False Holocaust Testimony, Holocaust Denial, and

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False Holocaust Testimony, Holocaust Denial, and Post-Truth Political Culture
Thesis · September 2017

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False Holocaust Testimony, Holocaust Denial, and
Post-Truth Political Culture
Andrew Marsden
Dissertation presented in the University of Salford for the Degree of MA Literature, Culture,
Modernity 2017
FALSE HOLOCAUST TESTIMONY, HOLOCAUST DENIAL, AND POST-TRUTH
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................................. ii
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................................... iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.......................................................................................................................... iv
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE: “THE TRUTH OF A LIFE”: FRAGMENTS AND THE WILKOMIRSKI AFFAIR ........................ 8
CHAPTER TWO: “#HOLOHOAX”: THE RESURGENCE OF HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA
.............................................................................................................................................................. 26
CONCLUSION......................................................................................................................................... 34
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 40
i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to begin by thanking Dr Jane Kilby for agreeing to be my supervisor, despite already
having more than enough MA dissertations to supervise before I pitched my initial thoughts
to her. Thank you for your swift responses to any queries I had, and thank you for your
encouragement throughout the process.
I would also like to thank Sarah Wetton, Simon Foulds, Dr Claudia Rees, and the rest of the
staff at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum for their time and advice before and
during my visit to the centre as part of my research.
Thanks to the support of my parents, Denise (who helped me to consider going back to
university to do an MA degree) and Doug (whose interest in the Holocaust has probably
influenced mine).
Finally, a massive ‘thank you’ to my wife Rachel, for her belief in me and her willingness to
accompany me to the Holocaust Centre in the UK and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in
the name of research, as well as her help and support in reading my drafts and offering
advice/pointing out any mistakes of this dissertation and all my previous assignments! I
honestly do not think I could have got through the whole MA degree programme without her
there to push me onwards.
ii
ABSTRACT
The usage of the term ‘post-truth’ grew in late 2016 and continued into 2017 following two
very divisive election campaigns which saw a resurgence in populist politics. The culture
surrounding post-truth politics is reliant on the public hearing arguments which are
emotionally appealing, despite being factually questionable. The maturation of the culture of
post-truth has coincided with a rise in hate crime, especially online through social media.
This dissertation aims to apply issues around post-truth to Holocaust studies. It begins by
outlining what post-truth is and what implications this could have upon those who are
learning about the Holocaust as well as those who may wish to deny that the Holocaust
happened. An exploration of the origin and changing reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
false Holocaust testimony, Fragments (1996), is used against the context of post-truth culture
to examine issues around personal narrative, postmodernist interpretations of history,
traumatic memory, and the reception of Holocaust testimonies. It looks at how such an
emotionally charged book saw its author lauded, before revelations about his true past opened
up arguments around truth and Holocaust testimony and saw Wilkomirski turn from
‘survivor’ to pariah. The dissertation then goes on to explore how Holocaust denial and
revisionism has been able to increase online, especially through social media sites, and how a
post-truth culture, with its ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’, can be used to the advantage of
deniers.
iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Twitter Timeline from www.twitter.com .................................................................... 5
iv
INTRODUCTION
As 2016 drew to a close, Oxford English Dictionaries (OED) sought to pick their “Word of
the Year”, the one word which over the course of the year “has attracted a great deal of
interest” (Oxford English Dictionaries [OED], 2016, para. 1). The teams in both the UK and
USA selected the same word: post-truth. To the OED, post-truth is an adjective which in their
definition is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less
influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (ibid.). The
term had gained increased usage and prominence when it entered mainstream media news
and political commentary, especially following the UK’s decision to vote to leave the
European Union in June and the election of political outsider, Donald Trump, to the position
of President of the United States of America in November, two election results which had
seemingly confounded predictions of victory for their opposing sides. For the journalist Evan
Davies, the term was “an expression of frustration and anguish from a liberal class
discombobulated by the political disruptions of 2016” (Davies, 2017, p. xii). In the new post-
truth political landscape, logical appeals to reason through factual statements were deemed
less powerful than appealing to the emotional responses of the electorate. To the sections of
society who felt that they had been ignored by the traditional political and cultural elite, truth
and facts seemed less important than promises to “take back control” or “make America great
again”, even though the exact details of what enacting these promises would entail were lost
amongst the heightened rhetoric on the campaign trails. Such emotional appeals “invite us not
to think, [therefore] the literal truth of anything underlying them is never at the forefront of
the mental appraisal we give them” (ibid. p. 137). In addition, the post-truth culture saw an
increase in what has become known as ‘fake news’: “hoax-based stories that perpetuate
hearsay, rumors, and misinformation” (Mihailidis & Viotty, 2017, p. 444). Fake news stories
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often rely on sensationalist content, written with the intention of provoking a strong
emotional reaction from the reader, but appear to be from a genuine media outlet.
What was unusual about the political climate heralded by the post-truth era was not so
much that “more lies were told (on the basis that lies have always been told), it was that some
voters demonstrated an inclination to accept them” (Davis, 2017, p. 284). As 2016 gave way
to 2017, the post-truth climate developed further shortly after the first press conference held
following the inauguration of Trump as the President of the USA. During that conference, the
(then) White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, made claims about the attendance of the
inauguration ceremony which were found to be untrue. When one of Trump’s advisors,
Kellyanne Conway, was asked about Spicer’s claims on a news programme, she “archly said
he’d merely used ‘alternative facts’” (Ball, 2017, p.38). This statement, with its Orwellian
overtones, seemed to define how the post-truth culture would operate: “There was no stable,
verifiable reality – only an endless battle to define it, your ‘facts’ versus my ‘alternative
facts’” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 14).
While the term ‘post-truth’ may have increased in usage since 2016, it is not a new
concept. The term itself was first published in 1992 in an article by the American-Serbian
playwright Steve Tesich for The Nation magazine. In the article, Tesich proceeded to
examine his view that following the Watergate scandal the American people assumed that no
politician would dare be caught lying to them again and this, coupled with increasing
divisions between rich and poor and constant reforms to the education system, had meant that
the American public had turned a blind eye to scandals involving Ronald Regan (the Iran-
Contra affair) and George Bush (the real versus the stated reasons for the first Gulf War). To
Tesich, the American public were “rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian
monsters could only drool about in their dreams” (Tesich, 1992, p. 13) and that even when
faced with the truth of a deception by their elected leaders they had “acquired a spiritual
2
mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free
people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world” (ibid.). In the UK,
philosopher and literary critic Christopher Norris had noticed a similar trend emerging in the
late 1980s, reflecting that “we in Britain are living through a period when it is vital to
maintain a due sense of the difference between fact and fiction, historical truth and the
various kinds of state-sponsored myth that currently pass for truth” (Norris, 1997, p. 95).
This clash between ‘truth’ and ‘myth’ and ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ (or, if you will, ‘fact’
and ‘alternative fact’) is one that has been going on for millennia, from the philosophical
debates on truth and perception by Plato and Aristotle in Classical civilization, to Immanuel
Kant’s views of reason and logic in the period of the Enlightenment and into the Modern era
with Nietzsche’s view that “the truths and values of his time were the opposite of life
enhancing, plunging culture into a crisis of nihilism in which all sense of purpose was being
lost” (Simons, 2002, p. 67). Nietzsche seemed to anticipate what we now refer to as the post-
truth culture when he wrote that “human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let
themselves be deceived” (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 882). The ‘cultural turn’ (to borrow a phrase
from Fredric Jameson) to postmodernism in the late 20th century saw philosophical thought
replacing the notion of ‘truth’ with the notion of multiple ‘truths’. With this freedom of truth
choice came a fracturing of the already fraught relationship between fact and fiction, as
Bauman (1996) explained: “The task of philosophical reason seems to be shifting from…the
correct way of separating truth from untruth to legislating about the correct way of translating
between separate languages each generating and sustaining its own truths…the truth of the
West…found its home in the self-same work of fiction which is fought tooth and nail” (pp.
116-118). D’Ancona (2017) recognised that the ‘multiple truths’ encouraged by
postmodernism resulted in “an increasingly pluralist society [which] would need to
acknowledge and heed multiple voices: the stories of gender, ethnic minorities, sexual
3
orientation and cultural tradition” (pp. 91-92) but this freedom came with the downside in
that postmodernist thought questioned “the very notion of objective reality [and in doing so]
did much to corrode the notion of truth” (ibid. p. 92). In his view, postmodernists became
“the inadvertent prophets of Post-Truth” (ibid. p. 107).
If the post-truth culture enabled the election victories of Trump and the Leave the EU
campaign by allowing their populist arguments to appeal to the greater majorities of their
respective electorates, then this culture has seemingly ennobled some within society to voice
their views against people of differing races and faiths. The House of Commons Home
Affairs Committee published a report entitled Hate Crime: abuse, hate and extremism online
in May 2017 which noted that there was “evidence of an increase in the number of attacks on
people from ethnic minorities and of non-British nationality…immediately following the
[EU] referendum” (House of Commons [Hoc], 2017a, p. 3). In America, one of the first acts
of the Trump presidency was to issue “an Executive order banning citizens of seven countries
[Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Sudan] from entering the US for a period of 90
days” (HoC, 2017b, p. 675). This order became known as a ‘travel ban’ and instantly proved
to be controversial as the countries affected by the ban were predominately Muslim and that
this singling out of a religious culture had sinister echoes. The order was signed on the 27th
January 2017, which in the UK is Holocaust Memorial Day. During a parliamentary debate
on 30th January, Yvette Cooper MP raised the occasion of the signing and stated that: “If ever
there was a day to remember why we need to have the courage to speak out against prejudice
and hatred, Holocaust Memorial Day is it” (ibid. p. 717). Two weeks prior to that debate,
another debate had been held in the House of Commons regarding Holocaust Memorial Day
and many MPs from across all political parties came together to recall stories of their
encounters with survivors of the Holocaust and visits they had made to former concentration
4
and death camps in Eastern Europe. A common theme throughout the debate was that,
“Holocaust Memorial Day has renewed significance this year. We live in a time of post-truth
politics and fake news” (Hoc, 2017c, p. 1151) and that this era of post-truth had seen a rise of
“more supporters for the lie of holocaust denial, including more online supporters who appear
to be gathering new force” (ibid. p. 1142). Social media companies such as Facebook and
Twitter are enabling people with common ideas to come together and share their values but
some of these values tread on dangerous ground; the Home Affairs Committee report noted
that these platforms, as well as the video sharing site YouTube, “are being used to spread
hate, abuse, and extremism. That trend continues to grow at an alarming rate but it remains
unchecked and…largely unpoliced” (HoC, 2017a, p. 4). After using the social media platform
Twitter to send a tweet following a visit to the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in the
UK, the author received a reply which stated that “The world’s biggest lie is the #Holocaust”.
A visit to the profile of that user’s Twitter Timeline revealed that this message had been sent
in reply to other tweets which mentioned the term “holocaust” as can be seen in Figure 1
below:
[Figure 1 Image taken by the author of a Twitter Timeline from www.twitter.com ]
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Anti-Semitism, of which Holocaust denial is a part, is on the rise (alongside
Islamophobia) in the post-truth culture where supporters of racist ideologies and conspiracy
theories such as Holocaust denial can flourish in the online world heralded by the
technological boom of broadband internet and the subsequent emergence of what Tim
O’Reilly (2012) would term “Web 2.0”, where the internet was “no longer limited to the PC
platform” (p. 48) as wireless mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets became
more affordable. Like the populist policies of Trump and the Leave the EU campaigns,
conspiracy theories against companies or other races depend “not on evidence, but upon
feeling -the essence of Post-Truth culture” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 68). What is concerning,
especially with regards to knowledge about the Holocaust, is that a recent Institute of
Education [IoE] report (What do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust?)
revealed that “despite the Holocaust being a staple in the curriculum for almost 25 years,
student knowledge and conceptual understanding is often limited and based on inaccuracies
and misconceptions…68 per cent of students [were] unaware of what ‘antisemitism’
meant…” (Foster et al, 2016, p. 1).
If students are relying on misconceptions of historical events, especially one as
serious as the Holocaust, are they more susceptible to the emotion driven rhetoric encouraged
by post-truth culture rather than discovering the established facts of the event? As we move
into an era where those who were fortunate enough to survive the Nazi campaign to eradicate
Jews from Europe are no longer with us, will Holocaust denial, encouraged by the post-truth
culture, continue to rise? Survivor testimonies, especially when given in person, were noted
in the IoE report to provide “an especially powerful educational experience” (ibid.). But what
of the minority of testimonies which have had either false elements added to them or, as in
one notorious instance, have proved to be totally false? In the new post-truth culture, do such
‘false testimonies’ matter or are they now validated by the emotional power they carry?
6
The research questions outlined above will be examined in this dissertation. The issue of the
false Holocaust testimony of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and the subsequent
controversy which erupted when it emerged that he had never been a witness to the
Holocaust, whereby Wilkomirski was “accused of mixing fact with fiction in his story
and…of turning the Shoah itself into fiction” (Maechler, 2001, p. viii), will be explored
within the context of the post-truth culture to determine whether in the current era of fake
news and ‘facts’ against ‘alternative facts’, fabricated Holocaust testimonies can hold as
much emotional impact as the true ones can. Following on from this, an exploration of social
media and its role in increasing hate crime, and specifically Holocaust denial, will look to
determine whether those views, no matter how misguided and ignorant they are, have gained
a form of legitimacy within the post-truth political culture.
7
CHAPTER ONE: “THE TRUTH OF A LIFE”: FRAGMENTS

