Stefan Mächler - Wilkomirski the Victim: Individual Remembering as Social Interaction and Public...

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Wilkomirski the Victim

Individual Remembering as Social Interactionand Public Event*

STEFAN MAECHLER

I wanted to know everything. I wanted to absorb every detail and understand every connection. I hoped I would fi nd answers for the pictures that came from my broken childhood memory some nights to stop me going to sleep or to give me terrifying nightmares. I wanted to know what other people had gone through back then. I wanted to compare it with my own earliest memories that I carried around inside me. I wanted to subject them to intelligent reason, and arrange them in a pattern that made sense. But the longer I spent at it, the more I learned and absorbed empirically, the more elusive the answer—in the sense of what actually happened—became. It made me despair.

Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments1

“The wandering Jew, that’s me; the starving prisoner in striped pajamas, that’s me; the little kid from Warsaw who faced the German machine guns, with a face of unbelievable seriousness and dignity, that’s me once more; me, tortured by the Inquisition; me, the bloodied rabbi after a pogrom; me, Dreyfus on Devil’s Island...” For the longest time, this is what Jewish identity meant in my eyes, and this, after years of bluster, is the meaning it has lost.

Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew2

Le Juif imaginaire is the title of a book by Alain Finkielkraut published two decades ago. In it the French philosopher, born in 1949 to Jewish

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parents of East European origin, discusses self-critically the temptation of a Jewish biography:

The Judaism I had received was the most beautiful present a post-genocidal child could imagine. I inherited a suffering to which I had not been subjected, for without having to endure oppression, the identity of the victim was mine. I could savor an exceptional destiny while remaining completely at ease. Without exposure to real danger, I had heroic stature: to be a Jew was enough to escape the anonymity of an identity indistinguishable from others and the dullness of an uneventful life. I was not immune to depression, of course, but I possessed a considerable advantage over the other chil-dren of my generation: the power to dramatize my biography.3

These advantages—although admittedly not appropriate in the same way and with totally different prerequisites—suited the Swiss Bruno Gros-jean who became famous as Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Obviously the metaphors of a Jewish existence could also serve as a biographical surrogate for a non-Jew who suffered from not being able to trace his past. The power and seduction of culturally spread images will be the focus of my article. I will describe how, over the course of his life, Wilkomirski acquired his memories and ultimately came to publish his book. I will examine how social interactions and social context play a fundamental role in his invented narrative and how he used the mytho-logical power of the Holocaust to create a convincing autobiography.

FROM GROSJEAN TO WILKOMIRSKI

The boy who would one day write his story, because he had none, was born to an unmarried factory worker in the Swiss town of Biel in February 1941.4 His mother, Yvonne Grosjean, had lain in hospital for almost half a year before the birth, after being knocked off her bicycle by a motorist and left severely injured. When she emerged from her prolonged coma in hospital, the doctors told her that she was pregnant. Her younger lover abandoned her without ever seeing the baby, who was


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named Bruno. Today he claims that his parents forced this course of action on him to spare themselves the shame of having an illegitimate grandchild. In accordance with the law at the time, the unmarried mother was denied parental guardianship and her child became a ward of state. As a result of the accident Yvonne Grosjean was physically handi-capped and psychologically disturbed. She received no compensation, however, since the police and law courts handled the culprit, a promi-nent factory owner, with kid gloves. She moved from one rented room to another, trying to support herself and the child on the pittance she earned from work done from home. Finally, she was forced to give Bruno, still barely two years old, into care. After two foster homes, he was placed with the Aeberhard family in the neighboring village of Nidau. His foster mother was mentally disturbed, which made Bruno’s life unbearable for almost a year until, in February 1945, the family informed the legal guardian that they could no longer keep the child. While the biological mother was fi ghting for her life in hospital, after almost hemorrhaging to death due to a self-induced abortion, the legal guardian sent her son to a children’s home in the Bernese Oberland. The guardian, always skeptical of the young woman’s life style and her ability to rear her child, soon urged her to put the child up for adoption. She fi nally gave in to the pressure—including the threat of being certi-fi ed as incompetent. Her son, whom she would never see again, was so bewildered meanwhile that he identifi ed a strange woman visitor to the children’s home as his mother. In October 1945 Bruno Grosjean was sent to Zurich to live with Kurt and Martha Dössekker, a childless couple, both from respectable, established families, wealthy owners of a large villa in the best area of town, the Zurichberg; the man had a fl ourishing doctor’s practice. Bruno’s schoolfriends of the time recall that, even as early as primary school, his stories were not always reliable.5 He did not actually lie so much as distort reality, relating strange tales—of scorpions or caves, for example—in his desire to impress others. He once dedicated a poem to his girlfriend’s mother, whom he respected, claiming to have written it himself, whereas it was really by Bertolt Brecht. Even his epileptic attacks, which aroused the concern of his fellow pupils at secondary school, were probably simulated as well. He was already telling people that he was a child refugee from the Baltics. However, he still celebrated

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his birthday on the date registered in the offi cial papers of Bruno Gros-jean from Biel; later he would assert that he did not even know the exact year of his birth. During his Confi rmation period and adolescence, he was extremely interested in Christianity and painted religious pictures—saints, Madon-nas, Jesus—but in his mid-twenties he claimed for the fi rst time that he was a Jew. He wore a chain with the Star of David in public, but put on the more conspicuous yarmulke only in his Zurich apartment and in Vienna, where he studied music for a time. At the end of the 1960s he assured people that he came from a family of Polish musicians and made several trips to Poland, among them to Kraków and Auschwitz. From one trip in 1972 he returned, now aged 31, claiming to have discovered traces of his family. His name was Wilkomirski and his mother and fi ve brothers had perished in a concentration camp.6 Before reaching the age of fi fty he told people who knew him that he himself had been in a concentration camp, that he had met his mother there as she lay dying but had not been allowed to speak to her. She had given him an apple as a parting gift and this was his only memory of her. He was to retain this episode—replacing the apple with a piece of bread—as a leitmotiv, always expressing his regret that he had looked at his mother too fl eet-ingly to recall her face today.7 Towards the end of 1980 he gave an Israeli friend the impression that he could speak Yiddish; once he was supposed to have muttered words in this language in the delirium following an operation. In the spring of 1981 he still appeared to have no knowledge of Jewish customs, but soon afterwards he displayed his Jewishness to younger acquaintances, explaining Jewish rituals to them and inviting them to a meal on the Sabbath. The same year he began to identify with the Israeli cause. He maintained that he was a Mossad agent, infi ltrating Egypt on a surfboard on a spying mission and going to war against the Palestin-ians. The training as a pilot which he genuinely completed was given an adventurous twist when he recounted how he had taken off from an Israeli airforce base or done a nose-dive to avoid a SAM 2 rocket. He felt so threatened and hunted in his Zurich apartment that he installed a surveillance camera at the entrance.8 In his identifi cation with Israel, he later felt called on to point out to secondary school students the “awful, striking similarity” between the sacred writings of Islam and


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the polemic of National Socialism. The Koran sees Jews as “second-class human beings” like the “‘Untermensch’ of the National Socialists.” Islam demands the “physical annihilation of the Jews” as the “pre-requisite for the salvation of the world.” PLO leader Arafat, nephew of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini, carries on the family tradition and aims to destroy the Jews. In general, Wilkomirski came to believe that Muslims, acting “in place of conquered Nazi Germany and out of revenge for the ‘Jewish victory over the Nazis,’ are continuing the war against the Jews in their own countries and against Israel.”9

The early 1980s were a turbulent time for Bruno Dössekker, as he offi cially still called himself. He left his wife, fell in love with a clari-net pupil, who did not return his feelings, his biological mother died, followed a few years later by his adoptive parents. To make matters worse, he suffered a series of severe, although not life-threatening, illnesses. He implied that he had cancer and the people around him saw him as terminally ill, with only days to live. However, instead, his biologi-cal mother died, without mentioning him in her will. Wilkomirski reacted secretively and explained that Yvonne Grosjean was the woman who had brought him to Switzerland from Kraków after the war.10 Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from contesting the will, on the grounds that he was her biological son, in order to inherit.11

In 1983, two students, Fernando and Rolando Colla, planned to make a documentary fi lm about him. They gave their feature the title “Binjamin,” the name he now used. They wrote that their protagonist had retained only a vague knowledge of where he came from, but that he had probably been born in German-occupied territory in 1940–1941, which at least approximated the year of Bruno Grosjean’s birth. Accord-ing to them, Binjamin had survived a subcamp of Majdanek and had been in a Kraków orphanage before arriving in Switzerland. The fi lm was never made, thus preventing Dössekker’s fi rst public appearance as the concentration camp survivor Binjamin. Probably only a few years after the failure of this fi lm project, he paid a visit to the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot in Israel, looking for information about the Wilkomirskis. There he told his story to Sarah Schner, a museum employee. He traced his earliest memories back to a farmhouse in Zamość. He recalled the names of two brothers, Motti and Daniel (the second name was later

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deleted from his stories). In 1943 he had been deported from the farm to Majdanek, from where he had been removed in the spring of 1944.

