The Man Who Wasn’t There

Full disclosure: I was gulled. In 1997 I interviewed child Holocaust survivor and memoirist Binjamin Wilkomirski for The Times. I still remember his voice on the phone. It was, I wrote, “soft and kind, vulnerable and urgent.” It was also believable. I had no reason to suspect otherwise. After all, Wilkomirski’s devastating account of his childhood in the death camps of Majdanek and Birkenau, “Fragments,” was published by the esteemed Schocken Books and had received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for autobiography. “Fragments” came garlanded with superlative reviews. The New York Times Book Review called it an “extraordinary memoir.” In the Nation, Jonathan Kozol predicted that “Fragments” would be studied as much by child psychologists as by historians “because it poses questions asked by those who work with spiritually tormented children everywhere.”

Wilkomirski’s memoir, now discredited as the work of an impostor, has been the subject of much study, but not for the reason Kozol predicted. Wilkomirski’s story aroused the suspicion of a Swiss writer, Daniel Ganzfried (the son of a Holocaust survivor), who published an expose of Wilkomirski’s true origins in the Swiss paper Weltwoche in 1998. Philip Gourevitch wrote a lengthy article on the Wilkomirski affair for the New Yorker. A Swiss historian named Stefan Maechler was commissioned by the publishers of “Fragments” to conduct a full investigation into Wilkomirski’s life. Maechler’s book, “The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth,” came out in paperback last year.

Now there is another take on the subject, Blake Eskin’s “A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.” A reporter for the Forward and a commentator for the public radio program “This American Life,” Eskin has written a meditation on identity, memory and the search for authenticity that is riveting and profound.

What makes this book different in approach from the others is that Eskin’s relationship to Wilkomirski’s bewildering deception is rooted in the personal. On his mother’s side, the family name was originally Wilkomirski. (After the family immigrated to the United States from Riga, Latvia, the name was Anglicized to Wilbur.)

When Eskin first encounters a description of Wilkomirski’s book, he wonders if he’s found a link to a family past sundered by emigration and the Holocaust. When Wilkomirski, a Swiss citizen, comes to New York on a book tour, he accepts an invitation to visit the extended Wilbur family (including both Orthodox and secular Jews, some of whom had never met one another). The scene jump-starts the book: Eskin’s aged cousin Miriam from Brooklyn pores over worn photos from Riga with the supposed Holocaust survivor.

Wilkomirski had written of being not much more than a toddler when he saw his father shot and killed. He writes that he was then dispatched to the camps. He claims to have been too young when he was separated from his parents to remember details of his early years. His memories, he writes, are “mostly a chaotic jumble.” On the other hand, Eskin’s family history is well documented--at least after emigration to America. When it comes to their exact European origins, however, Eskin’s family can’t really be certain who they are either. The history of the Wilkomirskis is oral and imprecise. “It’s strange to admit that authenticity was something we craved,” writes Eskin. How does one maintain an authentic sense of one’s past?

Though Wilkomirski ultimately turns out to be a fraud, his incarnation as a possible relative catalyzes Eskin’s search for family history and coherence--the emotional theme of the book.

Eskin chronicles how “local and literary” doubt finally collided in Wilkomirski’s case. He relates his own considerable efforts, before all the facts were in, to give Wilkomirski the benefit of the doubt.

He describes how his mother’s desire to find living relatives blinded her to information that increasingly suggested Wilkomirski wasn’t one of them. Eskin writes: “I felt like the better reporter, yet her compassion for Binjamin made her the better human being.” Eskin acknowledges that trauma can cloud memory. He understands that the believability of Holocaust testimony was “a source of anxiety for its victims even before they knew whether they would survive to tell their stories.” A Jewish archivist in Riga reminds him of a sad truth: “Every person who survived, who was a priori condemned to death, his story was unbelievable.” Partly for these reasons, as long as it was possible, Eskin was willing to grant Wilkomirski an “... extralarge helping of inconsistency. Some of his memories may be unreliable--after all, he’s human--but his story must have some kernel of truth to it; even a confirmed masochist would never invent such a life for himself.”

Which apparently turns out to be what Wilkomirski did: He appropriated the Holocaust as a metaphor for his personal torment. Born Bruno Grosjean (later called Bruno Doessekker), the author of “Fragments” was abandoned by his young mother. He spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and a foster home. But the orphanage and foster home were not in war-ravaged Poland, as he claimed, but in comfortable Switzerland.

Wilkomirski’s deception falls hardest on those who did suffer through the camps, particularly those child Holocaust survivors who faced doubt and disbelief when telling their stories. When Wilkomirski’s deception is finally unraveled, Eskin also feels taken. Though he had questioned whether Wilkomirski was a relative, he had never seriously considered the possibility that he was not even a Holocaust survivor. He attends an annual meeting of child survivors in Prague to look for Wilkomirski, though, he admits, “what that means is not so simple anymore.”

When he finally brings himself to watch the videotaped testimony of a bona fide child survivor, however, he is quickly engrossed. “I did not want to fast-forward and I could not push stop.”For the first time since doubting Wilkomirski’s story, he is able to open himself to the story of a child survivor.

He observes that the real survivor’s testimony has “the unedited quality of life, not the episodic drama of cinema” that Wilkomirski used in “Fragments.”

The characters who populate Eskin’s story (relatives, frauds, historians, cranky journalists, child Holocaust survivors, psychologists) are a lively and contentious lot. The author has done a formidable amount of research. A bibliography or index would have helped in keeping track of all the players and sources.

Eskin is an excellent reporter, and he asks good questions, even of himself. He writes (of Wilkomirski): “How did the ingratiating, reverent attitude of the journalists he encountered affect his sense of himself?”

I’m inspired to dig up the audiotape of my interview with Wilkomirski. The urgency in his voice is impressive, even knowing what I now know. I can see I was reluctant to ask him questions that might cause him more pain. When I did ask, when his voice choked up, I apologized.

Wilkomirski, Eskin fairly concludes, is a cipher. “Each one of us made use of Binjamin’s story in our own way, and in so doing we gave him substance, we made him real.” We may never know why he did what he did. To this day, the man still insists he is Binjamin Wilkomirski. Why? Eskin suggests two possible answers: “Either he still believes he is Binjamin, or he is a shrewd con artist.”

I believed Binjamin Wilkomirski and, I dare say, I was in good company. In believing him, I helped give substance to his story. Now, after extensive investigation, the paramount question in the Wilkomirski case has been settled: He is not the person he said he was. However, the important issues explored in Eskin’s book--the need to invent identity, the yearning to connect with the past, the fallibility of memory and the believability of those who suffer trauma--will long continue to resonate.