AND THE WILKOMIRSKI AFFAIR
First published in German in 1995 and then translated into English the following year,
Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948 by Binjamin Wilkomirski swiftly became a
much-praised book, garnering numerous positive critical reviews and awards across Europe
and in America (Lappin, 1999, Maechler, 2001, Eskin, 2002). The book was a memoir of
Wilkomirski’s traumatic childhood during the Holocaust and in its aftermath. Wilkomirski
bears witness to shocking acts of physical violence as he is taken from his home in Riga in
Latvia, initially to the Majdanek concentration camp and then to an unnamed camp (which
Wilkomirski would later identify as Auschwitz) before encountering emotional violence in
the post-war world; first, in an orphanage in Krakow where he feels the need to keep silent in
case anyone should recognise him from “the barracks” (his term for the camp) and, finally, in
Switzerland with an adoptive family where he is promptly told his life before was “only a bad
dream…You must forget everything” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 122). Fragments generated such
a positive reception, both prior to its publication, where literary agent Eva Koralnik (who
specialises in Holocaust literature) read it and was so moved by the story that she managed to
find a publisher within six months of receiving the manuscript (Bernard-Donals, 2003), and
afterwards because, appearing at a time of “wild proliferation of Holocaust memoirs and
Holocaust-related fiction” (Gourevitch, 1999, p.50), it was able to offer something the other
works had not: “a fresh line of vision on the century’s defining moment of inhumanity”
(ibid.), which it did by emphasising Wilkomirski’s “depiction of an absolute naïf adrift in a
realm of absolute malevolence” (ibid.).
Wilkomirski swiftly found himself travelling across Europe and America, where the
book saw the greatest number in sales, due in no small part to the fact that America is “a
8
place where Holocaust remembrance has become a highly organized cultural phenomenon”
(Gross and Hoffman, 2004, p.28), to give talks, introduce readings of the book, and perform
music. Wilkomirski’s testimony, his “[s]hards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which
still cut flesh if touched today” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 4), was becoming more than just a
recent addition to the canon of Holocaust survivor testimony literature; it was also a rallying
cry of support to other children who had survived the Holocaust but had lost their families
and their original identities, many of whom were “too cowed by their own uncertainty to go
public with their stories” (Eskin, 2002, p. 57).
For all the praise of Fragments, there had, however, been doubts about the
authenticity of the testimony. Holocaust literature scholar Lawrence Langer had read the
book and “assumed that Fragments was a fictional narrative” (Langer, 2006, p .50). Even
before the book was originally published in Germany, concerns had been raised that the book
may not be a true account and the German publishers were asked to consider how to market
the book, to publish it as a novel, and therefore as a work of fiction, rather than as a memoir.
Wilkomirski was confronted with the doubts and insisted that his account was true, that the
rumours of him having invented an identity and background set in the Holocaust was part of a
campaign against him by his ex-wife (Maechler, 2001). His literary agent, a child survivor of
the Holocaust herself, was conflicted. She needed to know if his story was true, after all her
professional reputation would be at stake if it were found to be a false testimony. But what if
it was true, as she initially felt it was upon reading it? She recalled to Maechler that she
remembered thinking: “What an upside-down world, in which a victim of the Shoah had to
prove his story; what a dreadful humiliation for the man” (Maechler, 2001, p. 95). As a
compromise, Wilkomirski was asked to write an Afterword to the book which alluded to the
problem of his dual identity: “As a child, I…received a new identity, another name, another
date and place of birth…Legally accredited [and documented] truth is one thing – the truth of
9
a life is another” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 154). This Afterword acted as “an authenticating
supplement” (Vice, 2014, p. 201) and helped lend credence to the eventual reception of the
book, where it emphasised the work as “the terrifyingly stark testimony of a man whose
identity had been shattered even before he had the chance to become a child” (Lappin, 1999,
p. 12). Fragments wasn’t just the account of a traumatic childhood in a world of almost
unbelievable violence and cruelty, it was Wilkomirski’s testimony to his original identity, the
truth of who he really was.
The doubts cast in private between Wilkomirski and his publisher went public in 1998
when a series of articles by Swiss writer Daniel Ganzfried appeared which claimed to have
seen documentary evidence that Binjamin Wilkomirski was called Bruno Grosjean (later
adopted and called Bruno Dossekker), who had been born in Switzerland, was not Jewish,
and had never experienced the horrors of the Holocaust (Magilow & Silverman, 2015). As
news of these articles and their allegations spread, critical opinion was soon swiftly divided:
some who had praised the book, as Elena Lappin had, soon found themselves re-reading the
work in a new light and became “struck by how well constructed it seemed” (Lappin, 1999,
p. 13), that some elements were perhaps a bit too contrived, too controlled, too much like a
cleverly constructed work of fiction; others, like Harvey Peskin, stood fast to their praise of
Fragments and defended it, citing that what was important wasn’t the authenticity of the
work but rather, its intention: in the case of Wilkomirski it was “to urge the child survivor’s
recovery of a forfeited personal identity through ravelling a daunting trail of unforfeited
Holocaust memory” (Peskin, 2000, p. 40). To settle the matter and conclude whether the
author of Fragments was who he claimed to have been, Wilkomirski’s literary agent
commissioned Stefan Maechler, a Swiss historian, “to investigate the doubts about
[Wilkomirski’s] veracity that [had] been raised in the media” (ibid. p. 39). Maechler’s report,
which was initially published in German in 2000 before being translated and published in
10
English in 2001, concluded that “the elements of Wilkomirski’s story are full of
contradictions both in their particulars and in regard to historical reality…the story he wrote
in Fragments and has told elsewhere took place solely within the world of his thoughts and
emotions” (Maechler, 2001, p. 268). With this damning conclusion that Wilkomirski
fabricated his testimony, publication of the book was suspended across the world (Peskin,
2000) and it only became available again as an Appendix to the published report by
Maechler. Despite this, Wilkomirski seemed “firmly to believe in his own myth of origin”
(Vice, 2003, p. 249) and stuck by the Latvian, Jewish, Holocaust child survivor identity
which had initially brought him acclaim before turning to acrid disdain.
While “The Wilkomirski Affair”, as it has become known, played out in the mid to
late 1990s, it remains a fascinating example of false Holocaust testimony and the questions
surrounding it – questions of historical fact and fictional narration, of how trauma survivors
process and relate to their fractured memories, of the uses of survivor testimony in relation to
developing our understanding of the Holocaust, of how fiction can create identities, questions
of, in Wilkomirski’s terms, “legally accredited truth” and “the truth of a life” – are all worth
examining within the context of a post-truth culture. In an era where social media platforms
such as Facebook are used to share news stories which are untrue and used as propaganda to
stoke feeling for or against a political candidate or cause, does the case of Bruno
Dossekker/Binjamin Wilkomirski gain new relevance? Were the “Wilkomirski Affair” to
break in 2017 rather than 1998, would it have caused as much controversy? After all, when it
comes to “fake news” “[a]ll that matters is that the stories feel true, that they resonate”
(D’Ancona, 2017, p. 54), and many of the critics who subsequently revised their opinions of
Fragments following the Ganzfried allegations maintained, as Dan Stone (2006) remarked,
that “[t]he uncomfortable fact remains that we are dealing with an extremely powerful and
important book; whether it is true or not, there is a truth in it to which many have responded”
11
(p. 144). Like many in the current post-truth climate, they responded to the emotions behind
the work, rather than the historical facts.
To begin to assess the impact of Wilkomirski’s testimony had on readers and to use this to
reflect on how it was re-read in light of the allegations about his actual childhood, it is
important to examine what techniques Wilkomirski was drawing upon while writing
Fragments.
Early on in his report into Wilkomirski, Maechler (2001) acknowledges that within
historiography, there is a debate which has raged with seemingly no resolution in sight. He
goes on to explain that this debate “revolves around the question of whether a historian
registers past events in simple passivity, without reflecting his or her own agency, or adds
something new to the presentation whenever he or she constructs a true story out of evidence
left by the past” (p. viii). This brief overview of the debate offers some insight into the
historical context in which Fragments and other works of Holocaust testimony are placed.
The traditional view of historiography was “bound up with notions of “objectivity,” “reality,”
and “truth”. Representations of the past should offer…a direct and close link to past “reality”
on the basis of “facts”” (Braun, 1997, p. 418). With the development of postmodernist
thought, this view became challenged as the notions of the traditional view of history were
rejected and opened what Eagleton (2004) would term as “a historical vortex at the centre of
our thought which drags [history] out of time” (p. 7). To postmodernist thinkers like
Baudrillard, the technological advances and cultural shifts of the late twentieth century were
creating a society where humanity was “leaving history to move into the realm of simulation
[which] is merely a consequence of the fact that history itself has always, deep down, been an
immense simulation model” (Baudrillard, 1997, p. 44). For some historians, this presented a
12
chance to argue that “historical accounts are nothing but interpretations” (White, 1985, p. 55)
and that postmodernism was rejecting the grand, old ‘meta-narrative’ of history as a fixed
chronicle of events and instead history was formed “not as raw, bleeding facts but in textual
production in [smaller] narratives woven by desire (for truth) and a will (for power)”
(Chambers, 1997, p. 80). The aim of this plurality of historical narrative was to encourage
“readers and researchers to rethink and re-envision” (Ghasemi, 2014, p. 1) history and its
