Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a 1995 book, whose author used the pseudonym Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be a memoir of the Holocaust. It was debunked by Swiss journalist and writer in August 1998. The subsequent disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications sparked heated debate in the German- and English-speaking world. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. Swiss historian and anti-Semitism expert Stefan Maechler later wrote, "Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch." Author Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose real name is Bruno Dössekker (born Bruno Grosjean; 12 February 1941 in Biel/Bienne), is a musician and writer who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor. The book In 1995, Wilkomirski, a professional clarinettist and instrument maker living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). In the book, he described what he claimed were his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust. The supposed memories of World War II are presented in a fractured manner and using simple language from the point of view of the narrator, an overwhelmed, very young Jewish child. His first memory is of a man being crushed by uniformed men against the wall of a house; the narrator is seemingly too young for a more precise recollection, but the reader is led to infer that this is his father. Later on, the narrator and his brother hide out in a farmhouse in Poland before being arrested and interned in two Nazi concentration camps, where he meets his dying mother for the last time. After his liberation from the death camps, he is brought to an orphanage in Kraków and, finally, to Switzerland where he lives for decades before being able to reconstruct his fragmented past. First publication First published in German in 1995 by the Jüdischer Verlag (part of the highly respected Suhrkamp Verlag publishing house), Bruchstücke was soon translated into nine languages; an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway with the title Fragments appeared in 1996, published by Schocken. The book earned widespread critical admiration, most particularly in Switzerland and in the English-speaking countries, and won several awards, including the National Jewish Book Award in the United States, the Prix Mémoire de la