The Betrayal of Innocence

Binjamin Wilkomirski can’t be sure of his name. Or his birth date. He thinks he may be about 57. He may have been born in Riga, Latvia.

Wilkomirski’s origins are clouded in a childhood ripped asunder by the Holocaust. His ability to consider any tangible chronology begins in 1945, when he was discovered wandering on the outskirts of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Allied soldiers. Auschwitz was apparently the last of several concentration camps young Binjamin considered “home” over a period of at least four years.

The first was called Majdanek. He was taken there as a tiny child by a woman in a gray uniform, after witnessing the execution of his father and being separated from his family. “ ‘Where to?’ I asked the gray uniform, clutching to the edge of her skirt to keep pace. ‘Majdanek,’ she said. ‘You can play there.’ ” But he swiftly learned at the gates of the concentration camp with the “beautiful name” that the gray lady had lied to him.

Now a respected classical musician in Switzerland, Wilkomirski recently visited this country on a book tour for “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood” (Schocken Books). His devastating account of coming of age in hell has just been awarded the 1996 Jewish Book Award for Autobiography, and will surely take its place with works by Elie Weisel and Primo Levi as classic firsthand accounts of the Holocaust.

Comparisons to Anne Frank’s famous diary are appropriate as well, for, with achingly simple prose, Wilkomirski lays bare the betrayal of childhood innocence. Educator Jonathan Kozol, in an impassioned response to the book in the Nation, predicts it will be studied as much by child psychologists as historians, “because it poses questions asked by those who work with spiritually tormented children everywhere.”

Before he was 8, the young Binjamin experienced horrors a child should never know and an adult mind can barely fathom. He saw rats eating their way through the swollen bellies of dead women. He learned to keep his feet warm by standing in excrement. One night he saw two “bundles” tossed into his barracks--bundles that turned out to be infants, so hungry that they devoured their tiny frozen fingers to raw bone.

Levi wondered whether, if he survived Auschwitz, he would know how to describe what happened, because “daily language is for the description of daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language of this other world.” In his memoir, Wilkomirski has found such a language. His unadorned writing (“Nothing but a rattling noise as they threw the bodies onto the cart”) creates gut-wrenching home movies of life in the camps.

The world described is a disembodied one. Binjamin is manipulated by forces beyond his control: Hands snatch at his wrists, shiny black boots aim kicks at his stomach. Just as inexplicably, other forces also protect him: Two big arms seize him and throw him from certain death on a suffocating cattle car; a woman’s foot reaches under a pile of rags where he is hiding to seal his mouth closed to prevent any sound that would give him away.

“People at that time had no faces,” he writes. “I knew the silhouettes of prisoner women. I knew the silhouettes of the different uniforms. But for me, there were no faces.”

By the end of the war, the traumatized child who is Binjamin Wilkomirski has lost his ability to speak. Now, one wonders, what will the voice of a man who has endured so much sound like?

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It is soft and kind, vulnerable and urgent. He speaks with a Swiss-German lilt. Reached by phone at a hotel in Miami, he’s clearly exhausted from speaking about those “knife-sharp” memories, which, as he writes, “still cut flesh if touched today.” Nevertheless, he gamely answers all questions, even when he must pause to collect his emotions.

We begin with a question about his process. “Recovered memory” is a controversial psychological technique, one used by therapists in cases of suspected child abuse when an adult patient has no memory, sometimes not even any knowledge of the long-ago offense. Because the images in “Fragments” are so startlingly sharp, some critics have assumed Wilkomirski relied on this method.

He is eager to refute this: “I saw in some reviews the term ‘recovered memory’ and somebody had to explain to me what that expression meant. It’s not really correct. I never lost my memory or had to work to get it back. I just was never allowed to speak about these things.

“My foster parents in Switzerland just said, ‘The place where you came from is so horrible, we must never talk about it.’ They said to me, ‘Look, in Switzerland people do not like Jews. It’s better that you forget everything.’ In a way, my foster parents didn’t know how to cope. You mustn’t forget it was another time. Child psychology did not exist at that time after the war.”

Until he met the woman who would become his second wife, 14 years ago, Wilkomirski had rarely spoken of his childhood in the camps. “My wife was so patient, she understood immediately. She said it was terrible to see my nightmares. Then I fell very ill and my wife said, ‘It looks like you swallow all the anger, all the aggression and it’s going against you own body. You have to speak out.’ ”

Four years ago, Wilkomirski finally agreed to visit a therapist. “She was a Jewish therapist who really knew what I was talking about, and with this lady I concentrated on my visual memories. It was really chaos in my memory and I wanted to make order. I didn’t intend to write a book. I am not a writer. I just wanted to write down these memories and give them to my wife, to my closest friends, and to my children.” (He has three children from his first marriage.)

Then his wife and others suggested he publish his story to help others open up and speak out. “So I said OK, but probably no one will read the book who is interested in that. And suddenly it was such a huge echo, a reaction for the book that I was completely overwhelmed.”

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This question of forgiveness--is it possible?--causes Wilkomirski the longest pause.

“That’s such a difficult question. I cannot forgive for what they did to others. I have not the right. I could maybe forgive one day just what they did to me.”

Wilkomirski recently concluded a book tour in Germany. “At first I was scared to go. Of course there are the neo-Nazis, there are the old fascists.” But he found young people eager to learn. “They want to understand, they want to know how to behave in the future. It gave me a little bit of hope.”

Perhaps the even more difficult question is whether Wilkomirski the man can forgive Binjamin the child.

In “Fragments,” Wilkomirski describes a devastating incident: Four young boys, all plagued by diarrhea, share a bunk of straw and are forbidden to use the toilet bucket during the night. To soil one’s bed means certain death. A new boy arrives and suffers painfully: “ ‘What shall I do? I need the bucket, I can’t hold on any longer,’ ” he cries and, “ ‘I can’t anymore! Help me, help!’ ” His screams threaten to bring the guards.

“ ‘Just go in the straw, right where you are,’ ” a loud voice in the dark advises the new boy. To his everlasting horror, Binjamin realizes the voice is his own: “I realized that I’d said right out loud, really loud, what I only thought I was thinking.” The new boy soils his bed, and in the morning he is executed.

For years Wilkomirski was tormented by this boy’s death. Two years ago he was in Israel and asked a Hasidic rabbi about his guilt. “The rabbi explained to me that, according to the law, a child of my age could not be guilty in this way. And it was a little bit of a comfort.”

As well as illustrating the insane cruelty of his captors, Wilkomirski’s tale of “the new boy” also shows the dawning of a child’s moral conscience. “I remember so clearly,” he says, “that, in that exact moment, I realized I didn’t behave like I should have.”

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Though Wilkomirski has found talking about his experiences with strangers to be exhausting, he also emphasizes that it has been healing. He is pleased that he has managed to combine his skills as a musician with his duties as a touring author. At home in Zurich, he plays clarinet with chamber groups, performs as a soloist and teaches.

“I brought my clarinet to some events,” he says proudly. “I read from the book and at the end I played some kind of klezmer [traditional Jewish music] cadenza and then people asked questions.”

When did he realize he was drawn to study music? “When I was growing up I felt that I had no audience. No one wanted to listen to me,” he explains, laughing. “I thought that if you do not want to listen to my voice, at least I can force you to listen to my song.”

The top photo, from “Frag- ments,” shows Wilkomirski at about age 10.