You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I grew up and became an adult in a time and in a society that didn't want to listen, or perhaps was incapable of listening… It is so easy to make a child mistrust his own reflections, to take away his voice. I wanted my own certainty back, and I wanted my voice back, so I began to write… As a child I also received a new identity, another name, another date and of place of birth… Legally accredited truth is one thing - the truth of a life another. (Wilkomirski , p. 53)
Binjamin Wilkomirski is writing about his past in the present, and explaining the resistance he encountered in the society in which he grew up. He is asking us, the readers of his book entitled Fragments, to understand that society as a whole, and his foster parents specifically, shared an inability to believe in the unbelievable and to think the unthinkable. Like a modern day revisionist, he was brought up, and surrounded, by those who did not believe that he had survived the Holocaust; whether they believed in the Holocaust as an historical event in its totality is not absolutely clear. This text, because it has been challenged in so many ways, now raises core issues within several current debates.
The central debate from the literary perspective rests on the belief and the author's statement that he has written his book autobiographically; he writes as a witness of historical events and claims that he was there and these events happened to him. The publishers have now withdrawn the book because he has been accused of bearing false witness, of not only being absent from the events he describes, but of falsifying his life, his name and his personal story. Alongside this perjury, he has appropriated an event, a religion and a culture to which he does not belong. This part of the debate on the veracity of the text can be placed in the context of Holocaust writing and Holocaust memory that is itself a complex and fascinating area of study.
However the book has been read by many historians of the Holocaust,