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Review by Michael Alec Rose
It does not get any worse than this. Until you confront the things that are recounted in this book, you will not have reached the limits of conceivable inhumanity. In all times and in all places, people have visited dehumanizing cruelty upon other people. Every bit of that unredeemable history is compressed, concentrated, and surpassed in this little memoir.
Book reviewers are not usually given to goading the reader. But then it is not usually the case that a book deals with such horrific extremes. So I dare you to imagine something worse than what happens in this book. You won't be able to.
That it even happened at all -- truly happened, only a half-century ago -- is difficult for a feeling person to accept. But accept it one must.
That it happened to a child makes it unbearable. But it must be borne.
Or must it? Why read such a devastating narrative at all? Why stretch our capacity to realize the fullest depravity of human ruthlessness? Why subject ourselves to facts we would be much happier left ignorant of?
The Holocaust can be, and ought to be, a reproach to willful innocence. In the face of its sheer horror, it is almost impossible to pretend that our freedoms and pleasures are any more than just matters of luck.
At the same time, the bottomless tragedy of the Shoah can serve to clarify just how precious childhood is: how rare it is that children have ever had the time, space, and freedom in which to laugh, play, and merely be children.
Binjamin Wilkomirski never had this chance.
Like so many survivors who were encouraged to suppress their memories of wartime, it has taken him decades to unleash these fragments on a world poised to forget the event altogether. Fragments are, of necessity, all that his memories can be. A three-year-old child cannot grasp the enormity of witnessing the murder of his own father. A mere toddler cannot know how to be grateful to a woman who preserves his life in a random moment. A small boy cannot know how to respond when a man kicks him in the face and leaves him for dead.
But a child can feel guilt over his own survival while watching other children die, and can actually come to believe that he is the cause of the dying going on around him. A child can come to understand that he will lose every person he loves to violent death. A child, above all, can learn to accept his impossibly brutal reality as the way the world was meant to be. Such a child learns to mistrust any act of kindness or compassion.
Such a child becomes an adult who must either tell the tale or be eaten away by his own silence. Wilkomirski tells. Who are we not to listen? And if not now, when?
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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