I remember that children and adults were loaded onto about 30 transport trucks out of Majdanek. The children were driven to the Pruszkow transit camp. Most of the children’s transports went to the Konstantinuw Nowi-Locki camp. I no longer know which of the two camps I was in. I have a gap in my memory. After that, on 22 May 1945, at the end of the war, I was in Birkenau. From there I went to Kraków with a group of women, but I can’t remember any names from Kraków. It seems I was moved from place to place. I stayed in Kraków until early 1948. In February 1948 I came to Switzerland. Frau Grosz put me on a train. I arrived in Basle and stayed there unaccompanied.

He fi rst went to a children’s home and then was taken into foster care by the Dössekkers, a Swiss family.12 By his own account Wilkomirski was three or four years old during his time in Zamość and Majdanek. He himself was probably struck by how incredibly detailed these memories were for that age. In any case, he subsequently mentioned neither the number of transports, the names of the camps Pruszkow and Kontan-tinuw Nowi-Locki, nor most of the dates. Instead, he was able to recall several people from Kraków, whose names he did not know initially and, on visiting the town, to recognize many places.13 In this account Wilkomirski claimed for the fi rst time that he had been in Birkenau (later he was to forget his internment in this death camp, only to redis-cover it in the 1990s with evident reluctance and in a dramatically staged public appearance).14 His story thus now contained most of the essential elements of the book, which he published in 1995. However, something was still missing, for he stated at the Museum that he remembered noth-ing prior to his stay in Zamość, namely his memories of Riga. These added episodes make it necessary for him to give up Bruno Grosjean’s birth year and to predate it to 1938 or 1939. Before it can be published, his story must take shape in writing. The psychotherapist he had been seeing since autumn 1992 gave him the impetus for this.15 However, Wilkomirski did not wait for his book to appear before going public. In November 1994 Channel 1 of Israeli television broadcast a documentary


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fi lm called Wanda’s List, about child survivors who were trying to trace their origins. One of those featured was Wilkomirski, who now made his debut among actual survivors. Wilkomirski had become a public witness. Before publication with the illustrious publisher Suhrkamp, which would herald his triumphal debut, Wilkomirski had to fend off an unex-pected threat. His book had already gone to press when Hanno Helbling, former head of the literature section of the prestigious Neue Zürcher Zeitung, wrote to the publishers, warning them that they were about to pass off what was a fi ctitious biography as the authentic story of a Holocaust survivor. Although Helbling did not mention Wilkomirski by name, his letter testifi ed to fi rst-hand knowledge, which he had, in fact, received from musicians who knew the clarinetist Bruno Dössekker personally.16 Thomas Sparr, editor of the Jüdischer Verlag of Suhrkamp, and Eva Koralnik, who had submitted the book as Wilkomirski’s agent, both demanded that the author produce proof to refute these charges. He used a double strategy to defend himself. One concerned the newly revealed fact that his offi cial papers were issued in the name of the Swiss Bruno Grosjean. He resolved the contradiction with his East European concentration camp biography by claiming that he had been swapped with Bruno.17 Wilkomirski’s second strategy consisted in bolstering his story with the statements of third parties. He called on several alleged experts to confi rm his account. The fact that most of them belonged to Wilkomirski’s own circle and were by no means unbiased appeared not to infl uence editor Sparr and literary agent Koralnik. The impression is that both underestimated the serious implications of publishing a Shoah autobiography of questionable authenticity and that they were far more concerned with evidence in Wilkomirski’s favor than against him. At the time the Nazis perpetrated their mass crimes, the reports had appeared so monstrous that people had refused to believe them or had printed them with strong reservations. Over fi fty years later, constant discussion and publication of the subject matter had become so commonplace that, despite the rumors, people were not willing to see that this story was questionable and needed critical investigation. The publishers decided to bring out the book with an afterword appended by the author, in which he acknowledged the contradiction between his memories and his offi -

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cially documented identity, but in a way that would not cause anyone to become suspicious.18

The book was released by Suhrkamp in August 1995, followed by translations into nine other languages with similarly respected publish-ers. The critics unanimously acclaimed the slim work—especially in the English-speaking countries—and compared the author to Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Anne Frank. Wilkomirski was invited to participate in radio and television programs as a witness and expert, he addressed school classes and universities, gave long video interviews to the most reputable archives and received numerous awards. The unknown Zurich clarinet teacher had become a world-renowned victim of Nazi crimes, a spokesman for Shoah survivors, an expert on the hitherto neglected topic of child survivors—a media star.19 This made the public shock all the greater when the Swiss author Daniel Ganzfried published two articles in the summer of 1998, in which he claimed that Wilkomirski knew concentration camps only as a tourist and that, far from being born in Riga, he came from Biel in Switzer-land. Moreover, he and a certain Bruno Grosjean were one and the same person.20 Although these revelations were largely new for the readers, Suhrkamp’s editor Sparr countered by asserting, “Ganzfried says noth-ing that we did not already know. It is included in the afterword.” The author was later to use this assertion as proof that the publishers had brought out the book fully aware that it was fi ction. Suhrkamp’s principal witness was the Israeli Lea Balint, who had established an archive for children without identity in the Ghetto Fighters’ House. She was one of Wilkomirski’s acquaintances who had already spoken up in his defense after Helbling’s warning. In a press release the publishers presented her as having a Ph.D. in history and as an employee of Yad Vashem, when in fact she had neither an academic degree nor a position working for the distinguished memorial museum in Jerusalem. Nor do any of the other arguments later put forward by Suhrkamp to defend the book bear scru-tiny.21

Six months after Daniel Ganzfried’s disclosures, Wilkomirski’s agency, stalled by his promises of imminent proof to verify his version, asked me to investigate the charges. Although Ganzfried had based his claims on meticulous research and plausible arguments, he was unable to prove them conclusively. At the time it seemed doubtful whether the


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matter would ever be clarifi ed. However, my investigation and those of Wolf Gebhardt and Elena Lappin corroborated Ganzfried’s fi ndings with unequivocal evidence, illuminating many aspects of the affair. 22

LIE OR SELF-DELUSION

Wilkomirski, as I continue to call him for the sake of simplicity, dismissed my conclusions as “a manipulative phantasmagoria” and “lying, defama-tory, underhand work” in the “lowest style of the tabloid press.” He clung to his memories even after my report.23 Does he really believe his alleged autobiography? Or is he a deliberate liar, even, as Ganzfried assumes, a “cold, calculating crook”?24

Certain circumstances point to deliberate, systematic deceit on his part, namely the fact that Wilkomirski made regular efforts to frustrate research into his past, or that he repulsed attempts by his step-sister, a daughter of his biological father, to get in touch with him. But many other considerations make this theory of cold-blooded scheming seem unlikely: Wilkomirski began to invent his biography in early youth and continued to elaborate it, drawing on encounters with people and on varied sources of information for inspiration. His story is not only full of paradoxes itself but stands in contradiction to the historical facts.25 It therefore seems more probable that he increasingly adopted his fantasy world as the real one and fi nally came to believe in it. This assumption is not necessarily invalidated by his efforts to avoid disclosure. For some-one whose identity and social network depend on a closed system of self-delusion, any critical investigation becomes an existential threat. There remains the third and fi nal explanation—that Wilkomirski really believes his invented story and yet deliberately lies both to his audience and to himself. Whether such a split is possible is beyond my knowledge. What is certain, however, is that the evolution of Wilkomirski’s story displays many features typical of invented memories: Visualizations: Wilkomirski himself relates how he “did concentra-tion exercises under therapeutic guidance” to enable vague, preverbal and incomprehensible memories to crystallize. In 1997 he explained to K.M., a girl he was friends with at the time, how this happened: “You must picture a grey, concrete wall and stare at it for a long time, until

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gradually people you recognize appear on the wall, whom you can ask questions, who start to speak to you and tell you how it was.” K.M. then asked what these people had said and who they had been. Wilkomirski replied, “They were people I already knew inwardly. They confi rmed the names of places where I had been. Everything I had experienced and could only vaguely remember became quite clear through their state-ments!” Empirical studies show that creating visual images is a highly effective method by which to create the subjective feeling that goes with an authentic memory. Ultimately we are convinced that we remember a real occurrence, although the event in question never happened in real-ity.26 It is quite possible that these visualizations also contributed to the noticeably fi lm-like quality of Fragments. Repetitions: For decades, Wilkomirski spoke about his past, fi rst to friends and acquaintances, then to his therapist, and fi nally to the public. Such constant preoccupation also increases the false sense of subjective certainty about accurate recall. One can no longer determine whether the memory seems genuine because the event actually occurred, or merely because one has imagined and spoken of it so often.27

Suggestive questions: When Wilkomirski began to take on the identity of a Shoah survivor, he automatically aroused certain expectations in his conversation partners, presumably also prompting appropriate sugges-tive questions from them. This can also produce false memories.28

Dream interpretations: New research shows that false memories can also be produced when one interprets the dreams of test volunteers and explains that they contain repressed experiences. Wilkomirski is on record as saying that nightmares can depict “real memories,” and inter-pretations of this kind played a role in the genesis of his own story.29

Flashbacks: Wilkomirski explains that his memories are to some extent quite physical, involuntary, intrusive, and fl ashback-like. Even if these symptoms are connected, as I assume they are, to actual traumas that occurred in his early childhood, they are nevertheless not their direct replicas. Rather, such memories are particularly prone to distortion. One reason for this is that vague ideas must fi rst be verbalized. Wilkomirski described this process to a radio journalist as follows:

It was actually a process which lasted for decades, because most of the pictorial memories course through me day by day, like a kind of


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fi lm, prompted by small things, minor associations. But for a long, long time I couldn’t interpret most of these pictures. They were there, they also caused me anxiety, but I had no words for them. I couldn’t explain them, perhaps because the memories, these pictures went back to a stage when I didn’t speak, to a “nonverbal stage” in today’s language, and it takes a very long time before you fi nd the vocabulary to delineate the pictures somehow.

