Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood

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