Invented ‘Memories’ Praised

A Holocaust Memoir in Doubt

Until Binjamin Wilkomirski’s truth came into conflict with his own legal identity, the slim memoir of his Jewish childhood in the concentration camps of Poland was hailed as a “small masterpiece,” a searing sketch of death and horror — rats rummaging among corpses, starving babies sucking fingers to the bone, a dying mother’s last glimpse of her son.

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Tearing babies in half

‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’

Recently I watched the testimony of a survior of the Kovno ghetto, in Lithuania. He spoke of the so-called Kinderaktion, in which the Germans rounded up all the children (and many of the elderly) and took them to the nearby Ninth Fort — a killing site outside Kovno — for execution. The witness was present in the room when an SS man entered and demanded from a mother the one-year-old infant she was holding in her arms. She refused to surrender it, so he seized the baby by its ankles and tore the body in two before the mother’s eyes.

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Auschwitz ashes

Today [Tue, 18 Aug 1998] my wife and I went to the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof (Cemetary) here in Hamburg, for a walk in the nice green parks (Spaziergang) and also to visit and pay our deepest respect to the thousands of German soldiers buried there (the youngest soldiers we saw buried there were 16 and 17 years young ). We sat for awhile with the 36,000 citizens of Hamburg who were killed in the fire bombing in 1943. People have planted small crosses and plaques along the sides of the mass graves — some listing the names of whole families, from Grandpop (Oma and Opa) through to the little blonde kids.

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