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Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn

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By DOREEN CARVAJAL

Published: October 14, 1999

In his book, first published in 1995, Mr. Wilkomirski portrayed himself as an
orphaned young Latvian Jew despite Swiss legal records that indicated that he
was born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1941 to an unmarried Swiss woman who was
Christian, Yvonne Grosjean. He was later adopted by middle-class parents, the
Doessekkers.

Publishers said that the report was the result of a rare formal contract
among Mr. Wilkomirski; his literary agent, Ms. Koralnik, and Mr. Machler, who
struck an agreement to look at all of Mr. Wilkomirski's documentation. Mr.
Machler was given power of attorney to request private government documents.

As part of that contract, Mr. Wilkomirski has the right to review the report
and to respond within the next 20 days, Ms. Grasnick of Suhrkamp said.

Ms. Koralnik started sharing the report with the book's various publishers
this week. ''It's the only way we can do this to bring an end to this matter,''
Ms. Koralnik said of her decision to commission a report. ''So we decided that
we owed something to the reader, to the publisher and everybody who read the
book.''

She declined to describe her own reaction to the report, but said, 'I think
that the fact that the book was withdrawn speaks for itself.''

Carol Janeway, Mr. Wilkomirski's American editor and translator for Schocken
Books, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, said she had received a copy of the
preliminary report on Tuesday but would probably not take any action until after
reading it. When doubts about the book were raised, Ms. Janeway defended it last
November as ''remarkable testimony'' and said the publisher was not about to
''vet every manuscript and every author on an adversarial basis.''

Leon Stabinsky, the president of the California Association of Holocaust
Survivors, said that Suhrkamp should have taken this latest step a long time ago
because it had fielded early allegations from a former Swiss newspaper editor
that the book was a work of fiction.

But the view was far from unanimous even among Holocaust survivors. Mr.
Stabinsky formed his own group after splitting off from the Holocaust Child
Survivors Group of Los Angeles, in part because of feuding over whether the
book's author was telling the truth.

Correction: October 16, 1999, Saturday An article on Thursday about a
German publisher's decision to withdraw ''Fragments,'' a disputed memoir about a
Jewish orphan's experience in Nazi camps, referred incorrectly to an
organization of Holocaust survivors in quoting its president, Leon Stabinsky, as
saying that the publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, should have withdrawn the book far
earlier. It is the California Association of Child Holocaust survivors, not the
California Association of Holocaust Survivors.

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