A LIFE IN PIECES

The pathetic story of a self-proclaimed child survivor of the Holocaust upon whose story much doubt has been cast, crisply reported by journalist (and Wilkomirski family member) Eskin.

In 1996, Schocken published Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust memoir called Fragments, for that is just what it was: unadorned, brutal, and hugely compelling shards of memory, recounting a young Jewish boy’s experiences in Latvia and the concentration camps. Even before it was released, the book came to the attention of Eskin, whose family included Wilkomirskis from Riga. Eskin smelled a good story in Wilkomirski: he was invited to New York to meet his own extended Wilbur/Wilkomirski family, perhaps establish some link between families. At this point, even though Fragments was receiving much favorable publicity—from Kirkus and many others—for its raw pungency, for its powerful disjointedness and graspings to recapture a life, doubts were being raised about Wilkomirski’s account. They didn’t exactly creep in, as doubt is always present in recovered memory. They started with the very notion of a three-year-old remembering anything with any clarity. Then factual questions arose: transportation between camps didn’t happen as Wilkomirski recalls, nor did his destinations jibe with what happened to Latvian Jews; his family background was willfully obscured, then dismissed as mistaken paperwork; a whole flurry of inconsistencies slowly built to a damning amount. Eskin reports on the entire recovered-memory movement, presents the cases for and against Wilkomirski as developed by Daniel Ganzfried and Harvey Peskin et al., and its effect on child-survivor groups, makes a remarkable trip to Latvia to find family members, presents a valuable look at Holocaust-denial themes, and softens his reportorial skepticism by revealing how much he would like Wilkomirski’s behavior to have some valuable meaning.

Eskin conjectures Wilkomirski may be overidentifying with camp survivors, or deluded, or a con man, but, any which way, its one more dreadful story trailing in the poison of the Holocaust.