Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood

Majdanek extermination camp outside Lublin, Poland, was equally as murderous as Auschwitz, and nearly as large. It is curious that it is much less well known, but that is where the author spent about four years of his childhood, as an orphan, entering the camp around age three. His survival is a testament to his resilience. In sparest prose, the author describes such daily occurrences as starving babies who devour the ends of their own fingers. There are numerous Holocaust memoirs on the market, but this one is qualitatively different, for it attempts to introduce us to the worst of the Nazi horror through the mind of a child. Wilkomirski, today a musician living in Switzerland, worked with a psychiatrist to piece together these ""fragments"" of the story of his childhood--recollections that, he claims, he has dredged up through the psychiatric process. Though presented as fact, this blackest night of the soul reads like fine literature. (Sept.)