These “translations” can distort the original experiences, for they are the product of the present, hence exposed to its infl uences. The psycholo-gist Daniel L. Schacter even states: “The contents of a fl ashback may say more about what a person believes or fears about the past than about what actually happened.” 30 Source amnesia: Wilkomirski’s story contains scraps from books, fi lms and oral narration as well as experiences from his real life. Together they form his autobiography. It is possible that he mixed fact and fi ction because he lacked the ability to distinguish the source of his information. This symptom is known as source amnesia and contributes a good deal to confabulations.31

In his introductory chapter to Fragments, the author speaks of “shards of memory” and “exact snapshots of photographic memory.” “I can only try to use words to draw as exactly as possible what happened, what I saw, exactly the way my child’s memory has held on to it.” He thus acts in the belief that past experiences can be brought to light unchanged, like stored objects. This view, either as a conviction or a rhetorical strategy, is typical of the bulk of autobiographical literature. Memory research, however, has long since established that remember-ing is a constructive act which is infl uenced by the current situation.32 Extreme examples of this are the effects mentioned above of visuali-zations, repetitions and suggestions. Unlike Wilkomirski, many genuine Shoah survivors are well aware that their powers of recall are unreliable. Gabor Hirsch, a former inmate of Auschwitz and President of the Swiss Survivors Group who accepted Wilkomirski as one of their own, voices his skepticism on the subject: “I know how the past, the latrine news bulletins of the camp, the nightmares and the information read and viewed later form an inseparable mixture.”33

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INDIVIDUAL REMEMBERING AS SOCIAL INTERACTION

If memory is an act of construction, it does not depend only on the individual person but on the current context; it is not the action of an isolated person but a social practice. This view is now well estab-lished, mainly in the belated reception and extension of the theories of Maurice Halbwachs or Lew Semjonowitsch Wygotski. Interestingly enough, Halbwachs begins his classic work Les Cadres sociaux de la Mémoire with the story of a foundling girl who had been discovered in a French forest and believed herself to have been born among the Eskimos. From there she had been taken to the Antilles, where she had served a lady as a slave, before being transported to France by ship. What interests the sociologists in this episode is the fact that the loss of family hindered the girl concerned in her powers of recall. Generally speaking, most of our memories form when our parents, friends or other people recall them to us. It is the family and other social institutions that constitute the neces-sary framework within which individual memory is possible at all.34 As regards the family level, psychologists of the Wygotski school have come up with compatible theories when they assume that, for children, verbal interaction with other human beings is the basis for autobiographical memory.35

In this respect little Bruno Grosjean had precarious conditions to contend with. In his formative years he was moved from one foster family to another, thus being deprived of a person he could relate to. When he came to the children’s home at four years of age, he no longer had an inner picture of his mother. His subsequent placement with the Dössekkers, the doctor’s family in Zurich, cut him off from his earlier life, since the authorities prevented further contact between the biologi-cal mother and her son. It also seems credible when Wilkomirski says that his adoptive parents made his past a taboo subject. This, after all, correlates to what was then considered to be in the best interests of the adopted child. Bruno Dössekker thus had very poor prospects for devel-oping an autobiographical memory and for performing the task, diffi cult for all adopted children, of linking his biological and social origins in a meaningful way. No one told him about his earliest years; he himself had only fragmentary memories of the devastating stay with the Aeberhards, his last foster family. He later incorporated these memories in his East


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European autobiography; a Swiss farm became a Polish one, a diffi cult foster home became an anxiety-ridden hideout during the German reign of terror.36

At secondary school (Gymnasium) Wilkomirski was deeply infl uenced by his Jewish teacher, Salvo Berkovici, who became his mentor and who was the kind of father he would have wished for himself. A fellow pupil remembers today that Berkovici spoke to the class about Jewry and the genocide of the Jews. For a time they also had a Jewish history teacher, a piece of information that Wilkomirski keeps to himself. He had been a “wreck” and may even have been in a concentration camp. By contrast, in Fragments, Wilkomirski refers to another teacher, whom he “really admired” and who had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis. It is signifi cant that he was confronted at an early stage with Jews, their culture and the history of their annihilation. At the time this was most unusual for a non-Jewish Swiss student and not without consequences, since fi gures in authority can have a strong infl uence on memory, and role models are crucial for the development of an adolescent’s identity. Moreover, Wilkomirski’s entire later career shows how suggestible he was.37

His girlfriend at the time, Annie Singer, speaks of his preoccu-pation with the book The Yellow Star by Gerhard Schoenberner. This volume, which appeared in 1960, was one of the fi rst to deal with the subject of the genocide of the Jews, using large-scale, compelling pictures and original texts to display all the elements which later play a role in Wilkomirski’s story: anti-Semitism, the German invasion of Poland, the formation and liquidation of ghettos, raids, executions, the arrest of children, deportations and fi nally the camps, Majdanek and Auschwitz.38 Today Wilkomirski claims to have been engrossed in the Nazi trials at the time. His testifi ed reaction to The Yellow Star appears to bear this out. He may also have followed the sensational Eichmann trial of 1961. This would have been important, since Holocaust survi-vors gave evidence there in public for the fi rst time. Their appearance en masse—there were 111 witnesses—before the Jerusalem court and the world media afforded them social identity, recognition and authority, due to their special role in history. This was a step that had far-reaching consequences for the self-defi nition of the Jews and for the treatment of the Holocaust.39 Wilkomirski never mentioned whether this trial affected

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him. What is certain, however, is that shortly afterwards he adopted Jewishness, a role that he cultivated more in distant Vienna rather than at home in a milieu where he shared another past and where the change of identity caused friction. In the early 1970s Wilkomirski met the Jewish woman Karola, who had survived a concentration camp and been in a children’s home in Kraków. He befriended her and found the inspiration for his biography in her fate. Among others, he made her his companion in the camp (by implication) and in the orphanage. At fi rst Karola believed she was re-united with a cousin untraced since the Nazi era. This expectancy on her part and the opportunity to try out his Jewish identity and be accepted as such in a close relationship with a former camp inmate no doubt gave Wilkomirski further impetus to pursue his chosen course.40

In 1972 he acquired his name by suggestion: attending a concert by Wanda Wilkomirska with friends in Kraków, his striking resemblance to the famous violinist was noted. As a result Dössekker returned home as Wilkomirski.41 In 1979 Wilkomirski became acquainted with Elitsur Bernstein, an Israeli studying psychology in Switzerland and writing his Ph.D. thesis on schizophrenia.42 He became Wilkomirski’s closest friend, accompanying him on his trips into the past. He was the fi rst Jew in Wilkomirski’s adult life whom he saw on a regular basis, since Karola lived abroad. Bernstein’s return to Israel gave Wilkomirski access to soci-ety and new perspectives there: he did research in Israeli archives, gave evidence for the fi rst time in the Ghetto Fighters’ House, got to know Lea Balint, his most important historical ally, appeared on television and, as we will see, fi nally found his family. Bernstein also accompanied Wilkomirski on trips to Riga, Zamość, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Kraków in 1993 and 1994, where Wilkomirski rediscovered the stations of his life of suffering in dramatic scenes which were recorded live on video. Together Wilkomirski and Bernstein worked out a dubious therapy concept for child survivors with no identity, for which Wilkomirski’s case constituted the empirical basis and which the psychologist used to treat patients. Bernstein’s motives are not clear. Today he claims to have believed his friend and to have been utterly and selfl essly committed. He refutes all charges of manipulation with great vehemence.43 Bernstein’s infl uence was at the core. As Wilkomirski’s constant dialogue partner, he corroborated and extended his story. Not only was he a Jew, whose


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forefathers came from the alleged home country of his friend, but, in addition, he possessed the authority of an expert on traumatic memory. He had already heard, by his own admission, hundreds of accounts of survivors, so that he could verify the authenticity of Wilkomirski’s story. Today he denies using any form of suggestion, but an expectant attitude alone was suffi cient to establish Wilkomirski on his chosen route.44