telling. For historians such as Hayden White, the plurality of historical narratives enabled the
historian to “emplot” a variety of genres onto their historical accounts: “What one historian
may emplot as a tragedy, another may emplot as a comedy…if this is true then it follows that
there are at least two levels of interpretation in every historical work: one in which the
historian constitutes a story…and another in which…he…identifies the kind of story he is
telling” (White, 1985, pp. 58-59).
While the plurality of historical narrative and genre enables unheard stories to be
aired, or old historical accounts to be revisited from a different angle, the theories of White
and other postmodernist historians face a challenge when it comes to attempting to represent
the Holocaust. The theories of history being a language construct with various narrative
emplotments which were espoused by White and other postmodernist thinkers were
challenged by the concept of how to sensitively place the issue of the Nazi’s Final Solution
within their frameworks; for Saul Friedlander, a Holocaust survivor and historian, the
Holocaust was at the very limit of the possibility of representation as “it is the most radical
form of genocide encountered in history: the wilful, systematic, industrially organized,
largely successful attempt to totally exterminate an entire human group” (1992, p. 3). In
response, White acknowledged that while there were “a number of scholars and writers who
view the Holocaust as virtually unrepresentable in language” (White, 1992, p. 43), it was
imperative that the history of the Holocaust be documented, even if that meant that “our
13
notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be revised” (ibid. p. 52) to reflect and
record the experiences of those who suffered through the Holocaust. White did not want his
ideas, or that of other postmodern theorists, to be used as a way of trying to “emplot” a
narrative where the actuality of the Holocaust could be doubted, as Holocaust deniers or
“revisionists” were attempting to do (Himmelfarb, 1997).
The ideas which inform the postmodernist view of history, of multiple smaller
narratives, of the issues around emplotment and interpretation offer an insight into
Wilkomirski’s methods when writing Fragments. Professor Nick Groom, in a radio
discussion in 1999 about the controversy surrounding Wilkomirski’s past, acknowledged that
the case reminded people that “…history is written. History is a form of literature. History is
style" (Bragg, 1999, Podcast). Groom’s comments chime in more with the postmodernist
view of history and in his view, Fragments was a work which offered a particular view of a
specific period of history. For while the testimony presented within it may not be true, it was
rooted in a truth which resonated with people. Wilkomirski had been placed into foster care at
a young age and did not find anything approximating a “normal” domestic setting until he
was sent to live with the comfortable middle class Dossekker family in October 1945
(Maechler, 2001). Wilkomirski did incorporate an interpretation of this day into the text of
Fragments, although the family is not named in the text but the description of the house and
couple do match that of the Dossekkers and their home. Mrs Dossekker is the woman who
Wilkomirski claims told him to forget his past life and insisted that “I’m your mother now”
(Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 122). For Wilkomirski, or Bruno Grosjean as he was then, being
asked to accept this stranger as a mother would have been highly upsetting. Prior to that
moment he had “been bounced around from place to place…amid the constant chaos of ever-
changing places and faces, his mother had been lost to him entirely before he ever really
knew her” (Maechler, 2001, pp. 20-21). When it came to the writing of Fragments,
14
Wilkomirski (as he claimed he was) sought to write his own childhood history, to try and
provide himself with some form of stable identity and he chose to interpret and emplot it
within the historical background of the Holocaust. After being told to “forget the past” as a
child, the adult Wilkomirski decided to try and reclaim what was lost to him, what appeared
to him as his “earliest memories [which] are in a rubble field of isolated images and events”
(Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 4). To do this, at some point in the early 1990s, he “decided to try to
analyse his memories by using historical methods and scientific rationality” (Maechler, 2001,
p. 67). He was so dedicated to his cause, he “approached his analysis as if it were someone
else’s story” (ibid., italics mine). It could very well be that this approach, coupled with his
emotionally driven belief that he had not been born in Switzerland but brought there after the
war by a lady called “Frau Grosz” (whose name bears an uncanny similarity to that of his
birth mother, Yvonne Grosjean, and whom Wilkomirski later claims to “hate” after she has
abandoned him at the orphanage in Switzerland), that caused him to pull events from the
child survivors he spoke to and whose documents he was avidly collecting into a vast archive
(Gourevitch 1999) and merge them, gestalt-like, with his own fragmentary early memories to
create the narrative he presented in Fragments. In his research, Maechler came across at least
one example of this when he was contacted by a woman whom Wilkomirski referred to as
Karola in interviews. In the text of Fragments, she is referred to as Mila. Wilkomirski states
that “I recognized her when we met each other again in the orphanage in Krakow….We knew
each other from somewhere, from one of the many barracks probably, we weren’t sure
anymore…” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 80). Wilkomirski then proceeds to relate Mila’s story of
survival where she and her mother were thrown by a young SS man onto a pile of corpses and
then they “lay there, playing dead, absolutely still…Once it was dark they slid down and
mixed themselves back in among the living, but as fake living people…because they were
supposed to be dead” (ibid. p. 81). Karola angrily told Maechler that by appropriating her
15
story and incorporating it within his own historical testimony of survival, Wilkomirski “had
abused her trust, done violence to her biography” (Maechler, 2001, p. 196).
This appropriation of the stories of others in an attempt to fashion a Holocaust based
background was just one approach Wilkomirski had taken, the other approach came from his
interest in psychology and memory. The issue of trauma and memory plays a key role in
reading and analysing Holocaust testimonies. Testimonies such as Night by Elie Wiesel or If
This is a Man by Primo Levi (the two figures of Holocaust testimony literature to whom
Wilkomirski was enthusiastically compared to when Fragments first emerged) are short and
episodic. This is because of the initial “traumatic event, although real, [taking] place outside
the parameters of “normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time” (Felman &
Laub, 1992, p. 69). This fragmentary nature of the traumatic memory, the “unassimilated
scraps of overwhelming experiences” (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart, 1995, p. 176) find
themselves in need of “being transformed into narrative language” (ibid.). This
transformation of fractured, non-linear memory into narrative is one of the key strengths of
Fragments as a piece of testimonial literature, irrespective of its authenticity in historical fact.
Geller (2002) recognised that the work presented itself “as a virtual textbook of trauma” (p.
349). From the outset, Wilkomirski writes that his (or, if the case of Karola and others were
the true sources, then their) memories are “a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological
fit…escaping the laws of logic” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 4). The book then proceeds to switch
from one time and place, often within the same chapter, to produce a dizzying, disorientating
effect on the reader; we experience the “fragments of memory” with Wilkomirski as the
shards well up in his mind. Details of places and people are vague, as is the exact chronology
of the childhood memories; Wilkomirski frequently peppers his text with uncertainties, the
man whose death he witnesses in Riga may be his father or another male relative,
Wilkomirski later asks, “Did I have four brothers or five, which seems righter? I can’t say for
16
sure anymore” (ibid. p. 26). Although Wilkomirski seems so sure of his memories, his
vagueness on details (which could be because of his ‘trauma’) encourages the reader to
become more involved as they attempt to “connect dots to create his biography” (Eskin,
2002, p. 16). This involvement has the effect of creating reader empathy as we too experience
the memories as they come to Wilkomirski and, like him, try to piece these broken fragments
into a coherent whole.
As well as encouraging the reader to be in the position of the adult Wilkomirski,
trying piecing together his childhood memories, the prose style of the text also creates
empathy and sympathy with the narrator of the testimony. The use of the childlike
perspective, as though Wilkomirski is so drawn back into the time of the horrors he witnesses
that he loses all sense of adult logic and ordering and can only testify to what he sees as he
did as a small boy, does much to encourage sympathy for its young (yet, from the temporal
perspective of the present of the novel’s writing, old) protagonist. This sympathy is further
developed through the juxtaposition of this childlike perspective with the descriptions of
violence which “are as drastic as anything one has ever read” (Maechler, 2001, p. 213). This
technique of using a child’s perspective on scenes of violence is crystallised during the scene
where the young Wilkomirski sees the body of a dead woman moving. “Dead women aren’t
allowed to move” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 85), he thinks, before looking closely and seeing “a
big wound on one side [of the woman’s belly], with something moving in it…the wound
springs open, the wall of the stomach lifts back, and a huge, blood-smeared shining rat darts
down the mound of corpses” (ibid. p. 86) and, having witnessed this, he goes on to declare, as
a child would, that “I saw it! I saw it! The dead women are giving birth to rats!...Am I a rat or
a human? I’m a child – but am I a human child or a rat child, or can you be both at once?”
(ibid. pp. 86-87). Wilkomirski then proceeds to relate how this shocking, traumatic image
remained burned into his consciousness when, many years later, he witnessed the birth of his
17
first child and witnessed the emergence of life into the world: “As a first-time father, I didn’t
know how much hair a newborn baby can have. I wasn’t ready for this little half-head of hair.
All I could do was stand still and stare at it…like an echo from before…” (ibid. p. 87). For
the adult Wilkomirski, that echo returned him to his younger self: alone, adrift, and confused
