A Life in Pieces

Blake Eskin

The story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the man who claimed to have recovered memory of a childhood spent in the concentration camps, cannot fail to intrigue. It asks questions about identity, trauma, human pyschology, the value of historical authenticity and the role of the holocaust in culture. Blake Eskin can't be expected to supply all the answers but his book does contain one certainty at least: that Wilkomirski's account (as is now generally supposed) was an invention.

As he shows in A Life in Pieces, Blake Eskin had a personal motive for covering the Wilkomirksi story. There were Wilkomirskis (Americanized to Wilbur) in the family tree and for a time it was thought Binjamin was a distant cousin to the Eskin clan. There were members of Eskin's family who longed to claim kinship with Wilkomirski and were determined to trust his account.

Blake Eskin, however, was operating on a less emotional level and he seems to have had doubts from the beginning. Bit by bit he started checking Wilkomirski out. At the same time Eskin was unpicking the story for himself Wilkomirski's credibility was, in any case, unravelling. In 1998 a freelance Swiss journalist denounced Wilkomirski's book as a fiction. Within two years an investigation by his own publishers in Switzerland reached the same conclusion.

In a small way the Eskin family were victims of Wilkomirski. So Eskin's compassion and fair-minded tone is admirable. The result is a superbly readable account of Wilkomirski's rise and fall. It also reinforced my belief that Americans who obsess over their roots in Europe are looking for something that isn't there.