Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments

In his memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski delivers a heart-breaking story with glimpses into his childhood during World War Two while he was imprisoned in several Nazi children's concentration camps and his move from the orphanage in Krakow, Poland. The best way to analyze Binijamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, is to consider Binijamin's life before he was taken away from his home in Latvia, his life during the Nazi concentration camps, his life under a Swiss identity in a Swedish orphanage, and his return to the real world. Wilkomirski captures our hearts through young innocent eyes, knowing only his life as a number from the time he is roughly three to four years old. Wilkomirski …show more content…
In the concentration camp, Wilkomirski meets his best friend, Jankle, who is a twelve year old boy, the night he breaks down crying knee deep in human waste. He describes living on mostly soup, enduring daily abuse, starvation, the brutality of other children, and the mistrust of adults. Wilkomirskis loses hope after the death of his friend Jankle, recalling crying over his dead body, saying “I should write a whole book in his honor, not just one pitiful little chapter” (72). Reflecting on memories during the camps, he gives a cloudy recollection of digging his way above a pit of human bodies where he can only assume he was left to die. Wilkomirski always struggled to be unseen during roll call, surviving by hiding in floorboards, oak trees, and mounds of clothes. He knew Nazis burned children. His first memory of babies was wondering why the starving infants were being dropped into a childrens' barracks. When he woke up the next morning, they had chewed their fingers off during the night, unable to feel them, numb from the frostbite. In addition, he struggles today be around babies because of his worst memory: stepping over babies with their skulls bashed to escape after Nazi soliders found them inside a mound of clothes where he had been hiding in a women's textile …show more content…
He begins telling past memories of trying to adjust when he identified himself Swedish and was sent an orphanage in Sweden. Wilkomirski could not adjust to children not eating all their food or saving it for later; one never knows when he can eat. Wilkomirski is ridiculed when he believes he has lost his shoes and ties rags to his feet to protect them from the cold, as Jankl taught him, but his shoes were simply drying. He terrifies his teacher and students when asked what he saw in the poster of a Swedish hero shooting an apple off of a baby's head, He responds plainly, it is a Nazi shooting a baby. He also touches on his embarassment after adoption during his first fair when he did not have money to enter a ride and then terrified students, teachers, and his parents by panhandling. Life outside the concentration camps was different. It was not about survival; it was about fitting