Binjamin Wilkomirski - Exposure

Exposure

In April 1999, Wilkomirski's literary agency commissioned the Zurich historian Stefan Maechler to investigate the accusations. The historian presented his findings to his client and to the nine publishers of Fragments in the autumn of that year. Maechler concluded that Ganzfried's allegations were correct, and that Wilkomirski's alleged autobiography contradicted historical facts.

Maechler described in detail in his report how Grosjean-Wilkomirski had developed his fictional life story step by step and over decades. Most fascinating was his discovery that Wilkomirski’s alleged experiences in German-occupied Poland closely corresponded with real events of his factual childhood in Switzerland, to the point that he suggested the author rewrote and reframed his own experience in a complex manner, turning the occurrences of his real life into that of a child surviving the Holocaust. It remained unclear to Maechler whether Grosgean-Wilkomirski had done this deliberately or if the writer actually believed what he had written, but he was skeptical that the writer was a “cold, calculating crook”, as Ganzfried assumed. (Maechler, 2001b, pp. 67–9) Amongst other things, Maechler revealed that a Holocaust survivor which Wilkomerski had claimed to have known in the camps, a woman named Laura Grabowski, had been earlier unearthed as a fraud, and had previously used the name Lauren Stratford to write about alleged satanic ritual abuse - a story which itself had been debunked nearly a decade earlier.

Maechler’s first report was published in German in March 2000; the English edition appeared one year later (Maechler, 2001a) and included the original English translation of Fragments which had been withdrawn by the publisher after Maechler’s report. Subsequently, the historian published two essays with additional findings and analysis (Maechler, 2001b, 2002), while Ganzfried (2002) published his own controversial version of the case (s. Oels, 2004; Maechler, 2002). Journalist Blake Eskin (2002) covered the affair. Prior to the exposure, Eskin wrote and told the story of Wilkomirski's trip to the USA to become reunited with people he claimed to be distant family, of which Eskin was a part. This story was aired in acts One and Two of This American Life episode 82, "Haunted". The writer Elena Lappin (1999) published an extensive report in May 1999. She had become acquainted with Wilkomirski two years before, when the Jewish Quarterly awarded him its prize for nonfiction. At the time, she was editor of that English magazine. In the course of her research, she identified a number of contradictions in Wilkomirski's story and came to believe that Fragments was fiction. In addition, she reported that Wilkomirski's uncle, Max Grosjean, said that as children he and his sister Yvonne (Wilkomirski's biological mother) had been Verdingkinder (or "earning children") - in other words, that they had been part of the old Swiss institution of orphaned children working for families, with overtones of child slavery. Eskin’s interest in Wilkomirski had its origins in genealogy: his family had ancestors in Riga and, initially, they believed that the author of Fragments could perhaps be a long-lost relative. In the same year (2002) the public prosecutor of the canton of Zurich announced that she found no evidence of criminal fraud. She added that a DNA test she had ordered had confirmed that Wilkomirski and Grosjean were the same person.