5 comments about A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

1. I am very interested in the Fragments affair and was eager to read this new account of it. Unfortunately I found this book disappointing. It adds little new to the other published works, notably historian Stefan Maechler's excellent account which was published in English last year. While Eskin has a good style, his narrative is jumbled, he skips around a lot and it is often hard to work out what is going on. Also Eskin virtually ruins his own book by going on endlessly about himself when it is really not relevant to Wilkomirski's story. There are too many unnecessary uses of the words I, me, and myself by Eskin to make this a focussed study of the Fragments affair.



2. When I read Fragments I could not understand how anyone could have believed Binjamin Wilkomirski's story. It was incredible that a child as small as he claimed to have been could have survived a Nazi death camp (much less two) or recalled the things he claimed to remember. By the time I read it, the book had been exposed as fiction. But the tale seemed to me so weak that I doubted I would have found it any more convincing had I read it in 1996, before the scandal broke.

   As a longtime student of the Holocaust, I was therefore fascinated by Wilkomirski's exposure as Bruno Doessekker, the Swiss birth-child of Yvonne Berthe Grosjean, who surrendered her son for adoption in 1945; he was ultimately adopted by the Doessekkers.

   Stefen Maechler's Wilkomirski Affair (2001) provided a superb and thorough expose of the fraud Bruno Grosjean Doessekker perpetrated. Maechler pursued every possible lead, compared each minute detail in Doessekker's narration of "events" with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer and accounts of other child survivors. He interviewed members of the Doessekker and Grosjean families and more. The most damning evidence Maechler unearthed was that in 1981, Doessekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." He received a third of her estate.

   Wilkomirski/Doessekker had also used Laura Grabowski, who claimed to have known him in a children's home in Krakow, to "corroborate" his story. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Sideshow: The Real Story of Lauren Stratford. Lauren Stratford's Social Security number is the same as that of Grabowski, who used it to make a false survivor's claim. Maechler even found similarities between Satan's Sideshow and Fragments. But Maechler did not answer the question of how Wilkomirski/Doessekker drew people in.

   Blake Eskin masterfully picks up that loose strand from a personal perspective: His maternal great-grandmother Anna Wilbur had immigrated in 1929 to New York from Riga--the Latvian city Wilkomirski/Doesseker said he was from. Her family had changed their surname name from Wilkomirski to Wilbur on their arrival in New York. Moreover, Anna Wilbur's brother and sister-in-law had in 1926 lived at 80 Moskva Street, the same address Wilkomirski/Doessekker claimed as his. Thus was Eskin's family taken in.

   They understandably longed for news of distant relations left behind in Riga, years before the Holocaust. They knew existentially what the Holocaust had done. They had not yet personalized the loss, however. In that context, it is not surprising that Eskin's mother, Eden Force Eskin, and her first cousin once removed, Miriam Vim, wanted to believe that Wilkomirski/Doesseker was Anna Wilbur's long lost nephew.

   Eskin takes readers on his two-fold journey, as he discovers both Doessekker/Wilkomirski's fraud and his family's roots in Riga and Israel. He covers some of the same ground as Maechler, but he adds a human dimension of which Maechler's sturdy reportorial account is devoid.

   This book opens new intellectual and emotional understanding to losses suffered by the world's Jewish community during the Holocaust. Even now, families that once believed they had completely escaped that terrible trauma are discovering whom and what they lost--family, culture, language, and an entire world. Though but one example of that discovery, Eskin's investigations prove somewhat archetypal.

   The Nazi Holocaust extinguished the lives of roughly a third of the Jewish people. Some families, like Eskin's, remained for years oblivious to their personal losses. But Eskin shows that very few were untouched. In that context, it's easy to see why families still hope to find their members among the living. And that context is the only thing that can lay the Wilkomirski/Doessekker fraud to its final and necessary rest. Alyssa A. Lappen




3. I enjoyed "A Life in Pieces" very much! Far from the narrative being jumbled, I found Eskin's weaving together of his personal search for his family's roots, along with the related story of the Wilkomirski hoax, very skillful. The story is told on 2 levels. It was the fraudulent claims of Bruno Grosjean/Doessekker, AKA Binjamin Wilkomirski, which ironically awakened interest in the author's ancestors, since his mother's family name was originally Wilkomirski. After a family reunion to meet the bogus 'relative', the author details his attempts to learn of his family from elderly relatives. This leads ultimately to a visit to Riga, Latvia, where the family's forebears came from. He then moves on to Israel, where long lost relatives, descendents of that remnant of the family that remained in Europe, are located. Eskin's own experience as a 3rd. generation Jewish American mirrors those of many, like myself, whose families had relatives who escaped from or who became victims of the Nazis. This book was written as part memoir. Therefore, his use of 'I', 'me' and 'myself' is wholly appropriate. It is a fascinating story which raises all sorts of troubling philosophical issues. These issues include the plight of former child survivors, false memories, victimhood, and family. Unfortunately, these issues more than ever before, took form with 'Wilkomirski' and his claims. I very strongly recommend this thought provoking work.



