This book – where do I begin? The Stefan Maechler part of the book was great; he began with Wilkomirski’s childhood as Bruno Grosjean and how he became Bruno Drosekker, then eventually Binjamin Wilkomirski. What I found interesting was that Maechler interviewed Wilkomirski, asking him about his childhood and how he “survived the Holocaust.” During the interview, he made no claims the Wilkomirski was a fraud and a liar. He must have just wanted to hear his side of the story. Later in the book is when Maechler starts to debunk Wilkomirski’s survival story. For example, Maechler points out that Wilkomirski changes his age a lot in his accounts and the dates of what happened do not match up to real life.
In Fragments, the autobiography portion of Wilkomirski, the story is so unbelievable that I am surprised it was published. It was written terribly and he contradicts himself in his own book. I am not saying that one must become a writer before they write a book, but why didn’t anyone in his publishing agency tell him to fix the story. Maybe in order to “preserve the authenticity” of Wilkomirski’s book no one edited it. Another aspect that was pointed out in the class discussion was how gruesome the story was in the book. For example, the part about the rats in the camp, nesting inside corpses’ bodies. That was gross. But, of all the “real” accounts we have read in the class thus far, they are not all that gory. Like Ruth Kluger said that she doesn’t need to go into detail about these parts, you can figure it out for yourself. I think that true survivors would not bring up the absolutely gruesome details because they have already lived that and they don’t need to revisit them – the trauma would be excruciating. However, as someone who did not experience the Holocaust (cough cough Wilkomirski) he would not know what these events were like; therefore, he could write as gory as he wanted because the traumatic experience is not debilitating him from writing.