The story of the literary hoax perpetrated by Binjamin Wilkomirski has been widely rehearsed. In 1995, he published a memoir, Fragments, telling of the relentless cruelty he suffered as a child survivor of the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. He described being smuggled into a Swiss orphanage and eventually adopted by a bourgeois Swiss family who conspired, in league with the rest of Swiss society, to erase his Jewish past and suppress his memories of the camps. But Wilkomirski is haunted by inchoate memories and only when he enters therapy, in his fifties, and then begins to visit concentration camps as a tourist, is he able to reconstruct them in the form they appear in Fragments.
The book was celebrated by critics as a classic of Holocaust literature, and won prizes all over the world. Three years after its publication, a Swiss journalist wrote an article unmasking him as a fake. He was not Jewish, nor had he been born in Latvia. He was the child of a poor Swiss woman who abandoned him in an orphanage; he was later adopted by the Zurich family whom he accused of denying him his true identity. Other investigations followed. In October 1999, his book was withdrawn by the German publishers who had brought it to the world's attention.
Blake Eskin, an American journalist, discovered Fragments when it was published in the US in 1997. He showed it to his mother, whose family were Wilkomirskis from Riga, Latvia. She wrote to Wilkomirski. When the now celebrated author visited the US on a tour, he went to meet the extended family, most of whom, Eskin writes, "craved authenticity".
Eskin describes Wilkomirski arriving at the family gathering, a strikingly thin and frail figure in a multicoloured dress-shirt. His tentative perusal of the family photographs was a taste of how he had established a false identity - through insinuating himself into other people's lives and memories. When blood connections appear to fail, when the facts don't add up, when sensible people such as Eskin's grandmother's cousin are unconvinced, Wilkomirski dismisses suspicion by saying that human feeling is what matters most. Repeatedly, it is the cultivation of bogus emotion and feeling that nourishes his fantasy.
Eskin describes how Wilkomirski established a strong relationship with a woman called Lauren Grabowski, a member of a Holocaust child survivor group in Los Angeles, on the basis that they had both been at Auschwitz. Lauren Grabowski turns out to be another impostor who, a few years earlier, had published an equally bogus account of her experience of satanic ritual abuse.
Wilkomirski was propelled to stardom by the confessional culture of the 1990s. What is most striking about Eskin's story is the contrast between the nature of his own and his family's desire to fill in gaps in the past and the solipsistic hysteria of those who attach themselves to Wilkomirski. One American professor suggests that to question Wilkomirski's memory is equivalent to committing murder. But, for Eskin, the more he hears of the man's story, the more he begins to "think more and feel less". A Life in Pieces is a triumph of the necessity of thinking and feeling at the same time.
This book is not the first lengthy account in English of the Wilkomirski affair: Elena Lappin in Granta and Philip Gourevitch in the New Yorker have already described his downfall. The cumulative effect of reading about him is depressing. Gourevitch put it well when he described Wilkomirski's rise to fame as "an abdication of sense in favour of sensation". He offers no defence for himself, ingenious or otherwise. Perhaps his motivation lies in the therapy from which he originally began to construct the memories. But even unpicking his attempted fraud leaves no sense of satisfaction.
"After years of investigating and pondering the author of Fragments, I know little about him," Eskin concludes. "Our interest has sustained him for too long and it is time to put him to rest."
Maurice Walsh works for the BBC