4. In a word, too much "me", too little on the affair Wilkomirski. As the author recounts, Wilkomirski repeatedly refused to be interviewed, and despite valiant, pushy attempts, Eskin never succeeds in cornering his quarry. But descriptions of these nonencounters do not make for compelling reading. Nor do long ramblings about the extended Wilkomirski family. With little to write about, Eskin falls back on writing about himself, and neither he nor his relatives have a story to tell that merits book length treatment. This is essentially a family memoir piggybacked over the Wilkomirski affair. Eskin plays up his tangential connection to the curious Fragments episode, but the family connection is based on hope, not reality, and the writing, amorphous and rambling, reflects the lack of content.

   Most important, I miss entirely a moral viewpoint. The crux of the issue is evaded: is there an objective truth, or is being a Holocaust survivor an entirely subjective matter of "feeling" like a survivor? The payoff at the end - the discovery of a tangible connection to distant relatives in Israel - is awfully thin stuff for the overlong buildup that preceded it.




5. I was so much looking forward to reading this book to learn the details of the author of Fragments, but ultimately this book left me with more questions than I had before I read it, not to mention bringing up more issues and then leaving them unresolved. For example, was Binjamin tattooed with a number on his arm? We are told that Varena is not Binjamin/Bruno's wife, but then are never told who she is or what connection she has to him. Was any DNA evidence ever made public, or is Binjamin/Bruno's true identity an ongoing mystery? I am reading the article in Granta #66 by Elena Lappin, and in the first few pages have learned that Binjamin/Bruno was married prior to his relationship with Varena and has three children! What a shocker. Why was this not mentioned in Eskin's book? Where are the children now and what do they think about the whole Wilkomirski affair? In any case, this book is passable as an introduction to the case, but I do agree with another reviewer here who stated that Eskin's personal history, other than being the catalyst to his investigation of the Wilkomirski affair, is really not very interesting (and this from a lover of memoirs and family history).

1 comments about Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski.

1. This invaluable collection belongs, in the best possible world, next to a collection of documentary fiction about experiences in the labor and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau -- We Were In Auschwitz. These letters to and from Tadeusz Borowski not only help correct some of the mistakes about the publication of his most widely anthologized story, "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," but give a much needed portrait of Polish people--artists, writers, mothers and fathers, all across the ideological field-- post WW2. The translator for this collection (as well as the Welcome Rain version of We Were in Auschwitz) is very knowledgable about the time, having lived through the German occupation and deported as a child to a work camp (Poles as Slaves)from her native Warsaw. The reader not only gets a sense in these letters from the prison in Warsaw (pawkiak), letters from Auschwitz, and from Munich post-war and Warsaw and Berlin, of how tenuous post-war existence was for people who quite literally went to hell and back, but provides first-person, private accounts of what it means to put a life back together in the wake of great destruction. Borowski is still taught and well-known and yet controversial in Poland today. Borowski has often been accused of nihilism, and of writing like Celine. This collection of letters demonstrates a fuller range of his personality, showing his youth, affectionate humour, idealism, and indebtedness to a vast network of Polish intellectuals, artists, family and friends-- as well as testifying to a massive grief and dislocation.

5 comments about Never Tell Your Name.

1. Josie Levy Martin wrote this memoir in the third person, "The child Josie," not referring to herself directly as the protagonist. The memories floating up she experienced during her tender years must have been too painful to face. How can a little girl at age four understand, that from one day to the next she must not speak of her parents, she must never mention her own name, she must never say anything that might give away her Jewish heritage. Josie was terrified, and that fear is palpable on every page. The book has been written with courage and with the author's wounded heart. There was the trauma of separation from her parents as well as other traumas suffered. Because of her age Josie did not understand any of this, making what was happening to her worse. This affected Josie as it would have other children in similar circumstances, and settled deep in their psyche and often haunted them for the rest of their lives. Add guilt to this. When statistics became known, Josie's mother told her, you have to be grateful, you were one out of ten Jewish children who survived. This produced a "survivors" guilt experienced by many Jews who did not perish in the Holocaust. Then add to this a newly aquired "Catholic" guilt. (e.g. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes) This new religion at first confused the young Jewish child, but Josie was a good little girl who tried to blend in and conformed. She was instinctively grateful and drawn to the kind nun who took it upon herself to hide her in the convent during the German occupation, placing her own life in grave danger should her action have been discovered by the Nazis. Josie sadly never had the chance to see the kind nun, Soeur St. Cybard, again. By the time Josie Levy traveled back to Lesterps, France, the nun had died. But with this loving and elegaic memoir, Josie has sat a fitting monument to Soeur St. Cybard and to those who helped the Jewish population in France during the dark times of Hitler's occupation.
   I write this review from the perspective of a German woman who lived in Berlin as a child during those years, and who has wrestled with the question of the collective guilt I have felt. The question of, "Do I, as a former German child have a right to recall my own memories concerning the horrors of war, when we have caused so much suffering for others?"
   I urge you to read Josie Levy Martin's memoir, you will not read of dramatic horrors, but of a tearing apart of families, and a gentle suffering that would haunt the traumatized child for years to come, and this memoir would add to your understanding of human kindness and human suffering.



