Holocaust fact or fraud?

Dan Goldberg, TV Review, The Australian Jewish News, 1 November 2002

As It Happened: Truth And Lies screens on SBS TV on Saturday, 9 November 2002, at 7.30pm.

When Benjamin Wilkomirski's book, Fragments: Memoirs of a wartime childhood, was first published in 1995 it was hailed as a literary masterpiece, elevating Wilkomirski to the plane of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.

In his book, subsequently translated into 12 languages, Wilkomirski described his early childhood experiences in Majdanek and Auschwitz, where he claimed  he was experimented upon by the angel of death, Dr Joseph Mengele.

The fragments of his early memory were so vivid that child survivors suddenly found a voice that had been lost for more than 50 years.

But three years after its publication, Daniel Ganzfried, an Israeli journalist working in Switzerland for the news weekly Weltwoche, began finding holes in Wilkomirski's account of his childhood survival.

He alleged that Wilkomirski wasn't in Auschwitz. That he wasn't a child survivor. That he wasn't even Jewish. And that his name was not Benjamin Wilkomirski, but Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss Protestant born in 1941 - and he had documents  to prove it. Wilkomirski vehemently denied the allegations.

In short, Ganzfried claimed that Wilkomirski has perpetrated a Holocaust fraud, and that he has abused the victims of the Holocaust in what he called a "coldly-planned swindle".

This BBC documentary traces the whole affair, interviewing Wilkomorski/Grosjean, Ganzfried, Wilkomirski's alleged father and other child survivors. It uncovers the paper trial that led to Switzerland's archives and that forced Random House to withdraw the book and order an investigation.

The result was Stefan Maechler's new book, The Wilkomirski Affair. A study in biographical truth, which concluded that Fragments was not Holocaust fact, but Holocaust fiction.

No doubt to most Jews and all Holocaust survivors, its alleged fiction was tantamount to fraud.

Truth And Lies  is a comprehensive account  of how an alleged Holocaust survivor's autobiography became a scandal.

Fredrick Töben comments: What a pity that the 17 September 2002 Federal Court of Australia judgment has gagged me on truthfully responding to the above matter. Suffice it to say that the madness of Wilkomirski's account essentially confirms the Revisionist view that there is indeed a 'Holocaust' racket going on, and that the lies surrounding this period of World War Two history will shed the shroud of lies — in time!

The sickness of the 'Holocaust' industry is all pervasive.

[From the film: "There was everything there (with 'Wilkomirski' Bruno Grosjean). "You mean he wasn't circumcised?" ... "He isn't Jewish .. the motive for lying was to attract attention."]