A Life in Pieces

The strange story of the man who posed as a Holocaust survivor In 1996 a slim Holocaust memoir entitled Fragments was published in English, to universal acclaim. Hailed as 'a small masterpiece', awarded several prestigious literary prizes, it told a searing story: of a Jewish boy, born in Latvia, transported with his family to Poland's Majdanek concentration camp, where he witnessed horrifying scenes of death, privation and suffering. But within two years the author of Fragments, Binjamin Wilkomirski, had been unmasked as the adopted son of middle-class Swiss parents, raised in Zurich, who claimed to have recovered his repressed Holocaust memories through therapy. Soon comprehensive doubt had been shed on the veracity of his memoir, and eventually, on both sides of the Atlantic, the book was withdrawn by its publishers. Blake Eskin, an American journalist, has a unique authority to write the story of the man who posed as a Holocaust survivor. According to his grandmother, their ancestors shared the name Wilkomirski, and when Binjamin first came to New York on the triumphant promotional tour of a celebrated author, he not only came to visit Eskin's family but claimed kinship with them. Now Eskin has told the strange tale of the man who calls himself Binjamin Wilkomirski, and the eerie process by which his assumed identity was unravelled. Not only is A Life in Pieces the biography of an enigmatic and unfathomable individual; it also fascinatingly explores wider issues, from the delicate task of verifying survivors' testimonies to the evolution of the Holocaust memoir as a lucrative literary genre. And it is an unsettling personal account of how the author himself, and his vulnerable older relatives, were deceived by someone who had seemed to offer them a part of their ancestry they had thought irretrievably lost in the Holocaust.