Binjamin Wilkomirski - The Book

The Book

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski, a professional clarinetist and instrument maker living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). In the book, he described what he claimed were his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust. The supposed memories of World War II are presented in a fractured manner and using simple language from the point of view of the narrator, an overwhelmed, very young Jewish child. His first memory is of a man being crushed by uniformed men against the wall of a house; the narrator is seemingly too young for a more precise recollection, but the reader is led to infer that this is his father. Later on, the narrator and his brother hide out in a farmhouse in Poland before being arrested and interned in two Nazi concentration camps, where he meets his dying mother for the last time. After his liberation from the death camps, he is brought to an orphanage in Krakow and, finally, to Switzerland where he lives for decades before being able to reconstruct his fragmented past.