6.8 Mythopoeic Lies
I n 1998 I read Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Childhood,
1939 - 1948 (1996), which was believed to be the extraordinary memoir of a small
boy, separated from his parents during the massacre of Jews in Riga, then taken to
the Majdanek Nazi death camp, and then possibly to Auschwitz; and of how, at the
end of the war he was taken to a Jewish orphanage in Cracow, and then to
Switzerland where his adoptive parents repressed these memories by refusing to
acknowledge them. The dust jacket blurb of the 1996 first edition advised that in
piercingly simple scenes Wilkomirski provides the reader with “ ... fragments of his
recollections, with a child’s unadorned speech and unsparing vision, so that we too
become small again and see that bewildering, horrifying world through a child’s
eyes”. I t suggests that there is no intervention of adult interpretations, and that
from the mind of a little boy we experience love, terror, friendship but above all
survival, and an arduous return to the real world.
I have read extensively on the holocaust, its history and literature and I
have visited the most notorious of the death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and so I
read Fragments with immediacy. I felt angry and sickened because of the
extraordinary, terrifyingly stark testimony of a child whose life had been shattered,
a testimony of events of such vividness that I literally saw, felt and heard what had
happened. I experienced the terror of little Binjamin and I heard him weep. I saw
the faces of the Nazi guards at one moment playing with the children and the next
dashing a little boy’s head against a wall; I saw and smelled the pungent smoke
billowing from the crematoriums (even though there were no crematoriums at
Majdanek). I read the book in a state in which I seemed to hover in a large room
filled with piles of clothing and rags and below me saw the little Binjamin tunnelling
in through the rags and clothes, being hidden by gaunt-faced frightened women
prisoners. I felt somewhere within my own being an empathy with his opening
words:
I have no mother tongue, nor a father tongue either. My
language has its roots in the Yiddish of my eldest brother,
Mordechai, overlaid with the Babel-babble of an assortment of
children’s barracks in the Nazi death camps in Poland. I t was a
small vocabulary; it reduced itself to the bare essentials required
to say and to understand whatever would ensure survival. At
some point during this time, speech left me altogether and it was
a long time before I found it again (Wilkomirski, 1996:3).