by who or what he really was.
These memories of trauma which Wilkomirski describes, which include a sickening
description of the aftermath of an SS man hurling two babies into a wall, “…the babies on
their backs, arms and legs outspread, stomachs all swollen and blue. And where once their
little faces must have been, a red mess mixed with snow and mud” (ibid. p 104), while true
for him (and prior to the outbreak of the controversy over his identity, his readers), are open
to charges of being ‘false memories’. Laney & Loftus (2005) examined cases where patients
who had undergone traumatic experiences when children and were attending therapy sessions
to attempt to make sense of their own fractured memories and found that they could ‘recover’
previously repressed memories which helped to explain their trauma. The issue of these
‘recovered memories’ has proved to be highly controversial within the psychoanalytic
community as research has revealed that these memories are often false. Outlining three
methods of research into whether these recovered memories were false or true, Laney &
Loftus noted that one method “showed that subjects could be led to adopt memories for entire
events that never happened to them” (2005, p. 825) and offered the cautionary advice that,
“Just because a memory seems detailed, just because the person seems confident in it…does
not mean it really happened” (ibid. p. 827). Prior to the writing of Fragments, Wilkomirski
was having therapy to help him come to terms with his memories, although he claimed that in
his case, “Never in my life have I forgotten what I wrote in my book. I had NOTHING TO
RE-DISCOVER again! Some of the memories have been, and are still now, present every
single day!!” (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 54). When re-read with the knowledge that Wilkomirski
18
had not lived through the experiences he claimed to remember, that statement of him having
nothing to rediscover takes on another meaning: he has nothing to rediscover because it was
never his to find again in the first place.
In one of the more bizarre turns in the Wilkomirski Affair, one of Wilkomirski’s
supporters was a lady called Laura Grabowski, a former child survivor of the Holocaust
herself who read Fragments and felt that the book echoed her childhood. Grabowski wrote to
Wilkomirski and during their exchange, Wilkomirski “seemed to remember her…The more
they revealed to each other, the more memories they found they had in common” (Eskin,
2002, p. 85). Grabowski, however, was uncovering memories as false as Wilkomirski’s. Like
him, Grabowski had adopted a different name and identity as her own. She was, in fact,
Lauren Stratford who wrote what at the time was a bestselling account of her own traumatic
childhood, but not one connected with the Holocaust. In Stratford’s case, her testimony
claimed to document her abuse at the hands of a group of Satanists in America. The book,
Satan’s Underground, depicted scenes of graphic violence and sexual abuse and in its
opening chapters, adopted a similar child-like perspective to that used by Wilkomirski in
Fragments: after describing her first rape, the young girl thinks to herself, “Mother will be
mad. Was I bad? Want to hide. Find boxes. Hide behind the boxes” (Stratford, 2003, p. 19).
The book was later found to have been entirely fabricated (Maechler, 2001). Perhaps it is no
surprise that Wilkomirski and Stratford-Grabowski developed a friendship; both had written
interpretative emplotments of their own traumatic, personal histories; both relied on theories
of traumatic memories in the writing of their works; both found recognition for their work
and, perhaps most importantly, a willing audience of readers and listeners to their
testimonies.
19
Bloxham & Kushner (2005) noted that from the late 1980s onwards, there had been a
significant increase in the number of Holocaust testimonies published. This increase reflected
“a demand, commercial and otherwise” (p. 7) for such testimonies. As the Third Reich went
to great lengths to destroy any documentary evidence of their Final Solution, or sought to
encode its reality in euphemisms as part of a “mechanism of repression…to conceal the
destructive process not only from all outsiders but also from the censuring gaze of its own
conscience” (Hilberg, 1985, p. 278), the testimonies of those who survived the Holocaust
became important documents to the suffering of the victims and the brutality and
industriousness of the Nazi genocide programme. Such was the value of testimony in helping
to create an understanding of the Holocaust, Felman (1995) argued that “testimony is the
literary – or discursive – mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be
defined as the age of testimony” (p. 17). While Eskin (2002) argued against relying solely on
testimony as the only source of understanding the events of the Holocaust, he did
acknowledge that works such as Fragments “are useful because they personalize the story of
the Holocaust” (p. 108). In the case of Wilkomirski and Fragments, audiences were drawn
into this very personal account of a traumatised childhood. In this respect, the work could
function, as Finklestein (2003) claims, as “the archetypal Holocaust memoir” (p. 58).
Finklestein, however, argues that the culture of remembrance around the Holocaust has
turned into what he provocatively refers to as “the Holocaust industry” and further went on to
elaborate that this industry is “built on a fraudulent misappropriation of history for
ideological purposes” (ibid. p. 61) and that the audience who support this industry were
“primed to celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust “survivor” waiting to
be discovered” (ibid.). While Finklestein’s argument is undoubtedly contentious, there is an
element of truth there: Wilkomirski was discovered and it was a reciprocal arrangement.
Readers were moved by his testimony and in exchange, he found supporters who praised his
20
courage and writing. This belief in the history he narratively constructed for himself helped
him to believe that it was “true and authentic because it unleashed such stunned silence, such
waves of sympathy” (Maechler, 2001, p. 273). The allegations made by Ganzfried that
Wilkomirski wasn’t who he said he was were so polarizing to this audience that, while the
controversy unleashed by the claims rumbled on, they essentially split into two camps: one
the one side were those, like Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, who relied on their
historical and literary knowledge of the events of the Holocaust and perceived the work to be
fictional from the outset, and on the other side were those who believed in the life and history
of Binjamin Wilkomirski and acted as if the implications of the allegations were nothing
serious (Eskin, 2002). Those who backed Wilkomirski’s testimony argued that the story was
true and that we had to place our trust in his memories because Wilkomirski had been
brought into post-war Switzerland as a ‘child without identity’ and “none of the other
children without identity [were] treated with such suspicion” (Eskin, 2002, p. 136).
Furthermore, Wilkomirski himself argued that, “I knew that I could depend more on my
memory than on what is said by the so-called historians, who never gave a thought to
children in their research” (Wilkomirski, quoted in Maechler, 2001, p .71). For all the furore
around whether his story was actually true, Wilkomirski did highlight an important issue
surrounding children and the Holocaust: their experiences had been ignored. During the war
and in its immediate aftermath, Jewish children had either been deliberately sent away to live
with non-Jewish families or needed looking after as a result of their parents being killed.
Often, these children were baptised so they were no longer Jewish, or too young to fully
understand their roots. Some lived their new lives with no knowledge of their Jewish
heritage. Others became aware that they had another identity, as was what happened to Saul
Friedlander, who recounted in his Holocaust testimony that he became aware of “a feeling in
my soul that had been dormant there for a long time, the feeling that I was Jewish”
21
(Friedlander, 1979, p. 179). Those who sought to defend Wilkomirski’s “truth” were
concerned that those who sought to undermine it were acting like “those who would not listen
to those survivors too young at the time of the catastrophe to have developed a paper-trail and
whose family history had been turned to ashes” (Geller, 2002, p. 352) and were, in effect,
subjecting Wilkomirski to “a second Holocaust by extinguishing his identity” (ibid.). On the
other hand, those who felt doubt about the legitimacy of Fragments were concerned that were
the allegations true and it was false then it would, as Elena Lappin pointed out, potentially
cause “damage to actual Holocaust survivors...every single Holocaust memoir will be
examined closely and with suspicion” (Bragg, 1999, podcast) because of Wilkomirski’s
appropriation of the Holocaust narrative. Furthermore, there was a far more worrying
repercussion: that the fabrication of Fragments would provide those who denied that the
Holocaust happened could point to the book as an example that the “Holocaust myth” was as
false as the book was.
False Holocaust testimony is, of course, not unique to the case of Wilkomirski. There
have been several books which purport to be accurate accounts of the Holocaust but which
have had elements fictionalised for commercial purposes. Perhaps the most notable example
of this is Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved, which claimed to detail the author’s experience of
incarceration in, and escape from, the Treblinka death camp. Like Fragments, the book was
well received. While it did not present the child’s perspective of the Holocaust, as Gray was
of adult age when it began, Gray frequently refers in his text that he needs “another voice,
other words. Every word to stand as a memorial to the thousands of lives which vanished…”
(Gray, 1984, p. 122), in much the same way that Wilkomirski acknowledges that he needs to
adopt a new voice himself by giving up on “the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only
distort what happened” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 4). Grey’s book was a bestseller but Gitta
Sereny (1979) conducted research into the writing of the book and discovered that Gray had
22
never been to Treblinka and that the episode in question was conceived by Gray’s ghost-
writer, Max Gallo, as a way of drawing readers in. When Sereny confronted Gray with this
evidence, he replied: “But does it matter? Wasn’t the only thing that Treblinka did happen,
that it should be written about…” (Sereny, 1979, p. 673). This argument could easily apply to
Wilkomirski and Fragments. The overriding truth was that the Holocaust did happen
(although deniers desperately attempt to argue otherwise); there were children who were
forced to forget their past, who felt like they did not belong anywhere, children who lacked
“information about their origins, with all traces carefully erased, furnished with false names
