A Life in Pieces, by Blake Eskin

Holocaust hoax unravels a family mystery

Binjamin Wilkomirski's amazing autobiography Fragments (1996) was a shocking work. In it, a child remembers the Holocaust: his perceptions are naive, extraordinary and beautifully written. Wilkomirski's book won literary prizes internationally and, for more than three years, the author was rocketed into the public gaze. The only problem was that the book was a lie.

Why would anyone want to fake a childhood in Majdanek concentration camp? And why would Wilkomirski cling to his fallacious story once it became public knowledge?

Blake Eskin has produced an exciting detective story which does not exactly come up with an answer, but explores the multiple mysteries surrounding the lives of real and fantasy child survivors of the camps. Binjamin Wilkomirski turns out to be Swiss, not Latvian. He is the the illegitimate son of a Christian mother, Yvonne Grosjean, not of murdered Jews.

He spent his childhood in a bourgeois Swiss family, not in a camp, and his real name is Bruno Doessekker. Even when this becomes known and he is stripped of his prizes, he refuses to admit the evidence but prefers to play the victim, twice over.

The book starts with the strong presence of Wilkomirski but, when his cover is blown, he almost seems to disappear. The reader starts to identify with Eskin's own personal journey. Surprisingly, Eskin gives Wilkomirski the benefit of the doubt and always wonders: is this man really an imposter?

Several narratives run concurrently to contextualise this bizarre story. Eskin probes his own family, the Wilburs, whose real name is Wilkomirski. He goes to Riga, Latvia, to trace their past while, at the same time, checking Wilkomirski's wild claims. He looks at Switzerland's dirty wartime history and how, coincidentally, Wilkomirski's book appeared just as Switzerland was revealed not as a neutral haven but as a reservoir for Nazi gold stolen from Jews.

How did Wilkomirski's story fool so many? Eskin leaves clues.

Elena Lappin in Granta and Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker wrote of how Doessekker constructed Wilkomirski. He had his hair permed to make himself appear more stereotypically Jewish. He inflected his German with Yiddish. Eskin notes how a former girlfriend remembers that, during the 1960s, Doessekker spoke of having been a child in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In this crazed journey, Eskin goes to a survivors' conference in Prague. This is one of the most poignant areas of his book.

"In the foyer there is a bulletin board... covered with index cards and scraps of papers ripped from notebooks, with messages written in English, French, German, Dutch, Czech, Polish. 'I am looking for my brother.' 'Ruth Springer is looking for children from the children's house in Otwock, Poland.' 'Who knows these girls? They were in a convent in France 1942-3'..." Here Eskin encounters that terrible longing for a family which was ripped out of European history.

All the time, he must worry about Binjamin and his invented past. He hypothesises: "Family romances are quite common in children." But is Wilkomirski's book really that? Was Doessekker's childhood in Zurich his own particular concentration camp? Or is he, as Eskin asks, "a shrewd con artist"? What is clear from Eskin's probings is that the creation of Binjamin fulfilled a need. Wilkomirski represented the return of the lost souls.

Eskin starts on a mission to explore Wirkomirski's true story and ends up discovering his own family history. The trip to Riga reveals that Avram Wilkomirski, his great-grandmother's brother, vanished in 1941 just after the Nazis invaded. Eskin, like so many of us whose families left Eastern Europe 50 years before Hitler, finds hard evidence of the murder of relatives.

In May 2000 he goes to Israel to meet Sheina, an elderly woman in Jaffa. She has a photo, which exactly matches one his mother has given him, of a couple in 1929. Eskin discovers that Sheina, a complete stranger, is his real Wilkomirski cousin. Unwittingly, the false cousin Binjamin has led him home. This is the treasure at the end of the trail.