Product Description
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award
An extraordinary memoir of a small boy who spent his childhood in the Nazi death camps. Binjamin Wilkomirski was a child when the round-ups of Jews in Latvia began. His father was killed in front of him, he was separated from his family, and, perhaps three or four years old, he found himself in Majdanek death camp, surrounded by strangers. In piercingly simple scenes Wilkomirski gives us the "fragments" of his recollections, so that we too become small again and see this bewildering, horrifying world at child's eye-height. No adult interpretations intervene. From inside the mind of a little boy we too experience love and loss, terror and friendship, and the final arduous return to the "real" world. Beautifully written, with an indelible impact that makes this a book that is not read but experienced, Fragments is "a masterpiece" (Kirkus Reviews). Translated form the German by Carol Brown Janeway.
"This sunning and austerely written work is so profoundly moving, so morally important, and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all that I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise."--Jonathan Kozol, The Nation
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Amazon.com Review
Binjamin Wilkomirski (the name the author believes to be his, though he will never know for sure) was held in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland as a young child. Fragments contains the powerful remnants of his memory, the piercing shards of a child's recollections of unadulterated terror and the confusing horror of the camps. The sheer power of the author's story would be sufficient to explain the force of his words; his steady confidence in his childlike voice and memory adds even greater authority to this memoir. Capable of standing up against Elie Wiesel's harrowing masterpiece Night, Fragments evokes an awesome power through the memory of a child and the words of a courageously honest man who has refused to substitute "understanding" for the inexplicable events he experienced.