and often false papers too” (Wilkomirski, 1996, p. 154), and that this truth was not
overwritten because somebody chose to use that history, that narrative choice, to testify to
their memories, even if those memories proved to be false.
Had Wilkomirski allowed Fragments to be marketed as a work of fiction rather than as a
memoir, the sense of betrayal which some readers felt when it was revealed that he had not
been involved in the Holocaust may not have been as great. Instead, the book may have been
placed alongside Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a work which also fell into controversy
surrounding its authorship and one which Wilkomirski was very familiar with (Maechler,
2001). Like Fragments, the novel shows a child’s perspective of the horrors perpetrated
during the Holocaust. Langer (2006) wrote how Kosinski had told several acquaintances that
the book was autobiographical, even though he was safely hidden during the war. While The
Painted Bird was published as fiction, Kosinski remained “an avowed believer in the power
of prose not only to shape the truth but literally to forge it” (Langer, 2006, p. 53) and would
continue to play with blurring the lines between fiction and autobiography in writings about
himself, despite his protestation in a foreword to the novel that “fiction and autobiography are
23
very different modes” (Kosinski, 1996, p. 14). Wilkomirski, it seems, was paying homage to
Kosinski, even if he was not necessarily conscious of it.
With all the arguments about truth and falsity, historical authenticity versus historical
interpretation, and false memories versus recovered memories, the Wilkomirski Affair saw
the (re)opening of numerous debates around the Holocaust and its representation, as well as
the nature of trauma and memory. While Maechler’s report examined all the evidence and
concluded that Fragments was fictional, one point which repeatedly came up was that many
of the people he contacted to try and verify Wilkomirski’s story who read the book
acknowledged that elements felt true, even if the whole did not. For Maechler, Fragments
was “true in the emotionality it evokes, in the density of its horrors” (2001, p. 278). In David
Shields’ 2011 book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, he argues that the dividing line between
fiction and non-fiction isn’t as clear cut as many would believe and states that the separation
of the two is “an utterly useless distinction” (Shields, 2011, p. 63) and that “something can be
true and untrue at the same time” (ibid. p. 135). If Shields’ ‘manifesto’ is calling for a new
form of literature where fiction and non-fiction are collapsed into one another, where truth
can be wrapped around a falsehood, then one could posit that Fragments is at the vanguard of
such a literary mode. Moreover, when reviewed in the context of the present post-truth
climate, the case of Wilkomirski plays into what D’Ancona calls “the defining characteristic”
(2017, p. 56) of the post-truth world: “The point is not to determine the truth by a process of
rational evaluation…You choose your own reality…You also select your own falsehood, no
less arbitrarily” (ibid., italics mine). Wilkomirski, in the writing of Fragments chose his
reality to be that of a “child without identity” who survived the horror and brutality of the
Holocaust only to be abandoned in the post-war world, and forced to forget the past. For him,
the documentary evidence that Ganzfried uncovered, that Maechler would later draw upon in
24
his report, were false documents, records of a false life. Even in the face of the documentary
evidence that proved otherwise, the man born Bruno Grosjean remained resolute that he was
Binjamin Wilkomirski (Maechler, 2001, Eskin, 2002). The documents, to him, proved
nothing; his emotionally driven memories, which would often cause him to break down into
tears (Gourevitch, 1999), proved everything. In this context, Wilkomirski, through his writing
in Fragments, appears to be the embodiment of what Bruner stated in his exploration of the
link between narrative and autobiography: “In the end, we become the autobiographical
narratives by which we “tell about” our lives” (2004, p. 694).
25
CHAPTER TWO: “#HOLOHOAX”: THE RESURGENCE OF
HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA
According to Stanton (2016), the tenth and final stage of genocide is denial. The evidence of
the crime is covered up and any blame is placed on the victims. While we are now over
seventy years removed from the time of the Nazi’s “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in
Europe”, the work of denial which the Third Reich began by destroying many of the
documents which they kept of those killed (Bernard-Donals & Glejzer, 2003) has been
continued by those who believe, for whatever reason, that the Holocaust never happened or
that the estimated total of those killed has been greatly exaggerated. These beliefs, while
explicitly outlawed in many countries across mainland Europe (Wistrich, 2012), continue to
permeate the thoughts of anti-Semites around the globe, many of whom are convinced that “it
was the Jews who invented the Holocaust “myth” in the first place, to serve their own
financial and political ends” (Wistrich, 2012a, p. 1), thereby attempting to blame the atrocity
on those affected most by it. As we enter a period where more and more survivors are passing
away, it appears that those who wish to deny the Holocaust are growing in confidence and are
ready to challenge the existing historical record (J. Morcan & L. Morcan, 2016).
The 2014 Anti-Defamation League (ADL) poll, ADLGlobal100, recorded that of all
those who were invited to participate in the survey 32% of people believed that the Holocaust
was a myth or had been greatly exaggerated, with the largest number of people who held
those beliefs, 63% of respondents, living in the Middle East and North Africa region
(http://global100.adl.org/info/holocaust_info). The high volume of this belief in that region of
the world is no doubt fuelled by the tensions between Israel and Palestine. Dossa (2012),
claims that “Auschwitz has yielded to its own sublime racism…the genocide of the Jews has
been turned into ‘mythic theology’….Not only has the ‘myth’ of Auschwitz displaced
26
Auschwitz’s actuality, it has legitimised the Jew/Arab-Muslim binary” (pp. 1575-1576).
Wistrich (2012b) acknowledges that “Arab Holocaust denial, unlike its Western counterparts,
is undoubtedly mainstream” (p. 262) and that this denial functions, according to Polian
(2012), as a way of placing political pressure on Israel, for if the Holocaust deniers are
correct then “the State of Israel is no longer legitimate, as it was created on the foundation of
the non-existent bones and ashes of millions of victims” (p. 16).
In Britain, where the number of respondents to the ADL 2014 poll who thought the
Holocaust was a myth was low, a follow up poll in 2015 revealed an increase in the number
of respondents who believed that Jewish people “still talk too much about what happened to
them in the Holocaust” (Anti-Defamation League [ADL], 2015, p. 14), from 10% of people
thinking the statement was “probably true” in 2014 to 26% in 2015 (ibid.). The Community
Standards Trust (CST) report into Anti-Semitic Discourse in the UK in 2016 flagged up that
in that year, “media discussion of antisemitism was more prominent than it had been for
many years” (Community Standards Trust [CST], 2017, p. 4). The report highlighted that
“Search results from Google, the world’s most popular internet search engine, were found to
prioritise antisemitic queries and websites when asked questions about Jews and the
Holocaust” (ibid. p. 34). In an increasingly online society, where the Internet is the main
source of information (D’Ancona, 2017), such a situation presents a prime opportunity for
Holocaust deniers as they can use the Internet as “a tool to amplify and to spread their
bigoted arguments and poisonous theories to a mass audience” (Wistrich, 2012a, p. 18).
Increasingly, Holocaust deniers are referring to themselves “as “revisionists,” thereby
crediting themselves with an ineradicable disposition toward a quest for truth, and, as a
consequence, toward the scholarly revision of the prevailing views based on newly found or
newly reinterpreted data” (Polian, 2012, p. 7). This seemingly new found confidence in
Holocaust deniers may be emboldened even further by the development of the culture of
27
post-truth, for Holocaust denial has its roots in conspiracy theories and the strength of such
theories depend “not upon evidence, but upon feeling – the essence of Post-Truth culture”
(D’Ancona, 2017, p. 68).
If Levitin (2017) is correct, then the “post-truth era is an era of wilful irrationality” (p. xiv),
whereby citizens caught up in its culture allow denials and untruths to go unchallenged.
Those who wish to deny or downgrade the magnitude of the Holocaust rely heavily on
misinformation, and while misinformation is nothing new, we now have access to a vast
online network which allows misinformation to be spread quickly resulting in a situation in
which “lies can be weaponized to produce social and political ends we would otherwise be
safeguarded against” (ibid. p. xx). These “weaponized lies” are easily shared between people,
for we all are, according to Baudrillard, “willing partners in the game of truth, in the game of
information” (1988, p. 213). While playing this game of information exchange, human beings
are often reliant on ‘confirmation bias’: “we look for and retain information that confirms our
beliefs and we struggle to accept information that goes against them” (Ball, 2017, p. 180).
The vast array of information that is now available via the Internet means that “we must all
become editors: sifting, checking, assessing what we read” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 113) and that
our confirmation biases are even stronger as a consequence. These biases are reinforced by
social media platforms such as Facebook, who had two billion active users worldwide as of
the second quarter in 2017 (Statista, 2017a, para. 1), and Twitter, who up to quarter two of
2017 had 328 million worldwide users (Statista, 2017b, para. 1). These companies use
algorithms which comb the data of interactions with the content of other users to direct users
to content they are more likely to engage with. The result of this information direction
towards others who share similar beliefs has been called the ‘filter bubble’ effect (D’Ancona,
2017, Ball, 2017). Posting and sharing content to these bubbles becomes, as Ball points out,
28
“an act of performance…Sharing a post that your bubble may disagree with risks provoking a
backlash…Sharing a post that your bubble agrees with offers affirmation through likes”
(2017, p. 153) and that the end result of this desire to share ‘liked’ content is an even more
polarising ‘feedback effect’.
A consequence of this ‘filter bubble’ has been that users of social media are now able to be in
contact with people from all over the world who share similar views to them, including those