In the early 1980s Wilkomirski’s fate and his being Jewish impressed young people like the students who planned to make a fi lm with him, or the clarinet pupil he persuaded to stay on a kibbutz in Israel.45 At about that time, 1982, he met Verena Piller, who has remained his companion up to the present. Since he had left his fi rst wife and soon afterwards, in 1985, his adoptive parents had died, all the most important old ties that reminded him of and bound him to an earlier identity were cut.46 Thus, he was a camp survivor not only privately for himself but also among his circle of contacts. His new woman friend was primed only too well by hardships of her own to lose herself in the needs of others. She offered herself as a patient listener so that he was able to make his story appear ever more truthful even to himself through constant retelling. To compound matters, she saw his illness as the outcome of repressed suffering and advised him to record it and to seek therapy. Soon after his friend Bernstein had returned to Israel, Wilkomirski bore witness at the Ghetto Fighters’ House on the coast north of Haifa. Frau Schner, who listened to him, had survived the war in a camp and as a partisan. From 1946 to 1948, as one of those responsible for Coor-dination, a Zionist organization, she had brought child survivors from Poland to Israel. Today she recalls that she was completely convinced by Wilkomirski’s story, which corresponded to what she had herself expe-rienced or heard.47 Why should she have had doubts? Was he not one of her protégés who had arrived at last, despite a time lag of decades? Her interest and knowledge may have shaped her perception, so that she instinctively formed Wilkomirski’s inchoate account into a plausible story. Probably the same applies a decade later to Lea Balint. Balint got to know Wilkomirski in 1993 at a time when she was already intensively involved with children with no identity—a subject that had received little attention but that gained importance with the recognition that the remaining witnesses had all been very young in the Nazi era. Balint was

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thus compiling a data bank in the Ghetto Fighters’ House. Since she herself had survived in Poland under a false identity, she was predisposed on both personal and professional grounds to believe a story such as Wilkomirski’s fragmented memories. She offered him additional histori-cal information to help him complete his biography, unaware that she was assisting in what was in fact an invention.48

Thanks to Balint’s initiative, Wilkomirski appeared in the documen-tary fi lm Wanda’s List with child survivors and found, as a result of the broadcast, a suitable family. Yakov Maroko, an Orthodox Jew from Bnei Brak, believed he had rediscovered his son Benjamin in the man portrayed, whose loss in Majdanek he was still grieving. In April 1995 the white-bearded man embraced his son at Ben-Gurion airport in front of television cameras and newspaper reporters. Pictures of the pair, weep-ing tears of joy, circulated throughout the world.49 At that point less than a month had passed since Wilkomirski’s ther-apist had asked Suhrkamp to ignore the warnings they had received and publish his book, to spare him from being again reduced to a “nobody.” By the time he began treatment, he had long since been passing himself off to acquaintances as a survivor and he had already related most of his memories. Without therapy, however, single episodes would not have taken on such concrete shape and his manuscript would not have materialized. Ever since Donald P. Spence’s brilliant essay appeared in 1982 on narrative and historical truth in psychoanalysis, we know how profoundly the interchange between client and therapist can infl uence memories. Spence shows with authority that only narrative truth can emerge in a therapeutic setting. He understands narrative truth to mean an aesthetically successful, fully developed account, which gives a satis-fying rendition of suffering and creates its own reality in the therapy. Historical truth, however, which is characterized by referential links to the past, remains elusive. Wilkomirski’s psychologist had a different viewpoint—she explained to Suhrkamp that, based on twenty years experience of treating childhood traumas, she could clearly distinguish between authentic and apparently real experiences.50

Spence points out that therapists, in contrast to Freud’s postulate of “free-fl oating attention,” always listen to their patients with a certain prior understanding; they have to create a context in order to under-stand a statement in the fi rst place. Wilkomirski’s accounts, the spoken


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ones included, are typifi ed by their vagueness and fragmentary character. This forces his listeners—not only in the therapy session—to actively construe content.51 Inevitably, since Wilkomirski is presented a priori as a Shoah survivor, they use their knowledge of the crimes concerned and their consequences for the victims. In this specifi c case the therapist had a clear conception of the symptoms of trauma and of authentic memo-ries. (In addition she was the daughter of a Jewish woman who found asylum from the Nazis in Switzerland, and thus, from the outset, she probably felt an affi nity with the destiny of the refugee Wilkomirski. This does not make it any easier to detect the problems of countertransfer-ence.)52 In this particular situation it was highly likely that Wilkomirski’s recollections would be infl uenced by her questions and reactions.53 More-over, he himself was familiar with the symptoms of traumatization from books. To be a good patient he only needed to feel and recall, perhaps not even consciously, as his therapist expected him to do. What he remembered ought to move or convince his listener and it had to match his existing story. Recalling properly and effectively is subordinated to cultivating the relationship. Rhetoric prevails over content.54

This situation becomes apparent when the therapist asks Wilkomir-ski to write down his story and read it to her aloud. This writing down of memories almost necessarily alters them—they become more plastic, defi nite; the author fi lls out existing gaps, links loose threads. What is remembered bends to the rules, exigencies and possibilities of style and narration.55 Through their role in therapy, memories primarily serve to forge the relationship between client and therapist: only memories that have the potential to gain a hearing are recovered and written down. We do not know the exact effect of such an emergent text on the therapist, but it is probable that Wilkomirski’s rhetoric of trauma impressed and overwhelmed her, as it later did his public audience. This recording activ-ity made it easy to forget that Wilkomirski was not impelled by precise memories but by their very absence, and that consequently the past took on a presence which it had never possessed. The texts that were produced could be seen as “screen memories,” but, in a reversal of the usual practice, Wilkomirski replaced his own, unrecountable or undesir-able memories with the most terrible of all stories. Spence characterizes such screen memories as a type of “mnemonic cartoon,” which can be described as “an exaggerated piece of reality in which, as in bad

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fi ction, subtleties are erased, colors are brighter, and outlines bolder.”56 Wilkomirski’s text reveals precisely these distinctive features. In the context of a heated general debate on repressed and recov-ered memory in the United States, Fragments was suspected of being the product of unsuccessful therapy. In 1995 Wilkomirski’s psychologist in fact called his manuscript the result of the therapeutic process and Wilkomirski himself believed at that time that his memory had become extended through this treatment.

Well, I have to say that for more than two years I trained my powers of concentration in a completely focused way with the help of a psychotherapist, a specialist in this area, in order to see these images with greater clarity and thus to fi nd a way to verbalize them some-how. So actually, during these last two and half years I had to learn to interpret these images and in doing so, I, of course, often discov-ered completely new possibilities for interpretations, very real ones.

Fashioning concrete, scripted stories from unclear and incomprehensible images is an act of creation, not one of mere interpretation. Neverthe-less, he and his therapist insist to this day that his treatment cannot be categorized as an instance of recovery therapy. Perhaps both believe quite sincerely that nothing was altered, that his memories had always been there, but that today he can understand and express them better. Such a line of reasoning, however, ignores the alterations that can be caused by better understanding and means of expression.57 In Wilkomirski’s case, it seems that therapy did not so much create entirely new memories as enhance, deepen and articulate them. The therapy confi rmed his feeling that his memories were authentic and encouraged his “coming-out” as witness and author. Wilkomirski explained that the texts were intended to help the people in his immediate circle to understand his strange reactions better: his hypersensitivity, anxiety and panic attacks. As we know, he did not confi ne himself to this private use but looked for a publisher for his manuscript. It is not clear whether the initiative for this came from him or whether he allowed himself to be persuaded by his friends. I imagine that, after his initial reluctance, he was happy to acknowledge the arguments of those around him that his example would help other


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survivors in their isolation58—altruistic narcissism, in other words. The manuscript was given to Eva Koralnik, a literary agent highly regarded by the publishers, who had herself barely escaped the Holocaust as a child. She was struck by the unusual stylistic form of these memoirs, which were at once both fragmental and artfully composed. On her recommen-dation Suhrkamp’s editor Thomas Sparr read the manuscript, was deeply affected and also enthusiastic. He had read many Shoah memoirs, but seldom one that paid so much attention to its own presentation and that, despite its restrained narration, left such a lasting impression. He later stated that “rarely had a text perplexed him, or a manuscript, after one night’s reading, confused his literary classifi cation system so much.” This statement was made on an offi cial occasion after the book’s appearance, at which the editor himself read excerpts, showing the extent of his commitment to it.59

Publication transformed Wilkomirski’s private memory once and for all into a public matter. The editor Sparr changed virtually nothing in the manuscript—with one interesting exception: in the German edition the rather positive fi nal passage about his Jewish teacher Berkovici, whom he revered and felt understood by, was left out. Sparr deleted this part, according to Wilkomirski, because otherwise German readers could have put down the book complacently, feeling that things had turned out well in the end. This deletion meant that the published version ends with a sentence that emphasizes the ongoing presence of an unbanishable past and focuses on the perspective of the victim: “Perhaps it’s true—some-how I missed my own liberation.”60 Suhrkamp may have paid too little attention to the background of the author, but, as was to be expected from a responsible publishing house of such standing, the potential moral and political impact on the German reading public was gauged with accuracy. Wilkomirski’s practice of using his memory to create social rela-tionships was well served by the publication of his book. He received innumerable letters from profoundly moved readers all over the world, most of whom expressed their shock, pity and respect. Others thanked him for his courage and his insights. Among those who wrote was a woman who was trying to trace her cousin Yankel, who had been in Majdanek like Wilkomirski’s friend of the same name; she enclosed a photo of the murdered family and asked if anyone in it seemed familiar

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to him.61 The book’s reception becomes understandable only when one considers the varying interests and social circumstances of the readers, but the common reaction was one of shock and devastation.62 Thus, a psychologist wrote in a review:

