think partly this is a very laudable effort to break down the hierarchy of suffering, and based on a better understanding of how trauma affects people. I think a little bit it also comes from the fear of "running out" of survivors, and the very realistic fear that people won't take the Holocaust seriously anymore if they can't put a living human face on it. So maybe this is why Hilberg is not designated as a survivor in this book, because all that happened to him was he was evicted from his home in Austria at gunpoint, his father was arrested, they had to flee, and all the people left behind were killed. This probably was not enough to make you a survivor when this book was written in 2002.

With the rise of easy DNA testing, I think it would be much harder for a hoax like this to be perpetrated today. All in all, this was a super interesting and thought-provoking read, and even though it's been a long time since this book came out, I hope to read more from this author (as long as he's not mansplaining anything about sexual abuse to me.)

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last year, I stumbled across an online article about fake memoirs, from Lauren Stratford’s sensationalist nonsense ‘Satan’s Underground’ to Herman Rosenblat’s ‘Angel at the Fence’, which was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and almost became a Hollywood movie. The article singled out Binjamin Wilkomirski’s ‘Fragments’ as one of the more interesting examples, and mentioned Blake Eskin’s book on the unmasking of Wilkomirski. I tracked down a respectably-priced second-hand copy of the Eskin book, then realised I’d probably need to read Wilkomirski’s literary con job first to get the most out of it.

Knowing it for a fake memoir, I expected to read ‘Fragments’ through gritted teeth. I emerged from it conflicted. I wish Wilkomirski had published it as a novel so I could rave about his imaginative sympathy, the brilliant realisation of a child’s perceptions, and his handling of incredibly dark set pieces. As it is, the dude tried to pass it off as autobiography and that’s where things get extremely problematic, not least because the debunking of a memoir supposedly by a concentration camp survivor gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers.

Reading ‘A Life in Pieces’ - a superbly-written blend of family history, reportage and literary detective work - I found that I wasn’t the only conflicted reader of ‘Fragments’. Even as the story of Wilkomirski’s fraudulence broke, any number of individuals and societies (including “children without identity” groups) scrabbled to find a rationale that allowed them to retain the agency ‘Fragments’ had given them in the face of overwhelming proof that its author had never been in the camps. Even Stefan Maechler, hired by Wilkomirski’s publishers to prepare a report on his lineage, concludes “Perhaps he did not believe his own story, but he did believe his own telling of it”, an application of semantics that I find mind-boggling.

The story gets sadder as Eskin’s book draws towards its close. The final nail in the coffin of Wilkomirski’s credibility is his association with Laura Grabowski, whom he claims to have recognised from the camps; Laura Grabowski, who is subsequently revealed as American-born Laurel Willson, a.k.a. Lauren Stratford, author of the histrionic and swiftly discredited Satanic abuse memoir ‘Satan’s Underground’.

Eskin’s entry point into Wilkomirski’s story is the possibility of a family connection. Early in the narrative, Wilkomirski meets Eskin’s family who are keen to adopt him as a lost cousin. Sympathetic to Wilkomirski initially, Eskin commences his own investigation, freely admitting that he wished he could have found a single verifiable fact to bear out Wilkomirski’s claims. Needless to say, he doesn’t. It’s the dynamic between Eskin’s idealism and his professional commitment to factual reporting (he’s a journalist) that gives ‘A Life in Pieces’ its potency.

[Jennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is excellent and the story compelling, and I don't have any huge criticisms, so I wavered between three and four stars. I had to go with three in the end, though, because the narrative arc doesn't end in a terribly satisfying way. That's hardly Eskin's fault, of course--he was writing about events as they were actually happening, and said events kind of sputtered to a close rather than ending with a bang--but it is what it is. I will say, though, that I kind of wish I'd read this before I read Stephan Maechler's book and the Granta article about Wilkomirski. Eskin provided his readers with a really well done slow reveal of some of the story's surprises, but I of course had already read all of those surprises elsewhere.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting examination of the Holocaust, child memories, and false identity. The subject of the book write a "memoir" that is almost certainly false, but he might believe it's true because it's written based on fragments of memory from early childhood - a time when he actually was shuffled between foster homes. But, as an adult he presents it as being shuffled between concentrations camps during the Holocaust. A very strange and sad story. If he's not a crook doing it on purpose, then he's a very troubled man searching desperately for a place to belong.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: I could not put this book down! An excellent documentation of the gentile who posed as a holocaust surviver and wrote a fake memoir entitled "Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood". Other imposters are documented in the book also. The hoax was only discovered after he won awards and recognition from Jewish organizations. Shows how gullible people are.

The only thing I would have wanted is an index. In fact, I might go thru and make my own index.

[Marianne Kwiatkowski-Yee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I believe that Eskin treated a sensitive subject with kid gloves, and that is good. However, his attempts to build intrigue and a bit of suspense, fell flat with me. The book was slow-moving, and hashed and re-hashed the same ideas over and over again. I get it. It's a very sad story about a poor guy with false memories. It did, however, make me want to read Fragments, by "Binjamin Wilkomirski."

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book for anyone interested in the representation of the Holocaust in literature and ethical concerns within the survivor community.

Fluently written, with a gentle touch that is rare in books about such emotive issues, this book would have got five starts but was let down by a careless proofreader.