2. If Josie ever gets to read these reviews on her brilliant book, I would like to tell her that I am the only sister and only sibling of the late Dr Michael Jospe who played a large part in helping Josie understand the survivors guilt she found so difficult to manage. She speaks so beautifully of him in this book. Michael passed away suddenly on July 4th 2000, and perhaps it is fitting that he left us on the day of American Independence. We live in Johannesburg, South Africa - Michael was born in South Africa and emigrated to the US in the late 1960s. This is the second time I am ordering Josie's book to give to a friend who comes from a similar background to ours. It helps me to remember what he meant to everyone, not only as a psychologist, but as a friend. He is deeply and sadly missed.



3. When I learned of Josie Levy Martin's experience as a child during WWII I had to read her written account of it in her book, "Never tell Your Name." I was unable to put the book down, reading it from cover to cover in one sitting. The style in which she chose to portray her experience, that as seen through the eyes of a young child, as well as the painfully poignant content of her story left me greatly moved.
   My own experience as a slightly older child during WWII, adopted in infancy by a generous and loving Roman Catholic family, contrasted greatly with that of Josie during the same period. Shortly following the end of WWII I read a book entitled "Lest We Forget." It provided a detailed account of the Holocaust, complete with many photographs of what the liberating soldiers found in the concentration camps where many Jews of all ages were systematically murdered. Obviously horrifying in its details, reading Josie's book records another kind of suffering inflicted on Jewish victims by the Nazis and their collaborators. Through Josie's courageous account of what she and her parents experienced, we have been provided with another compelling version of "Lest We Forget."



4. Once I began the first page of Josie Martin's Never Tell Your Name, I was unable to put the book down until the very last page. This early autobiography of a very small girl, with its vivid recall of details of French resistance against German occupation during World War II, of resolve against all odds, of unconditional love and sacrifice, will leave the reader with a new and better understanding of what it meant to be Jewish in the Europe of the second world war. These memories, retold through the eyes, thoughts and words of a four-year old child, are compelling, harrowing, poignant and inspiring.



5. Maybe I have read too many accounts of survival during the Holocaust, but I've never before reading this book encountered a first person account told in a third person voice. For me, that was off-putting, although I can certainly understand that a years-long separation from her parents as a six year old might be too difficult and painful to remember in the same way as other survivors do their own first-hand experiences.
   
   It is very sad that after the war, Josie's Alsatian mother constantly noted that the years of separation, hiding and starving suffered by their family, and especially the child, was "nothing" compared to the sufferings of those who survived the most notorious death camps. Of course, anything can seem more or less difficult in comparison to others' experience. But for any child to survive the miseries that Josie did was, indeed, something very large, something that forever scarred her.
   
   Nevertheless, the third person method Levy Martin employs to recount her personal experiences somehow makes them less poignant to readers than they might be otherwise.
   
   It seems most likely that Levy Martin has not yet healed as completely as she believes. Otherwise, she might have been able to cope with telling her travails in the first person.
   
   This is not to say the story isn't moving; I read the book in one afternoon, hardly putting it down. I recommend this account highly, especially for anyone who works with traumatized children. The wounds Levy Martin describes are not clinical in nature, of course, but they help therapists and parents understand deeply the pain of especially young trauma victims.
   
   Yet as personal Holocaust histories go, this one does not evoke quite the same latitude of emotion as such other, best-selling personal accounts as Gerda Weisman Klein's All But My Life, Alicia Appleman-Jurman's Alicia or Ruth Altbeker Cyprys' Jump for Life.
   
   Nevertheless, highly recommended.

No comments about East of Time (Alabama Fire Ant).

No comments about To Hope or Die - From Warsaw Uprising to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and after: Memoirs of a Survivor.

1 comments about My Brother's Voice.

