CHILD OF THE DEATH CAMPS: TRUTH AND LIES

The film raises the painful question of whether it is always a good thing to find out the truth. Journalist Daniel Ganzfied, who accuses the self-declared Holocaust survivor Binjamin Wilkomirski of lying, applies a strong argument. If false accounts of the concentration camps are accepted, it leaves room for false denials. But camp victims who consider Wilkomirski their spokesman, feel that their own credibility is being undermined by Ganzfield. It was not surprising that his attack on Wilkomirski was embraced by those that dispute that the Holocaust even took place. Director Christopher Olgiati first follows Wilkomirski's own story, as written down in his international best-seller Fragments. Wilkomirski claims to have been born in Riga, where his father was murdered by Latvian fascists. When he was three or four, he ended up in the concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. Wilkomirski himself was only kept alive as a medical experiment by the infamous Dr. Mengele. In Switzerland, after the war, he was given the name Bruno Grosjean. This name turns out to be the key to Wilkomirski's real past. Olgiati manages to trace former friends and relatives of Bruno Grosjean...