who may have extreme views. Holocaust deniers are now able to tap into these filter bubbles
and access new followers, especially as “people become so ready to hear what they want to
believe that a Facebook post is believed not only over experts, but also events which have
already happened [such as the Holocaust]” (Ball, 2017, p. 155). This fragmenting of the
online society into various groups, nestled in their filter bubbles, seeking out and hearing
views which relate to what they believe, echoes the sentiment expressed by Lyotard who
explained the reasoning behind anti-Semitism persisting, even after the Holocaust, was down
to “contemporary society. It no longer speaks of fraternity of all…The past has importance
only insofar as it is capitalized into powers…that allow us to hold sway over “the future””
(1993, p. 161). Holocaust denial, or revisionism, aims to exploit the gap in the historical
record surrounding the exact specifics of the Holocaust: that the lack of documentation
indicates that the total death toll of the Jews was less than 6 million, that the Zyklon B gas
wasn’t used to kill the Jewish prisoners but was just used as a pesticide (as it was initially
intended to), and that the Jews actually died from outbreaks of typhus (Butz, 2015). The work
of the ‘revisionists’ is to essentially provide a ‘counterhistory’ to the commonly accepted
historical narrative of the Holocaust. As Funkenstein (1992) remarked, “counterhistories form
a specific genre of history…Their function is polemical” (p. 69), and that Holocaust
denial/revisionism is just the latest form of the counterhistory. When looked at within the
context of a post-truth society, this historical revisionism becomes even more alarming in that
29
there is now a “corrosive effect of our casual attitude to truth…there’s no agreed way to test
our conflicting narratives against one another” (Ball, 2017, p. 13). These conflicting
narratives become even more difficult to test alongside one another when online users are
trapped in their filter bubbles with other like-minded people, as the alternative narratives are
screened out.
It has been argued, most notably in the 2017 Home Affairs Committee report into
online abuse and extremism, that social media companies need to be more active in
monitoring the content and activities of their users and that because of “their immense size,
resources and global reach, it is completely irresponsible of them to fail to abide by the law,
and to keep their users and others safe” (HoC, 2017a, p. 11). Companies such as Facebook
and Twitter argue that when users join their services they have to abide by their “community
standards” rules, and these rules contain guidelines which explicitly state that “we do not
tolerate behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses,
intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice” (Twitter, 2017, para. 9). When
abusive or hateful behaviour is encountered on their platforms, the companies acknowledge
that they “rely on our community to report this content to us” (Facebook, 2017, para. 3).
Once reported, the content is looked at by moderators who decide whether to block or remove
the content. Documents leaked from Facebook in May 2017 revealed that when it comes to
content which espouses Holocaust denial, “Facebook will only hide or remove Holocaust
denial content in four countries – France, Germany, Israel and Austria. The document says
this is not on grounds of taste, but because the company fears it might get sued” (Hopkins,
2017, para. 13). For companies like Facebook and Twitter, which depend on their large user
base to connect with each other through the content they share, the issue of Holocaust denial
is a particularly slippery one. On the one hand, they have to be mindful of avoiding
unnecessary upset and distress to their users, but on the other hand, they are committed to the
30
issue of “freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power” (Twitter, 2017, para. 9), an
argument which Holocaust deniers have relied upon for several decades (Dershowitz, 2017).
They are expressing their views and opinions, which just happen to go against or question the
established “narrative” of history, or are attempting to reveal the real “truth” about the
Holocaust.
Social media platforms are a way for like-minded people to connect with each other but they
are not the only online sources of Holocaust denial. One group, with the academic sounding
name of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), provides access to
Holocaust revisionist videos and books through its website. The group claims that the aim of
their site is to “promote intellectual freedom with regard to this one historical event called
"Holocaust"…We understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and
persecuted Jews and others…Nevertheless…we no longer believe the German State pursued
a plan to kill all Jews…” (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust [CODOH], 2017a,
paras. 1, 3). The CODOH’s online shop enables visitors to purchase books such as Arthur
Butz’s revisionist account of the Holocaust, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which is
currently in its fourth edition. The book is also available through the site as a free download
and is easily accessible; this seems to be in response to the fact that, “[e]ffective March 6,
2017, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the two biggest book retailers of the world, banned most
of our books from their websites” (CODOH, 2017b, para. 1). Works from academics such as
David Irving and Robert Faurisson are also available. Both men have been imprisoned in
Austria and France, respectively, over their lectures and writings which advocated Holocaust
denial (Wistrich, 2012a). As Evans (2002) has noted, much of this revisionist or denial
literature tries to present its arguments as “the outcome of serious historical scholarship,
resting on a combination of detailed documentary research and careful scholarly reasoning”
31
(p. 108), in an attempt to lend an air of academic credence to their views. Furthermore,
revisionists seem to tap into what Lyotard refers to as “language games”, whereby “a move
can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention” (1984, p. 10). In the case of Irving, he
attempted to steer discourse around his work from the term ‘denial’, by “using the term
analysis as a euphemism for denial” (Evans, 2002, p. 119) as he felt that denial was
synonymous with lying. However, as Evans has pointed out, the “language game” can be
played both ways: “There was nothing about the word denial that implied telling a lie…any
more than there was anything about the words challenge, contestation, or analysis that
implied telling the truth” (ibid.).
David Irving’s reputation as an academic in the UK was effectively torn apart after he
lost his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. With Irving, one of
the more recognisable faces of Holocaust ‘revisionism’, being labelled in the judgement as an
outright Holocaust denier, it seemed that the trial was “a landmark victory in the struggle
against denial” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 82). As has been seen, however, Holocaust denial has
shifted from “the realm of academic history” (ibid.) and into the online world of the Internet
and social media, where attempts to remove content which seeks to deny or present a
‘revisionist’ take on the Holocaust are minimal. In part, this is due to their concerns that they
may be oppressing users’ rights to “freedom of expression”. Moreover, the main barrier is a
practical one: for Facebook, “the sheer volume of content on the platform…make[s]
combating hate…a herculean task” (Wong, 2017, para. 20); Twitter, likewise, has “faced
criticism for slow and inadequate responses to online abuse…However, when faced with tens
of thousands of accounts…closing individual accounts is like bailing out a boat with a
thimble” (Ball, 2017, pp. 156-157). In the realm of the Internet, users can hide behind
multiple false personas and accounts, even if one gets shut down, they can swiftly re-register
32
under a new one and continue to publish or promote anti-Semitic or Holocaust revisionist
content.
The renewed confidence of those who practised Holocaust denial or revisionism, along with
those who may have shared those beliefs but only took to publicly sharing them through the
anonymity of social media accounts, has come at a time when those who did experience the
Holocaust are dying. While the initial acclaim granted to Wilkomirski’s Fragments and its
subsequent unveiling as a fabrication may have potentially provided deniers and revisionists
with an excuse to highlight that survivor testimonies are unreliable, the fact remains that
while the survivors who did experience the Holocaust first hand are able to tell their stories,
to stand up and account for those who did not survive, then Holocaust denial may remain on
the fringes of discussion. Once those survivors are no longer with us, however, the fight
against the deniers will potentially become more difficult. If Hoffman (2004) is correct and
“[h]istory is a race between education and catastrophe” (pp. 270-271), then those who wish to
uphold the truth of the Holocaust as a state sponsored genocide will have to work hard to
ensure that the stories and testimonies of the survivors continue to be heard against the
alternative history of the revisionists. Ultimately, the battle against denial is “not a matter of
Jews and true historians against the opposing deniers; it is a fight for the minds of all the
others, that is, the public at large” (Polian, 2012, p. 21). As we go through the culture of post-
truth and the “public at large” are less interested in hearing about the facts of an event if it
does not fit in with their preconceived views, the fight is even more important.
33
CONCLUSION
If Bauman (1997) was right in his assertion that “the idea of truth belongs to the rhetoric of
power. It makes no sense unless in the context of opposition” (1997, p. 112), then the
conceptualisation of the post-truth culture is an attempt to understand why the right-wing
rhetoric of Trump and the Leave the EU campaigns were able to win over supporters and
voters. While the terminology of post-truth is still relatively recent, it should be remembered
that the concept is not new. Within the last century alone, there is one example of what we
now call post-truth in action, as Ball (2017) pointed out: “Hitler rose on a post-truth narrative,
a brutal vilification of vulnerable scapegoats who were blamed for the very real problems
facing Germany” (p. 280). A similar attitude towards immigrants, those ‘others’ in society,
was apparent in the post-truth driven campaigns of Donald Trump, who targeted Mexicans
and Muslims, and of the Leave EU campaign, in particular the infamous “Breaking Point”
poster unveiled the week before the EU Referendum vote. That poster was swiftly compared
to propaganda used by the Nazis against the Jews in Germany (Stewart & Mason, 2016). The
Holocaust still casts a dark shadow over the culture in the West, although its uniqueness as an