1. What a great read! Mr. Nasser's incredible and heart-wrenching experiences during the Holocaust are presented to us as a testimony to the powers of love, faith, and the will to survive. It is refreshing to read an autobiography that not only describes the cruel and unjustified treatment from the SS but also the kindness of some Wehrmacht soldiers, not merely the every-man-for-himself stories prevalent in many Holocaust books but how helping other prisoners lifts the human spirit. In other words, Mr. Nasser's book gives us not only the dark aspects of the Holocaust (and they're very dark), but reminds us intelligence, attitude, and hope can lighten the heaviest of loads.

5 comments about Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism (Modern Jewish History).

1. Truly a fascinating story. I was born in Romania and went to college in Cluj during the late sixties. The period of time between 1945-1954 was always a mystery to me. Egon Balas has opened my eyes on many aspects of my country's secret past. The book is very engaging and kept me captivated until the end. Egon's story is representative of what happened to Transylvanian Jews who were communists before and after the war. While not all stories have happy endings like Egon's, I know of many people with similar stories. None of them talked to me in so many details and so eloquently as Egon did in his book. I am greatful to Egon for making this very personal account of his life public, so that the story of the communist Jews of Cluj is not lost forever. Great book !



2. Professor Balas from Carnegie Mellon University is one of the most respected members of the Operations Research community. I am a big fan of Professor Egon Balas, having read his papers on the "Lift and Project" method in solving mixed integer programming problems.

   Nothing moved me as much as this book though. I agree with the reviewer from Toronto, the book is definitely a great scientific mind at work, where Egon describes clearly and in vivid detail all that he went through, without any bitterness or resentments.

   A triumph of the human spirit against all odds and adversaries!




3. If ever I get imprisoned I'll remember to use a coffee-stained napkin and stale bread to make a chess set. I also learned from Egan Balas that to exercise in a confined space one takes an odd number of steps - else one walks in circles. Algorithmic ingenuity enabled him to successfully take up mathematics in his late 30s, against the conventional wisdom that good mathematicians do their work when young, and become an outstanding professor of industrial administration, applied mathematics and operations research at Carnegie Mellon University.

   He tells stories of his lives - escaping death narrowly - "according to my own taste", making it one of the most compelling biographies I have ever read.
   This would be an extraordinary thriller if it were fiction - but it's not, it's real. The highly personal account of how a Transylvian Jew became a revolutionary worker, a dapper diplomat, a tortured prisoner and a creative academic takes one through some absolutely awful scenes. Balas' craftiness enabled him to survive and his toughness under severe torture protected his friends. This is not some second hand account of Communist and Nazi hate, Balas drags the reader through his pain and suffering. There are happier moments - such as when he comes out of prison and addresses his daughter - not realizing that he's speaking to a younger sibling born in his absence and that his daughter has grown considerably.

   For anyone who wants to understand willpower and survival in Hungary and Romania during the 2nd world war this is a must read. Besides historical interest, the story's suspense makes it an ideal gift for thriller and spy story readers.




4. This memoir lays out in exquisite prose a touching, insightful journey through a series of challenges that are almost incomprehensible to those of us who have grown up in happier times. As I read I could not help but wonder how I would measure up to the ethical and moral standards set by Professor Balas. His academic excellence and stature are well known to all of us who have worked in any field related to mathematical programming; this book makes it clear that in addition to being an exemplary academic in every way, Professor Balas is also a very great gentleman, in the best British sense of the word. I can only say I am proud to have known him.



5. I am a PhD student doing Operations Research - more specificly, Mixed Integer Programming - that is why I purchased this book, just because of the curiousity about the autobiography of a brilliant mathematician in our field.
   
   I started this book in the end of Feb and couldn't help stopping digging into his unbelievable and inspiring life stories and have already started the third time. Everytime I get new gains and thoughts. First, it is definitely a good encouragement for my research work, by his enthusiasm and passion for knowledge and mathematics; in addition, I always can judge my attitude to life and people by learning from his experience and his eternal optimistic awareness. Here is a book, where you can find faith, justice, intelligence, honesty and love.

No comments about Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years - A Boy's Tale.

2 comments about Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.

1. Reading this book has completely altered my perception on the human being, individually, and as a whole. The events that took place in Auschwitz were so horrific and yet they mustn't be forgotten. Any person claiming a reasonable level of education must read this book. It will literally change the reader forever.



2. For Dr. Nyiszli to bear witness to the day-in and day-out horror of Auschwitz, and still be able to write about it, is quite unreal. Working as a pathologist for Dr. Mengele in the confines of the crematorium compound, we read of the horrors of the camp, and how both inmates & guards coped.

No comments about My Lucky Star.