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.

[2] In 1995, Wilkomirski, a professional clarinettist and instrument maker living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke.

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.

[5][6] Wilkomirski was invited to participate in radio and television programs as a witness and expert, and was interviewed and videotaped by reputable archives.

For example, he provided the names of the concentration camps in which he claimed to have been interned (Majdanek and Auschwitz), and added that he had been the victim of unbearable medical experiments.

[2] He insisted that he was an authentic Holocaust survivor who had been secretly switched as a young boy with Bruno Grosjean upon his arrival in Switzerland.

Eskin's interest in Wilkomirski had its origins in genealogy: his family had ancestors in Riga and, initially, they believed that the author of Fragments could perhaps be a long-lost relative.

"Those merits reside in a ferocious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of indelible images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child's voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world, during the war and thereafter" (Zeitlin, 2003, p. 177, see also Suleiman, 2006, p. 170).

The Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien [de] held a conference named Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom in Potsdam in 2001.