Fragments is a small book, a mere 155 pages long, and yet it contains one of the most powerfully written documentations of experiences of trauma and dissociation, forgetting and remembering, that I have encountered. With its unmitigated, brutally direct, unexplained and unexpected views of the unexplainable Binjamin Wilkomirski faced as a small boy in the midst of the death camps during the Holo-caust, it weighs in at the almost unbearable end. I hid Fragments from my children; I tried hiding it from myself, dragging my brain over months of trying to escape the writing of this book report.... Wilkomirski gives his reader an opportunity to experience a frac-tion of what he lived through as a young child. In the process of reading his Fragments, one piece after the other of disjointed, discon-tinuous life jumps out at the reader, as it probably jumped out at the little boy, fi fty some years ago, without the soothing and softening, refraining and distancing of adult explanations or preparations of things to come. Like the abrupt opening of the shutter in front of a camera lens, so do the different chapters of Fragments put the reader into the eye-level perspective of a 3-year-old boy, into the midst of the relentless, uncontrollable, daily events of terror, death and survival by chance inside the camp. Anybody willing to follow Wilkomirski’s remembered Fragments will understand the phenomenon of spontaneous dissociation for survival viscerally and emotionally.63

Wilkomirski’s book exemplifi es to an extraordinary extent how using the rhetoric of trauma can produce a strong reaction of empathy on the part of the reader. Wilkomirski also experienced a sense of community and solidarity at his many readings, which he further stimulated by careful staging. In most cases he had someone else read his texts, so that his silence not only conveyed the unspeakable nature of his fate but also left space into which the audience projected its own knowledge of the Shoah.


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He played the clarinet, his standard piece being the emotionally charged melody of the “Kol Nidre” prayer sung during the religious service on the eve of Yom Kippur, which was actually out of place in an auto-biographical context. In addition, he always appeared wearing a scarf, designed to resemble a Jewish prayer shawl. This demonstrated his kinship with the Jewish people, lending him the aura of a religious Jew, turning his lecture into an act of faith and his book into a semi-religious text.64

Through his book he also became acquainted with various Shoah survivors, some of whom became his friends. This enabled him to become assimilated into a large group of Swiss survivors, who were, in some instances, very moved by his description, treating him with great compassion, all the more so because he had been much younger than most camp inmates. But the child survivors were the most affected, since his text gave expression to their needs, their own devastated past and precarious identities. Their reaction is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the author had evaluated the testimony of innumerable witnesses for his work. However, one witness expressed his envy of Wilkomirski’s precise memory, since he himself had had little success in trying to assemble the fragments of his past. Interestingly enough, it is in this milieu that one of the rare instances of doubt about Wilkomirski’s story occurred, caused by the Yiddish accent he had acquired despite his having grown up in Switzerland. However, checking life-stories was taboo among survivors, hence it was not pursued in this case either.65

Wilkomirski even found more Jewish relatives—besides the Marokos in Israel.66 This was a family of mostly Orthodox Jews, originally from Riga, who had changed their name from Wilkomirski to Wilbur. He met them in 1997 in a private New York home, on the afternoon before the Jewish New Year. They had written to their famous Swiss namesake, and there he was, sitting in their midst, turning the pages of photo albums, once even detecting a striking resemblance to his son in one of the photographed faces. His hosts believed they recognized the Wilbur face in Wilkomirski’s own; one of them even discovered a likeness to one of those present. Wilkomirski told them how he had come upon the Wilbur ancestral home during his Riga investigations and speculated aloud as to whether he had indeed lived there as an infant. The meeting came about while he was on a fund-raising tour as guest of honor of the Holocaust

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Memorial Museum in Washington. The Museum staff were themselves so excited at the prospect of reuniting relations torn apart by the Shoah that they invited the Wilburs to be guests at a dinner held the following day. By the end of the week, the family regarded the visitor as a distant cousin. One of them said that although the Wilburs had surely had some distant cousins who had been tragic victims, they themselves had not experienced the Shoah “fi rst hand in terms of work camps.” But Wilkomirski was like a ghost from the past who brought this very experi-ence to them. Later, looking back on the deceit practiced on them, one member of the family expressed his opinion that Wilkomirski had given them a vicarious opportunity, albeit belatedly, to feel the guilt and the exhilaration of survival. Half a year later Wilkomirski found a fellow victim in Laura Grabowski, whom he had supposedly lost sight of fi fty years previously, after they had both survived Birkenau. The reunion took place in a syna-gogue in Beverly Hills in front of a mainly Jewish audience, many of whom were survivors. Grabowski had written a fi ctitious autobiography ten years earlier, in which she described how, as Lauren Stratford, she had grown up in the United States and had been abused from infancy by sex criminals and satanists. Later, during therapy she had discovered the resources to unravel her multiple personality and, among others, to develop an alter ego as a Mengele victim.67 For her this was an ideal precondition for fi nding comfort and support in the arms of another person who had also succumbed to the bizarre seduction of the suffer-ing of others and who had found the scars of medical experiments in the concentration camp on his own body.

THE SOURCES OF SELF-DELUSION

The individual parts of Wilkomirski’s biography came from the most varied sources: accounts of genuine survivors like Karola, his own expe-riences, fi lms and books. In the mid-1980s he was probably inspired by Claude Lanzmann’s fi lm Shoah and Eberhard Fechner’s equally impres-sive three-part television documentary on the Düsseldorf trial of the butchers of Majdanek. It is impossible to surmise exactly how much he owes to his immense reading—by his own account he “devoured”


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2,000 books and twice the number of fi les. It is certain that, as a young adult, he was infl uenced by Jerzy Kosinski’s book The Painted Bird.68 In his forties he most probably read Years of Childhood by Jona Oberski, who was born in the Netherlands in 1938 and was deported along with his parents to Westerburg, and then to Bergen Belsen. Oberski’s book contains a most unusual feature for a Shoah memoir, being written exclu-sively from a child’s limited viewpoint and therefore lacking an adult narrator’s knowledgeable commentary on the inexplicable. This device and the similarly simple language of a child are also to be found in Frag-ments, although not Oberski’s restrained tone. At a later date Wilkomirski must also have seen a fi lm on the Dutch survivor, which alludes to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale and which was broadcast in 1993 while Wilkomirski was working on his manuscript, for his chapter on the hideout on the Polish farm contains a similar episode.69

Wilkomirski was versed in the appropriate psychological literature, as can be deduced from his lectures on traumatic memory. This knowl-edge also had an impact on his behavior. K. M., the girl he was once friends with, relates an incident that took place during a group therapy session. They suddenly heard the wail of sirens, which turned out to be caused by a routine check of the alarm system in the neighborhood. Wilkomirski, however, reacted instantly, as if overcome by panic. He also used his knowledge of psychology while writing his manuscript, conceiv-ably to appear credible in the eyes of his therapist. One therefore fi nds stereotypical situations in Fragments, in which the I-narrator is seized with unexplainable panic by everyday circumstances. The wooden fruit racks in the cellar of his Swiss foster parents’ home remind him of bunk beds; the cast-iron oven evokes scenes in which children’s corpses were used for heating; the sound of a ski lift suggests the gassing machinery; and William Tell triggers the fear of child-murdering SS henchmen.70 Here, too, the author systematically uses his knowledge that trauma-tized people can be seized by panic when a present situation resembles the original threat. However, what is unbearable for such people is the fact that they do not know why they are in such a state. In contrast to Wilkomirski’s narration, if a genuine former child camp-inmate were to panic when confronted with the story of Tell, he would not know that he was confusing the Swiss national hero with an SS man, and the present with the past. He would experience the fear without knowing the cause.

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Recognizing the confusion would remove his panic, since the SS man would be relegated to the place where he belonged—to the past. Despite the contradictions—Wilkomirski describes the confusion, although he has ostensibly adopted the ingenuous perspective of a child—such episodes made a great impression on many readers, includ-ing actual survivors, who believed that their own experience had found coherent expression. I do not wish to doubt Wilkomirski’s empathy; what is important, however, is that he used the experiences and theories of other people for his autobiography. The common core of these theo-ries is the belief that the traumatic experience of the Holocaust cannot be related or at least requires completely new modes of representation. This is an obvious assumption, given that many former concentration camp victims suffered from the inability to fi nd adequate expression for their history. It is, however, also a problematic assumption, since innumerable survivors have indeed recorded their memories using tradi-tional literary means.71 Wilkomirski’s approach gave rise to two disturbing phenomena when his book was reviewed: First, literary critics and psychologists developed or demonstrated theories and hypotheses based on his text which he had probably used himself to produce the very text to begin with. Secondly, they were particularly impressed by the inno-vative form of his narrative, probably because this corresponded more closely to their conception of an appropriate portrayal of the “unpor-trayable” than all the conventionally written authentic testimony. The elaborated version appeared truer than the clumsy originals. The theo-ries and postulations were better served by poetic license than by the needs and constraints of expression dictated by real experience. Thus, if even acknowledged experts were impressed by Fragments, this did not happen despite their familiarity with the material but because of it.72 When Wilkomirski’s credibility later came under fi re, he, in turn, referred me to the authority of such experts—a hermeneutic circle of its own pecu-liar kind, which demands further examination, not only by those directly involved. Clearly, elements of Wilkomirski’s own experience also fueled his invention. The most strikingly obvious are the parallels between his hide-out in the Polish farmhouse and his foster home with the Aeberhard family in the Swiss town of Nidau. The ominous atmosphere, the violent events, the places and even the people in the invented Polish scenario can


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easily be recognized as refl ections of his catastrophic stay in Nidau. This transformation even makes sense when compared to the normal devel-opment of memory, for he claimed on his visit to the Ghetto Fighters’ House that his earliest recollections were of the Polish farmyard. He was in actual fact three or four years old when living with the Aeberhards; the events in his life prior to this were lost in childhood amnesia, as they are for everyone.

