The Holocaust: Survival Stories
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Binjamin Wilkomirski
A Holocaust fraud
(August 1) — A post-modern parable about the pliable nature of historical truth and the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust is manipulated.
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Survivor
YOU NEVER SEE THE SCARS. But she talks about them once in a while and you see them in your mind’s eye — smooth white burn marks on her flesh, old as the Holocaust.
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Wilkomirski award withdrawn
JUDGES of a leading Jewish literary award have withdrawn a non-fiction prize from an author whose work has been exposed as fiction.
Holocaust Seekers
Online, a Tangled Web
When Jen Rosenberg first started searching for information about the Holocaust on the World Wide Web, she found a lot of dubious and intentionally misleading pages. “You were more likely to come up with a denier or revisionist web site,” she says, which “looked more professional sometimes.”
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The Great Pretenders
In April 1998, the cover of The Jewish Journal featured the person who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski. Naomi Pfefferman (“Memories of a Holocaust Childhood,” April 24, 1998) compared his writing — his one and only book, called “Fragments” — to that of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. During an emotionally filled performance at a Beverly Boulevard synagogue, Wilkomirski was accompanied by a lady who called herself Laura Grabowski. Both claimed to be soul mates who, at long last, were reunited survivors of Dr. Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz.
Fragments of a fraud
Christopher Hope called it “achingly beautiful”; the New York Times said it was written “with a poet’s vision; a child’s state of grace”; Anne Karpf in this paper described it as “one of the great works about the Holocaust”; all were agreed it was a masterpiece. There is just one problem — Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir of surviving as a Jewish child alone in the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz was a fabrication, invented from beginning to end, one of the great hoaxes in publishing history.
The Holocaust’s Legacies
Philip Gourevitch’s article on Binjamin Wilkomirski and his memoir “Fragments” (“The Memory Thief,” June 14th) reveals much about the Holocaust industry. In 1996, Suhrkamp, also Wilkomirski’s publisher, published a German translation of my account of a wartime childhood in Poland. It is entitled “Dobryd” — an anagram of the name of the real town where the action takes place. I chose to write it as fiction, because, like Aharon Appelfeld, I did not trust the factual accuracy of my recollections. At the time of publication, it was suggested to me that the book would sell much better if it was reclassified as nonfiction, but I did not accept the suggestion. Though the book has received excellent critical notices, it has never enjoyed the attention given to “Fragments.”
Invented ‘Memories’ Praised
A Holocaust Memoir in Doubt
By Doreen Carvajal
Until Binjamin Wilkomirski’s truth came into conflict with his own legal identity, the slim memoir of his Jewish childhood in the concentration camps of Poland was hailed as a “small masterpiece,” a searing sketch of death and horror — rats rummaging among corpses, starving babies sucking fingers to the bone, a dying mother’s last glimpse of her son.
Binjamin Wilkomirski, the fake ‘survivor’
Fictional ‘survivor’ testimony