Fragments won several literary prizes, including a National Jewish Book award, and Wilkomirski himself became a celebrity-survivor, giving readings and lectures across the world.

	Wiesel's Holocaust Mystery
	"The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the ne-cessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. (50) ... The claims of Holocaust uniqueness are intellectually barren and morally discre-ditable, yet they persist. The question is, Why? In the first place, unique suffering confers unique entitlement. (47) ... The Holocaust is effectively a 'mystery' religion. Thus Wiesel intones that the Holocaust 'leads into darkness, negates all answers, lies outside, if not beyond history'. ... Only the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel is qualified to divine its mystery. And yet, The Holocaust's mys-tery, Wiesel avows, is 'noncommuni-cable; we cannot even talk about it.' Thus, for his standard fee of $ 25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine), Wiesel lectures that the 'secret' of Auschwitz's 'truth lies in silence'. (45) ... Apart from the frailties of memory, some Holocaust survivor testimony may be suspect for additional reasons. Because survivors are now revered as secular saints, one doesn't dare question them. Preposterous statements pass without comment. Elie Wiesel reminisces in his acclaimed memoir that, recently liberated from Buchenwald and only eighteen years old, 'I read The Critique of Pure Reason - don't laugh! - in Yiddish.' Leaving aside Wiesel's acknowledgment that at the time 'I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar,' The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish. Wiesel also re-members in intricate detail a 'mysterious Talmudic scholar' who 'mastered Hunga-rian in two weeks, just to surprise me.' Wiesel tells a Jewish weekly that he 'often gets hoarse or loses his voice' as he silently reads his books to himself 'aloud, inwardly.' And to a New York Times repor-ter, he recalls that he was once hit by a taxi in Times Square. 'I flew an entire block. I was hit at 45th Street and Broad-way, and the ambulance picked me up at 44th. The truth I present is unvarnished.' Wiesel sighs, 'I cannot do otherwise'." (82)
	Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, London 2000, numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in the book.

Serious doubts had been raised and then ignored about the work from the very beginning. Even worse was the indiscriminate rush to canonize yet another survivor-saint following the book's publication. The height of this absurdity, reports Maechler, came when Wilkomirski addressed a meeting of the Holocaust Child Survivors Group of Los Angeles, and was tearfully embraced there by a woman named Laura Grabowski, who claimed to remember him from the camps. It later turned out that she was actually a non-Jewish, US-born woman named Lauren Stratford, who had falsely accepted Holocaust reparations and had previously claimed to be the childhood victim of ritual abuse by Satanic cults.

Like other adherents of the so-called "recovered memory" movement in the US, Wilkomirski himself is seen by Maechler to be not some kind of deliberate con-artist, but a psychologically disturbed individual, who gradually created, and then accepted as truth, his fake Holocaust-survivor identity. To this day, even when confronted with absolute proof of his deception, Wilkomirski refuses to admit his scam. Even worse, some of his and Fragments initial admirers refuse to back down from their position­­and claim that to now attack the author and his work is to question the very veracity of the Holocaust.

Why were so many people initially fooled by Fragments? Reading it for the first time, it's not hard to imagine why. Wilkomirski does clearly have some literary talent; what's more, he very cleverly constructed his impressionistic book ­­ deliberately or not ­­ in such a manner that it evades easy detection. At the very beginning, he writes: "My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, and events, which still cut flesh if touched today. Mostly a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological fit."

Although Holocaust experts were able to later pick out inaccuracies in the text ­­ such as the description of a rat-plague in Majdanek that never took place ­­ it is unlikely a layman would detect Wilkomirski's forgery.

What is less understandable, however, is why this slim, vague and over-wrought work received such critical acclaim. The answer, of course, is because it deals with the Holocaust, an event that has been lifted out of the realm of normative critical perspective, and elevated into a pseudo-religious sphere of sanctified legend.

No wonder then that some academics are now turning a more jaundiced eye towards the way in which the memory of the Holocaust is increasingly being used ­­ and misused. Maechler himself, at the end of his report, writes: "The rise and fall of the figure of Binjamin Wilkomirski reveals more than just the mechanisms that are now part of the Shoah and its remembrance, and it would be wrong to discuss the phenomenon only within that framework.

"Nonetheless it can be said that the Wilkomirski phenomenon, from the origins of his memories to their reception and exposure, is a litmus test revealing how we all ­­ depending on the nature of our involvement ­­ deal with its aftermath."

Being cautious to a fault, Maechler doesn't come out and say "how we all" did on this particular litmus test. But the implication is clear, and I don't hesitate to say it: this affair is a clear sign that something has gone awry in the way we are remembering the Holocaust and dealing with its aftermath. A Wilkomirski is in many ways as dangerous, if not more so, than a Holocaust-denier like David Irving. We would do well to keep our guard up.