THE OUTCOME OF INVENTION The attempt to explain more precisely the connection between Wilkomir-ski’s narrative and his actual past runs the risk of succumbing to unverifi able speculation on causes and origins. Hence it is probably more promising to start with the narrative approach in autobiography research, which focuses not on references to the past but on the process by which an individual constructs a coherent life story from his memories. Thus, what is interesting in an autobiography is less which past is depicted than the signifi cance that an individual derives from it for his present and future existence. Attention is therefore centered on the strategies a person uses to create a particular self-narration and social relationships. The images and codes with which he creates a meaningful narration for himself and convinces his readers are therefore fundamental. This rhetorical function can only be fulfi lled by the use of symbolization that is conventional and culturally accepted. Biographies say as much about the society in which they were produced as about the biographer himself.73 A similar conclusion is reached by reading Wilkomirski’s story primarily as the case history of a sick person. We know from the study of ethnology that every culture has its own defi nitions of sickness and health and that the respective patients display specifi c symptoms that fi t into their collective conception and which can be treated by their heal-ers. The functions and impact of Wilkomirski’s story can thus be analyzed from a narrative perspective, even though his innermost motives and intentions are not known to us: Explaining strangeness and fi nding a sense of belonging: When the working-class child Bruno Grosjean was placed with his Zurich foster family, he

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found himself in an upper-class milieu in which he did not feel accepted. Later, as a musician and a self-taught clarinet maker, Wilkomirski led the life of an outsider. With his Holocaust memories he gained the sympa-thy and solidarity he had missed: his fellow students, his friends and fi nally the entire world responded. But above all he was admitted into the Jewish community, in an imaginary sense representing all child survi-vors, and in a more concrete form as a member of the Swiss group of survivors and as a newly found relative of the Marokos and Wilburs. He could now turn even his own outsider status to good account: previously living as an outcast, he had seriously doubted himself, but now the others appeared to him in a dubious light—people blind to the past, the anti-Semites with their eternal hatred of Jews like him. It is revealing that Wilkomirski’s fantasies did not fully develop until he had cut off his ties to the social milieu in which he had grown up. Belonging to the group determined his memory. With the new memory he now determined his group. This apparently liberating act of self-invention nevertheless meant that his connections to his former background were severed irre-versibly and that he could no longer leave his invented world, even if he wanted to, since this would have been tantamount to social death for him. Explaining (away) the pain of adoption: It is well known that adopted children are preoccupied all their lives with questions about their origins. Why was I given away? Wasn’t I worth keeping? Didn’t my parents love me? How lowly are my origins if people treat them as a taboo subject? Wilkomirski freed himself from such harrowing questions by attributing the absence of parents and lack of parental care to the criminal power of the Nazis. He recorded his feelings about the murder of a man who was probably his father (when writing the manuscript he had not yet met Maroko): “I am sad and shocked that he abandoned me, but I feel that he didn’t do it because he no longer loved me. His own agony must have been extreme and he only left me because there was something unknown, which was much stronger than him.” When he met his own mother in the camp, already with the mark of death on her, she reached under the straw and beckoned him to her: “I now saw her face more clearly, it was shiny and wet, I saw that she was crying. Without a word she stretched out her hand and indicated to me that I should take what she had fetched out from under the straw. I touched her hand a


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brief moment—it seemed to be hot and clammy.”74 His dying mother sacrifi ces the bread she has hidden for her own survival for her son—maternal love and care are stronger than the destruction wrought by the mass murderers. With this scene Wilkomirski idealizes a mother’s uncon-ditional love. At the same time he explains and excuses his never having received it. Receiving recognition and admiration: As a Jew he is something special, enigmatic; as a survivor he is a hero, a sage and a victim; as a child survi-vor he is the most innocent of all the innocents and the most deserving of pity. His dark origins, with their implicit suggestion of lowliness, have been transformed by suffering into a noble genealogy, his needs, incomprehensible in view of his materially privileged life-style, into the martyrdom of the century. Where once he was rejected by his family, he now basks in the loving embrace of the world; in place of a medio-cre career he now enjoys admiring acknowledgment as an expert on the unspeakable. The sense of his own ordinariness gives way to the eupho-ria of having world-historic signifi cance; and where previously there was an ego on the brink of collapse, it now embodies the deep pain of humanity. Excusing failure and present crises: The Shoah biography provides plau-sible justifi cation for all his unbearable or inexplicable present diffi culties, as well as for every questionable act he performed. Responsibility for his life lies with the past and its henchmen, but never with himself. He does not even need to refer others to his fate in self-vindication. All those who fail to comprehend the inevitable consequences of his experiences are stupid, if not anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi. Claiming his rights: The crimes of the perpetrators, the failure of the bystanders and his own experiences in the concentration camp have qualifi ed him to become, in Finkielkraut’s terminology, “the appointed trustee” of absolute justice.75 As a victim he represents his own interests, as the most oppressed of the oppressed he epitomizes suffering human-ity as a whole. Where formerly he had grounds for self-reproach, he now embodies a living and legitimate reproach of others. He has a right to be heard, a right to receive apologies and respect. When the city of Zurich awarded him a prize for his work, he interpreted this as “a sort of rehabilitation through the Swiss government.” In the same spirit

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he warns historians against hasty criticism of his statements, for “the witness always has a head start in knowledge.”76 Externalizing his own aggression and enjoying it under the pretext of morality: Someone who was so innocent then is still innocent today. The wicked are always the others, who once again willfully misunderstand us, who ignore, persecute and even want to kill us: cold adoptive parents, anti-Semitic Swiss society, ignorant contemporary historians, journalists who uncover secrets, Nazis and neo-Nazis or Arab anti-Zionists. In the day-long conversations I had with Wilkomirski, I was struck by the extraordinary way he suppressed aggression, which made him quite unable to refuse a request. In Fragments, however, this aggression appears as the justifi ed expression of his despair as a child or of a mandatory, merciless depiction of Nazi atrocities. Did he really disclose these obscene truths as an act of moral duty and of liberation? Perhaps it is only a self-deceiving method of savoring the utmost horror, both the suffering of the victims and the brutality of the perpetrators, under the protective cloak of morality. In Fragments these excesses of violence are combined with grandiose visions of the writer’s own power and destruc-tive force. For instance, the description of how little Bruno hurls himself at a uniformed camp guard who broke the skull of a boy with a wooden ball. Characteristically, this attack does not serve to save his own skin, but rather he risks his own life to avenge injustice to another.77 Finding a meaningful story: Human beings have a need to secure their own identity with a coherent personal history and thus to establish them-selves in relation to others. Wilkomirski certainly had some distressing recollections that could not be integrated into a meaningful story and he had gaps in his memory that could not be fi lled. His fi rst four and a half years were completely closed to him by his adoption. Paradoxically, to make sense of his own story he selected the senseless story of the Holocaust; to tell his own tale he took the supposedly untellable. Thus, he acquired not only a biography packed with the weight of the century but also an explanation of why his past made no sense and could only be partly recalled. Although Wilkomirski’s own diffi cult past plays a central role in his inventions, it does not of course follow that his past deter-mined his later narration. For even if he had traumatic experiences, as I assume he did, they do not contain concealed within them an intrinsic truth, fi xed for all time, which automatically seeks specifi c expression.