event has been questioned increasingly in recent years (Finklestein, 2003, Blatman, 2015).
Genocides which have followed since the Holocaust in Cambodia, Rwanda, and more
recently, the persecution of gay men in Chechnya and the current plight of the Rohingya
Muslims in Myanmar, have begun to make the Holocaust look less like an isolated
catastrophe. The handing over of the act of remembrance of the Holocaust to the second and
third generation as survivors pass away, has also provided distance so that it can now be
viewed “not only from within personal narratives but also with a wider lens” (Hoffman, 2004,
p. 271). This widening of the historical lens as we move further into the 21st century is
leading Holocaust scholarship towards “a path that integrates the history of the
Holocaust…into the broader history of Europe in the twentieth century…to conceptualize the
34
Jewish history of the Holocaust alongside its historical context in space and time” (Blatman,
2015, p. 39) to avoid it becoming “a mere historical anomaly for future generations, an
episode that combines apocalyptic images and myths, a sort of metahistory” (ibid.).
Cultural and historical debates around the Holocaust have often revolved around a
key issue in the theory of historiography: “the conflict between the “meaning” of the past
“reality” as knowledge (episteme), the formation of representations of the past as opinion
(doxa), and the relationship between past “reality” as construction of mind in the present and
in the past” (Braun, 1997, p. 420). This already fraught conflict has no doubt been
complicated even further by the rise of post-truth culture. It is, as D’Ancona has noted, “an
emotional phenomenon. It concerns our attitude to truth, rather than truth itself” (2017, p.
126, italics mine). Increasingly, this attitude to truth seems to favouring doxa over episteme;
opinions over knowledge. There is no way of telling if post-truth is merely a temporary
phenomenon. The implications it presents, however, are already making themselves felt
within society. The opportunity post-truth presents towards Holocaust deniers and
revisionists to present their own ‘alternative facts’ of the Holocaust against the scholarship of
academics and survivor testimony is one which they have seized with both hands. The
success of the narratives of Trump, in particular, have seen the emergence of “the alt-right, a
new and brash version of the far right for the internet era” (Ball, 2017, pp. 124-125) and has
enabled many who wish to deny the Holocaust to feel as though their views have been
legitimised: shortly after the election success of Donald Trump, members of the alt-right in
America and Europe gathered for a conference organised by the right-wing think-tank the
National Policy Institute, and was held near to US Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington (Shoah museum alarmed by alt-right conference, 2016). The head of the think-
tank, Richard Spencer, remarked that, “With Donald Trump, we feel like we have a dog in
the fight for the first time…with him there’s a real chance we could start influencing policy
35
and culture” (Gabbatt, 2016, para. 7) and the conference climaxed with “a 40-minute pseudo-
academic lecture called America and Jewish Consciousness, by Kevin MacDonald, a former
psychology professor…and a series of Nazi salutes by members of the audience” (Gabbatt,
2016, para. 4). The post-truth culture’s emphasis of emotionally charged rhetoric has
encouraged far-right extremists to “try to capitalize on a racially recharged political climate”
(Futrell & Simi, 2017, p. 76).
The freedom the Internet and social media offer to provide a sense of safe anonymity
to express racist sentiments, including Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic views, has
undoubtedly contributed to the rise in online hate crime in the UK and elsewhere in the world
(HoC, 2017a).
If the online rise of Holocaust denial is, whether wholly or in part, an aspect of the
development of the post-truth political culture, then can anything be done to fight it?
D’Ancona (2017) argues that education and knowledge are key tools in the battle against
post-truth narratives. However, while the Holocaust has been a staple of the British
educational curriculum for almost a quarter of a century, studies have shown that “too many
young people have far too superficial an understanding of the causes, nature and
consequences of the Holocaust” (HoC, 2016, p. 6). Furthermore, the Institute of Education
(IoE) report into the teaching and understanding of the Holocaust acknowledges that we are
presently living in “a time when the Holocaust has never been more ‘present’ in
contemporary Britain, when representations abound and when its memory is highly
politicised” (Foster, et al, 2016, p. 205). This lack of an in-depth understanding about the
Holocaust, and the multitude of representations in popular culture of it, is a concern as
Holocaust revisionists and deniers may be able to present their arguments of what they
believe is the true narrative of events and not have them questioned or challenged. The mass
of misinformation, which is “devilishly entwined on the Internet with real information,
36
making the two difficult to separate” (Levitin, 2017, p. xix), surrounding the Holocaust and
the seeming legitimisation of racist and anti-Semitic views offered by post-truth politics will
make the fight against the deniers and revisionists more and more difficult.
The IoE report recognised the importance of the testimony of Holocaust survivors, remarking
that it “often proves a uniquely affecting experience for young people that can facilitate
distinctive ways of ‘understanding’ and of drawing personal meaning from this history”
(Foster, et al, 2016, p. 211). While the report is focused on testimony given directly from a
living survivor, recorded and written testimony will play an even more important role once
those who survived the Holocaust are now longer around to tell their stories. The controversy
surrounding Binjamin Wilkomirski and Fragments has, however, not been the last word in
Holocaust testimonies which have proven to be fabricated. More recent examples include
Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves (2005), in which the author recounted her
experiences of being taken in and protected by a pack of wolves during her search for her
parents during the Holocaust, and the story of Herman Rosenblat, which was due to be
published in 2009 as Angel at the Fence and told of how Herman, as a young boy in
Buchenwald, befriended a girl on the outside of the camp who threw him apples over the
fence every day and whom he would go on to find in later life and marry (Katsoulis, 2009).
Both stories attracted interest and fascination, as Fragments had done, but they too were
exposed as false accounts. In both Defonseca and Rosenblat’s cases, it seems that what is
known of their Holocaust experiences was actually more interesting than their fabrications.
Defonseca, a Christian from Belgium, was the daughter of a member of the Gestapo and she
was “traumatised by the stigma of being a “traitor’s child”” (Katsoulis, 2009, para.8), while
Rosenblat had been held in a sub-camp in Buchenwald with his brothers and the story of how
they survived was “far more moving than the one he made up” (ibid., para.15).
37
The cases of Wilkomirski, Defonseca, and Rosenblat all pre-date the post-truth
climate we are presently in. If Fragments had been published in 2016, rather than 1996, and
the questions surrounding the true past of Wilkomirski been raised today, would it have been
as controversial as it was twenty years ago? While it is, arguably, “an insult to the survivors
of the Holocaust” (Stone, 2006, p. 144) that this story was hailed as a classic of its type when
it was an elaborate fabrication, the unescapable fact remains that there was an element of
truth in there to which people responded. If post-truth is “the triumph of the visceral over the
rational” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 20), then re-reading Fragments in this context highlights the
often troubling power of the book. The brutal imagery deployed by Wilkomirski, the
fractured narrative structure which echoes the traumatic memories of victims, the sympathetic
use of child-like narrative perspective, all of these elements make Fragments a visceral read
even if the reader does, on occasion, question the logic of some of the more graphic scenes.
If Shields (2011) is correct when he states that “[t]ruth in a memoir is achieved not
through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the
writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand” (p. 41), then Wilkomirski’s
memoir is true, at least in as much as the events he describes were true for him, even as his
credibility vanished and he desperately held on to his belief that he was not Bruno Grosjean
but was Binjamin Wilkomirski. His engagement with Holocaust history and its
transformation into the narrative of Fragments echoes White’s claim that “[h]istorians may
not like to think of their works as translations of fact into fictions; but this is one of the
effects of their works” (1985, p. 92). Wilkomirski essentially translated factual experiences
and records of ‘children without identity’ into a fictional account of his own personal history.
For a couple of years at least, Wilkomirski’s fiction was taken to be fact.
38
If the emergence of the post-truth era signals a political and cultural shift towards “a
recognition by the producers and consumers of information that reality is now so elusive and
our perspectives…so divergent that it is no longer meaningful to speak of, or seek, the truth”
(D’Ancona, 2017, p. 98) then the boundary between fact and fiction which Fragments blurred
becomes non-existent. Fact and fiction, truth and lies, become one and the same. The danger
this poses is that Holocaust deniers can exploit this situation for their own ends. D’Ancona
noted that what made post-truth such a dangerous prospect was not so much that politicians
were engaged in more deception than before but that the public’s response to the political
spin had changed: “Outrage gives way to indifference and, finally, to collusion” (ibid., p. 26).
At present, the public seem to be in the midst of the second stage, indifference. If post-truth
culture continues then there is a chance that more people will collude with those who deal in
falsehoods rather than be outraged by them. When it comes to matters surrounding the
Holocaust, this becomes even more pressing, for “untruth always matters, and not just
because it is unnecessary to lie when so much terrible truth is available” (Sereny, 1979, p.
673). For the memory of those who died during the Holocaust and those who survived and
had to carry their experiences with them for the rest of their lives, it has become more
important than ever to remember that the truth of their experiences still, and should always,
matter.
39
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False Holocaust Testimony, Holocaust Denial, and Post-Truth Political Culture

