If someone comes and maintains that he has been inside Hell, we sympathize without reflection. He relieves us of the task of understanding Auschwitz. The manuscript ends up with the respected Zurich literary agent Liepman and, in 1995, finally appears under the title Fragments from a Childhood, 1939-1948 from the Jewish Press of Suhrkamp. Since then, Binjamin Wilkomirski has become a public figure. This child, now a mature person of flesh and blood, travels the world.
Translations appear in more than a dozen languages.
To date, the book has spawned three films, one play, many learned treatises, and untold feature stories and reviews. Perhaps Zoe Jenny's Blutenstaubzimmer , another small book that appeared several years later from the same publisher, is comparable to it. But that was reviewed as a novel, which lets it remain innocent. Such episodes must touch every reader's heart, so nothing can go wrong for the author, we think. We read further and ward off the vapidity that we notice between the coarseness of the portrayals and the language, which is like that of a poetry album.