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Rather, the form in which his suffering was expressed changed constantly throughout his life, as the evolution of the sketches of his autobiography shows us, because it was indeed a response not only to his past but also always to his immediate present, with all its needs, interests and oppor-tunities. At fi rst glance, Wilkomirski’s strategy of using the Shoah as a source of metaphors is clearly a particularly elegant and economical solution. With one single narration he produces a convincing explanation for all his personal diffi culties and an instrument with which to satisfy all his needs. That this strategy was self-deceptive and self-destructive goes without saying. In addition, it is by no means certain that he resorted to inventing his horrifying experiences because his own life was equally horrifying. The only thing certain is that today he recalls and relives his past in this terrible way because the metaphors of the Shoah and people’s reaction to it offered him completely new fantasies of suffering and new ways to use them. We do not know what form his suffering would have taken had he not drawn on this source of previously inconceivable material, but certainly it would have taken other forms, probably less gruesome. What are the medium-term consequences for Wilkomirski of the fact that today virtually no one believes him and the social base of his identity has collapsed? It seems that until recently he still embraced his Jewish identity. In March 2001 he accompanied his old acquaintance Karola to her mother’s grave in the Jewish cemetery in Zurich, where he sang Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, by heart, his yarmulke on his head. However, three months later he dispatched a letter on the subject of the bloody confrontations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, in which he completely reversed his earlier position. He writes that the Jews are stealing everything in Palestine that can be stolen, bulldozing houses and killing unarmed people, including women and children. They deny that the reason for Palestinian terror is their own settlement politics. They not only elected the “Butcher of Beirut” as their representative, a man who actually belongs in front of a war tribunal, but they legitimize torture. They castigated and blackmailed Switzerland, although no country saved so many Jews during the Second World War: those whose lives were saved kept quiet (after all, there was money at stake!). They used the Holocaust to silence all criticism, to provide a bonus for everything, and

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they demanded and are still demanding continuous compensation for it. Cash for sacrifi ces. He recommends reading Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. According to Wilkomirski, the Jews are more nationalistic than any other people and behave towards Gentiles as if they were the master race. When criticized, however, they slip into their well-rehearsed, traditional role of victim. They are only hated in the world today because they behave as if they were the chosen people. The people killed in the Holocaust were actual victims, but the Jews of today are egotistic, nationalistic, calculating, arrogant perpetrators; not all of them, but a great number of them.78 In his letter, then, Wilkomirski distances himself from the Jews, in whose ranks he has numbered himself only recently, and lashes out at a stereotypical Jewish victim role, such as he himself adopted in an unprec-edented way. His sympathy lies now with the Palestinian victims, who have had a forceful presence in the European media since the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Once again Wilkomirski has succumbed to the seductive power of images—and in doing so uses common, well-known anti-Semitic arguments (not to be confused with legitimate criticism of Israeli policies). Only the outward signs have changed, the clichés remain. What appears to be a bizarre volte-face is still subject to the same mechanisms.

COLLECTIVE WISH-FULFILLMENT—THE ROLE OF HIS PARTNERS

Wilkomirski did not act in a vacuum in his desperate search for his iden-tity. Marked as he was by hypersuggestibility, he adorned himself with victim status, only discovering and cultivating its full potential in the knowing eyes of other people. This led him to stage-manage his role in a powerful and manipulative way (transposed into rhetoric in Fragments) in order to attract attention, sympathy and recognition. His partners, however, were not merely passive victims of his strategies but rather pursued their own interests: For survivors like Karola or Maroko he epitomized the hope that the destruction wrought by the Holocaust could be at least partially mitigated and a lost family member restored. For many survivors Wilkomirski expressed a story that they could not remember or articulate as effec-


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tively. For Sarah Schner, Wilkomirski may have been one of the children she hoped to save for Israel. For Lea Balint he was one of the child survi-vors without identity on whom she is conducting research with passion but little unbiased objectivity. For the Collas, the young fi lm-makers, Wilkomirski’s biography was an exciting subject belonging to an exotic world and a repressed past. Vered Berman, Esther van Messel and Eric Bergkraut, on the other hand, who, unlike the Collas, completed their fi lm projects, could identity with his story since they themselves are all Jewish. In addition van Messel is herself an adopted child.79 Bernstein may simply have wanted to help Wilkomirski; he may have become fasci-nated by the horror or perhaps he used his friend as an instrument with which to realize his therapeutic plans. These divergent motives were not necessarily mutually incompatible. Wilkomirski’s behavior corresponded to his therapist’s conception of the authentic memories of traumatized people; she probably ignored the fact that it was the concentration exer-cises that caused Wilkomirski to formulate specifi c memories for the fi rst time and enhanced his feeling that they were authentic. For literary agent Koralnik it was an interesting professional assignment to recommend these unique Shoah memoirs for publica-tion—unique, in that they presented, in a novel literary form, the frustrated attempts of a destroyed ego to remember. It may well be that her own background as a survivor made her particularly receptive to such stories. Editor Sparr’s stunned reaction to the book is striking, as is his identifi cation with the author. As a specialist on Judaism and as a German, he was perhaps particularly biased. In any case, by publishing the book he was able to align himself on the right side morally and, by means of an elegant deletion, to pursue politically correct intentions with regard to the politics of memory. The Wilburs were able to vitalize and enhance their family tradition and self-image as Jews through the reunion with their lost cousin. Now their family had been endowed with a dramatic and important feature of today’s Jewish identity: a Shoah victim’s story—and what a story! The interests of those involved, their biographical backgrounds and their links to the Shoah differed considerably. There were Jews and non-Jews, surviving victims and descendants of the perpetrators, Americans and Swiss, young and old. Some knew of the events related by Wilkomir-ski from direct experience; others had gained the knowledge indirectly

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through their culture in the broadest sense. But what united them all was their unreserved belief in Wilkomirski, their emotional upheaval when they learned of his fate, their desire to help him discover or tell his story. These reactions are not coincidental. Knowledge about the Shoah has become universal during the past decades. The Shoah has become a master narrative, whose quintessential truth is an unspeakable trauma. Paradoxically, the very diffi culty of understanding it has made it the most powerful, culturally sanctioned metaphor of suffering. It is a model that, on the one hand, allows for divergent interpretations of the evils of the world, but on the other hand differentiates clearly between victims and perpetrators. Moreover, at the same time it serves as a moral stand-ard by which to measure all crimes. Such a story is instantly understood everywhere and its details can be completed by the public if necessary. Anyone equipped with its power of legitimization and rhetoric cannot be gainsaid. Wilkomirski, however unconsciously, availed himself of this to the full.

Translated from the German by Moira Moehler-Woods

NOTES * This text is based on a lecture delivered at the conference “The Wilkomir-

ski-Syndrome: Invented Memories, or the Longing to Be a Victim” held in May 2001 at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Pots-dam, Germany. Building on the fi ndings of my book, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 2001), it offers fresh evidence and analysis of the case. The author possesses copies of all documents quoted not available to the public.

1. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York, 1996), quoted from the reprint in Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, 375–496, 490.

2. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln and London, 1994), 33 (originally published 1980).

3. Ibid., 7.4. The following is taken from Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, 3–21.5. The following is taken from ibid., 236–37; and conversations with Jürg

Wagner, Zurich, 25 March 1999 (interview kindly made available by Wolf Geb-hardt); Nika Derungs, Zurich, 21 May 1999; Lukas Sarasin, Zurich, 28 April


91

1999 (interview by Wolf Gebhardt); Annie Singer, Zurich, 18 April 1999; Chr. B., Zurich, 31 Aug. 1999; Annette Dössekker-von Gonzenbach, Zurich, 26 July 1999; Lisel Jettel, Vienna, 27 July 2000.

6. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 58, 193–96.7. Ibid., 36–39; conversation with Chr. B., 31 Aug. 1999, and Sybille Schuppli,

Zurich, 9 Sept. 1999.8. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 87–88, 98, 238; conversation with Chr. B.,

31 Aug. 1999; Bruno Dössekker in a letter to Birgit Littmann Brunner, 16 Feb. 1983.

9. B. D. Wilkomirski, “Israel-Palästina Dossier: Themen und Grundlagen zur Geschichte und zur Gegenwart” (1994), unpublished notes of a course given by Wilkomirski at the end of the 1980s at the latest, 12–13, 37, 57, 59.

10. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 62, 233, 237–38; conversation with Chr. B. 31 Aug. 1999; Bruno Dössekker in a letter to Birgit Littmann Brunner, 16 Feb. 1983.

11. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 233–34.12. Note by Paul Uri Russak on his conversation with Sarah Schner, 20

April 2001; report by Sarah Schner on a conversation with Bruno Dössekker Wilkomirski, Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot, undated (trans. into German from Hebrew by P. Russak and D. Golub). I owe the link to Schner to Lea Balint.

13. Cf. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 467–68. It is also possible that the names of the camps were introduced by Schner in conversation, since she was very famil-iar with the material.

14. Cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 68.15. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 378–82; Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 27–30,

81–82, 88–89.16. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 93–94; conversation with Hanno Helbling,

Rome, 18 Aug. 1999.17. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 94–96, 102, 24–27.18. Ibid., 96–110.19. Cf. ibid., 111–28.20. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 129–34.21. Cf. ibid., pp. 132–34, 174. When I interviewed Balint in the summer of

1999 in the course of my research, I recorded her statement that she had a Mas-ters degree (cf. ibid., 153). Today she denies ever having made this claim (e-mail to me, 28 March 2001).

22. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair; Elena Lappin, “The Man with Two Heads,” Granta, no. 66 (summer 1999): 7–65; research by the historian Wolf Gebhardt

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for the fi lm Child of the Death Camps: Truth & Lies, dir. Christopher Olgiati, BBC One (production), broadcast on 3 Nov. 1999.

23. Wilkomirski in a letter to his American editor Carol Brown Janeway, 29 Oct. 2000; written statement by Wilkomirski to Eva Koralnik, the publishers and me, 22 Nov. 1999.

24. Daniel Ganzfried, “Binjamin Wilkomirski und die verwandelte Polin,” Weltwoche, 4 Nov. 1999.

25. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 163–268.26. Ibid., 81; Wilkomirski in a radio interview with Hardy Ruoss, “52 Beste

Bücher,” Radio DRS II, 24 Dec. 1995, Studio Zurich, MG 58143; K.M. in an e-mail to me, 11 March 2001; Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York, 1996), 23, 110, 271–72; Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston and New York, 2001), 125, 127, 129, 219–20, 174, 177.