Thesis · September 2017

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Post-Truth Political Culture

encouragement throughout the process.

during my visit to the centre as part of my research.

there to push me onwards.

happened. An exploration of the origin and changing reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s

to examine issues around personal narrative, postmodernist interpretations of history,

Figure 1 Twitter Timeline from www.twitter.com .................................................................... 5

definition is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less

facts’” (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 14).

116-118). D’Ancona (2017) recognised that the ‘multiple truths’ encouraged by

postmodernism resulted in “an increasingly pluralist society [which] would need to

“the inadvertent prophets of Post-Truth” (ibid. p. 107).

people from ethnic minorities and of non-British nationality…immediately following the

[Figure 1 Image taken by the author of a Twitter Timeline from www.twitter.com ]

Anti-Semitism, of which Holocaust denial is a part, is on the rise (alongside

and misconceptions…68 per cent of students [were] unaware of what ‘antisemitism’

meant…” (Foster et al, 2016, p. 1).

If students are relying on misconceptions of historical events, especially one as

false Holocaust testimony of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and the subsequent

a form of legitimacy within the post-truth political culture.

CHAPTER ONE: “THE TRUTH OF A LIFE”: FRAGMENTS

Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948 by Binjamin Wilkomirski swiftly became a

Wilkomirski would later identify as Auschwitz) before encountering emotional violence in

afterwards because, appearing at a time of “wild proliferation of Holocaust memoirs and

(ibid.), which it did by emphasising Wilkomirski’s “depiction of an absolute naïf adrift in a

realm of absolute malevolence” (ibid.).

public with their stories” (Eskin, 2002, p. 57).

truth of who he really was.

recovery of a forfeited personal identity through ravelling a daunting trail of unforfeited

Dossekker/Binjamin Wilkomirski gain new relevance? Were the “Wilkomirski Affair” to

the work, rather than the historical facts.

historian constitutes a story…and another in which…he…identifies the kind of story he is

telling” (White, 1985, pp. 58-59).

form of genocide encountered in history: the wilful, systematic, industrially organized,

ideas, or that of other postmodern theorists, to be used as a way of trying to “emplot” a

“revisionists” were attempting to do (Himmelfarb, 1997).

Wilkomirski’s methods when writing Fragments. Professor Nick Groom, in a radio

This appropriation of the stories of others in an attempt to fashion a Holocaust based

themselves in need of “being transformed into narrative language” (ibid.). This

Fragments as a piece of testimonial literature, irrespective of its authenticity in historical fact.

into a coherent whole.

As well as encouraging the reader to be in the position of the adult Wilkomirski,

by who or what he really was.

These memories of trauma which Wilkomirski describes, which include a sickening

‘recovered memories’ has proved to be highly controversial within the psychoanalytic

never his to find again in the first place.

opening chapters, adopted a similar child-like perspective to that used by Wilkomirski in

encode its reality in euphemisms as part of a “mechanism of repression…to conceal the

elaborate that this industry is “built on a fraudulent misappropriation of history for

“primed to celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust “survivor” waiting to

be discovered” (ibid.). While Finklestein’s argument is undoubtedly contentious, there is an

subjecting Wilkomirski to “a second Holocaust by extinguishing his identity” (ibid.). On the

cause “damage to actual Holocaust survivors...every single Holocaust memoir will be

false as the book was.

their memories, even if those memories proved to be false.

Had Wilkomirski allowed Fragments to be marketed as a work of fiction rather than as a

Kosinski, even if he was not necessarily conscious of it.

narratives by which we “tell about” our lives” (2004, p. 694).