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Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn

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By DOREEN CARVAJAL

Published: October 14, 1999

For more than a year the publishers of a slender 155-page memoir of a young
Latvian Jewish orphan's early life of struggle in two concentration camps stood
firm against accusations that the memories of terror were nothing more than
vivid fantasies.

But today the German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, which had once vigorously
defended the author, Binjamin Wilkomirksi, announced with expressions of pity
that it was withdrawing from stores all hardcover copies of the book,
''Fragments.'' It was acting on information in a historian's 100-page
confidential report that had recently been presented to it that concluded that
Mr. Wilkomirski had not been a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born child named Bruno
Doessekker.

The announcement, in which the publisher continued to refer to the author as
Binjamin Wilkomirski, was made in a brief statement in what amounts to the
public square of international publishing, the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, which
draws more than 6,000 exhibitors annually. And it is likely that the Suhrkamp
announcement will have a ripple effect since many of the other publishers of the
book around the world had relied on the well-respected German publisher to vouch
for Mr. Wilkomirski.

Mr. Wilkomirski did not respond to messages left for him at his home in
Switzerland. But two people with knowledge of the report said that when he was
confronted with its findings, he stood up and declared defiantly, ''I am
Binjamin Wilkomirski.''

The frail, reclusive author has been immersed in an international controversy
since a Swiss writer, Daniel Ganzfried, first raised doubts publicly last year
about whether Mr. Wilkomirski was actually Jewish or even old enough to have
witnessed the terrors of two concentration camps in Poland. The author described
watching rats rummaging among the corpses and starving babies sucking their
fingers to the bone.

In translations, the book's simple, searing language has reaped a number of
honors like the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix
Memoire de la Shoah in France. Mr. Wilkomirski also toured the United States to
deliver lectures in major cities sponsored by the Umited States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.

But as the nagging doubts about his identity increased, Mr. Wilkomirski's
Swiss agent, Eva Koralnik, decided to hire a Swiss historian, Stefan Machler, to
investigate the author's murky past. Mr. Machler's preliminary report, six
months in the making, includes new information from documents, which indicate
that Mr. Wilkomirski was living in Switzerland and never left the country during
the war years, a period when, he has said, he was struggling to survive in the
camps of Majdnek and Auschwitz. A Swiss television station also reported this
week that the historian had tracked down the author's living natural father.

A final report is still scheduled to be issued, Suhrkamp said, but there was
enough troubling information to prompt the publisher to pull several hundred
hardcover copies in circulation in German bookstores and to banish the title
from the back list of its Jewish-interest publishing imprint, Judischer Verlag.
Suhrkamp will continue to sell paperback versions until the final report comes
out sometime in the next three weeks and the company makes what it says will be
its ultimate conclusion.

''We are very disappointed to make this decision,'' said Nadine Meyer, the
editor of Judischer. ''We are sad about it and we feel sorry about it, but also
have a responsiblity as a publisher.''

Heide Grasnick, a spokeswoman for Suhrkamp, said the company did not condemn
Mr. Wilkomirksi but rather felt sympathy for the author, who was raised by his
adoptive parents in Switzerland and spent decades searching for his identity.

While awaiting a response from Mr. Wilkomirski, Ms. Grasnick said, the
company decided to move right away to withdraw books published by Judischer
because it now seemed inappropiate for a Jewish publishing imprint to be
circulating the book.

''It's a problem,'' Ms. Grasnick said. ''What do you do when you have an
author who maintains that this is his identity and still believes it and there
are these documents?'' She added: ''I feel pity for him because I know him
personally. He's not a happy person.''

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