27. Schacter, Searching for Memory, 111, 272.28. Ibid., 109–10, 130–32; Schacter, Seven Sins, 112–37; Elizabeth Loftus and

Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York, 1994), 32, 77–79, 85–101, 126–30, 166.

29. Giuliana Mazzoni and Elizabeth Loftus, “Dream Interpretation Can Change Beliefs about the Past,” Psychotherapy, no. 35 (1998): 177–87; Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 88, 250, 258–59.

30. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 84, 168–69, 253–54; Wilkomirski in the radio interview, “52 Beste Bücher”; Schacter, Searching for Memory, 266, cf. 207.

31. Schacter, Searching for Memory, 114–16, 118–21; Schacter, Seven Sins, 88–111.

32. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 377–78; Schacter, Searching for Memory, esp. chap. 2; cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 251–54.

33. Gabor Hirsch in an e-mail to me, 30 March 2001.34. Maurice Halbwachs, Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen

(Frankfurt/M., 1985) (originally published in French, 1925), 19–21.35. Cf. Katherine Nelson, “Memory and Belief in Development,” in Daniel

L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, eds., Memory, Brain, and Belief (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 259–89; Paul John Eakin, “Autobiography, Identity, and the Fictions of Memory,” in ibid., 290–306.

36. Cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 226–32, 315–16.37. Berkovici is mentioned only in the English edition of Fragments, 490,

494, cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 55–56. Conversation with Jürg Wagner, 23 March 1999. For the signifi cance of fi gures in authority cf. Loftus and Ketcham, Myth of Repressed Memory, 89–90; Schacter, Searching for Memory, 106–7.


93

38. Gerhard Schoenberner, The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933–1945, trans. Susan Sweet (London, 1969), originally published in German: Der gelbe Stern (Munich, 1960). Conversation with Annie Singer, 18 April 1999, and Lukas Sarasin, 28 April 1999.

39. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 54; Annette Wieviorka, “Die Entstehung des Zeugen,” in Gary Smith, ed., Hannah Arendt Revisited: “Eichmann in Jerusalem” und die Folgen (Frankfurt/M., 2000), 136–59.

40. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 196–203.41. Ibid., 193–96.42. The following is taken from ibid., 60–61, 86–90, 67–73, 97–100; and

report by Sarah Schner on a conversation with Bruno Dössekker Wilkomirski.43. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 80–81, 247–62, 200, 203.44. Ibid., 60–61, 100, 87.45. Ibid., 238; conversation with Chr. B., 31 Aug. 1999.46. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 62, 84–86.47. Note by Paul Uri Russak on his conversation with Sarah Schner, 20 April

2001.48. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 153–56.49. Ibid., 73–78, 214–21.50. Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpre-

tation in Psychoanalysis (New York and London, 1982), here esp. 31–32. In my view Spence’s theories also apply to other forms of therapy including Wilkomir-ski’s therapy, although according to Bernstein it was not classical psychoanaly-sis but only psychoanalytically oriented. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 88–89, 96–97.

51. Cf. Spence, Narrative Truth, 29, 279–81, 284.52. Ibid., 188, 284.53. This infl uence is prevalent, even if her role is not as active as I described

it in my book. In the therapy concept that Wilkomirski and Bernstein jointly devised there are examples of Wilkomirski’s own therapy with his psychologist M.M. In a letter to me, she emphatically denies having anything to do with the concept. She claims that the therapy example with the belt buckle, which I refer to in Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 254–55, did not originate in her work. In this episode Wilkomirski describes how his therapist urges her patient despite his reluctance to relate a vague memory repeatedly and to record it.

54. Cf. Spence, Narrative Truth, 97.55. Cf. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, “Conversational Remem-

bering: A Social Psychological Approach,” in idem, eds., Collective Remembering (London, 1990), 23–45, esp. 35.

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56. Spence, Narrative Truth, 60.57. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 96–97; Wilkomirski in the radio interview

“52 Beste Bücher”; Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 82, 88–89; cf. Spence, Narrative Truth, 61.

58. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 82–83, 90.59. Ibid., pp. 91–92; Sparr in a letter to Koralnik, 20 Sept. 1994; Markus

Payer, “Die Falle der Erinnerung schnappt zu,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday edition, 18 Jan. 1996.

60. Video interview, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washing-ton, D.C., 26 Sept. 1997, tape 6. The passage is included in the American edition, Wilkomirski, Fragments, 494. But it is also missing in the French edition.

61. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 118–19, 286–93; H.G. of N.J. in a letter to Wilkomirski, 23 Jan. 1998.

62. For the reception in Switzerland and Germany cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 274–308, for the United States 310–15; with a psychoanalytic approach M. Neukom, “Die Rhetorik des Traumas: Wie die Betroffenheit im Fall Wilkomir-ski blind macht,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22/23 May 1999; cf. Neukom, “Die Rhetorik des Traumas in G.-A. Goldschmidts Erzählung Die Absonderung,” in Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis, no. 3 (2001).

63. R. Münke, “Fragments, by Binjamin Wilkomirski,” In Focus: The Newsletter of the Greater Philadelphia Society of Clinical Hypnosis 2, no. 1 (spring 1997).

64. Cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 116, 283.65. Gabor Hirsch in an e-mail to me, 30 March 2001. Hirsch adds the com-

ment: “There is also no incentive to present yourself as a survivor. At least that’s the way I see it.” For further doubts see Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 111–12, 114–15, 205–8.

66. The following episode according to Wilkomirski, e-mail to Elena Lappin, 20 Dec. 1998, and Blake Eskin, “A Life in Pieces: The Making of Binjamin Wilkomirski,” 21 Oct. 1998, unpublished exposé for a book project for the pub-lishing house Norton. For Wilkomirski’s research in Riga cf. Maechler, Wilkomir-ski Affair, 72–73, 165–67.

67. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 123–28, 204–10.68. Ibid., 59–60, 66–67, 210–14, 242–45.69. Jona Oberski, Childhood, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, NY, 1983),

German edition: Kinderjahre (Vienna, 1980); the corresponding fi lm, Jona che visse nella balena, dir. Roberto Faenza (Italy, 1993), 91 min. I owe the link to the fi lm to Eva Lezzi. Cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 316.

70. Ibid., 245–57; Conversation with K.M., 10 Nov. 1999; Wilkomirski, Frag-ments, 472–74, 475–80, 486-9; Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 52–53.


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71. Cf. Sem Dresden, Holocaust und Literatur (Frankfurt/M., 1997); Andrea Reiter, “Auf dass sie entsteigen der Dunkelheit”: Die literarische Bewältigung von KZ-Erfahrung (Vienna, 1995).

72. Commendatory statements by experts can be found in Maechler, Wilkomir-ski Affair, 116–17. Cf. also Birgit R. Erdle, “Traumatisiertes Gedächtnis und zurückgewiesene Erinnerung,” in Corina Caduff, ed., Figuren des Fremden in der Schweizer Literatur (Zurich, 1997), 153–74; Sarah Traister-Moskovitz, “Account of Child Survivor: Fact or Fiction?—Does It Really Make a Difference?,” in Martyrdom and Resistance (May/June 1999), ed. International Society for Yad Vashem; cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 280. Judith Greenberg, “The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo,” in American Imago 55, no. 3 (1998): 319–47, 323–24. Psychologists have also cited Wilkomirski on various websites as a paradigmatic case of traumatic memory. In his interview with me, he himself made repeated reference to the trauma specialist Robert Krell. His library con-tains books by Hans Keilson, whose concept was used by Erdle. Cf. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 63–65.

73. For a narrative approach see Spence, Narrative Truth; Jerome Bruner, “The Autobiographical Process,” in Robert Folkenfl ik, ed., The Culture of Auto-biography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford, 1993), 38–56; Joseph de Rivera and Theodore R. Sarbin, eds., Believed-In Imaginings: The Narrative Con-struction of Reality (Washington, 1998). Alain Finkielkraut’s The Imaginary Jew was partly responsible for prompting the following reasoning.

74. Wilkomirski, Fragments, in Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 379–80, 411–14. The dust cover of the English edition (Picador) states explicitly—in contrast to the book text—that the murdered man was his father.

75. Finkielkraut, Imaginary Jew, 33.76. Maechler, Wilkomirski Affair, 114, 256, 314.77. Wilkomirski, Fragments, 436–37; cf. also video interview, Holocaust Memo-

rial Museum, Washington, DC, tape 4.78. Wilkomirski in a letter to Hanna Zweig, 3 July 2001. The reason was a

reader’s letter sent by Zweig to the Berner Zeitung, in which she criticized an anti-Semitically slanted column on Israel, which appeared on 16 June 2001. In the same letter Wilkomirski defends Norman Finkelstein against criticism. Presum-ably he knows of the latter’s book The Holocaust Industry (London, 2000) only through the media, since it contains harsh criticism of Wilkomirski himself.

79. Vered Berman, Wanda’s List, pt. 1 (1994) and 2 (1995); Esther van Messel, Fremd Geboren (1997), Dschoint Ventschr, Zurich, 52/60 min.; Eric Bergkraut, Das gute Leben ist nur eine Falle: Ein Besuch bei Binjamin Wilkomirski (1997), 3sat, 46 min.

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