I had not been affected as profoundly in reading previous Holocaust
accounts as I was this one. Soon after, I discovered that Wilkomerski and his story
had been called into question; that he was not who he claimed to be and his story
fraudulent. Some critics have suggested that Wilkomerski, or rather Dossekker, is
not even a Jew. I was surprised, as were other readers, some who had themselves
been internees in the Nazi camps. Measured against all conventions of evidence and
credibility, is his story fraudulent and of no account? I n one sense his account is a
fiction but in another sense it is almost shamanic in that Wilkomerski, we discover
upon investigation, has transmuted the events of his life through a process of
recension or metaphor with those of a child in a concentration camp and in this
sense it is true. What is extraordinary, however, is the exactness of the detail he
has provided of the life of a child in a Nazi death camp, so much so that even
survivors of the camps believed that he was genuine (Lappin, 1999:42-43).
This raises issues of the derivation of authorship. The literary hoax, if that’s
what it is, perpetrated by Dossekker aka Benjamin Wilkomerski, must certainly be
classed amongst the most intriguing of pseudo Holocaust biographies or hoaxes,
depending on the position of the critic. This hoax or faux-autobiography is
remarkable for its demystification of dominant Jewish cultural values, not only the
academic reception of post-Holocaust literature and of Jewish literature in particular,
but also concepts of authorship and historical scholarship that still prevail. On the
one hand, Fragments exposed the multiple conditions of authorship, questioning the
claim of originality; on the other hand, it exposed the many values that inform
(Holocaust) scholarship, questioning the claim of historical scholarship. By
deliberately presenting himself as a Holocaust survivor instead of an author,
Wilkomerski directed his reader’s attention to the cultural materials, to place,
Majdanek Nazi death camp, and then to another camp, possibly Auschwitz. This
was of course done to give Fragments an air of authenticity but it also touched on
something in the collective psyche, not only to Holocaust survivors and Jews but
also to non-Jews alike.
I n the beginning of her article on this issue Lappin writes:
... did it matter so much whether Fragments was fact or fiction?
Wasn’t it enough that its prose was so moving and powerful that it
made hundreds of thousands of readers think about and perhaps
feel – if not understand – the Holocaust? (Lappin, 1999:15).
ron
(Ron)
#1