Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [41]
Binjamin Wilkomirski, a.k.a. Bruno Grosjean, spent his first four years being bounced around from place to place. His mother saw him only intermittently and finally abandoned him completely, placing him in a children’s home, where he lived until he was adopted by the Dössekkers. In adulthood, Wilkomirski decided that his early years were the source of his present problems, and perhaps they were. Apparently, however, an all-too-common story of being born to a single mother who couldn’t care for him, and being eventually adopted by a kindly but formal couple, couldn’t explain his difficulties dramatically enough. But what if he had not been adopted but rescued after the war, and exchanged for a child named Bruno Grosjean in the orphanage? “Why else,” his biographer says Wilkomirski felt, “would he have the panic attacks that suddenly overwhelm him? Or the misshapen bump at the back of his head and the scar on his forehead? Or the nightmares that constantly plague him?” 17
Why else? Panic attacks are a normal response to stress by those vulnerable to them. Just about everyone has bumps and scars of one kind or another; in fact, Wilkomirski’s own son has the same misshapen bump in the same place, suggesting a genetic answer to that mystery. Nightmares are common in the general population and, surprisingly, they do not necessarily reflect actual experience. Many traumatized adults and children do not have nightmares, and many nontraumatized people do.
But Wilkomirski was not interested in these explanations. On a quest for meaning in his life, he stepped off his pyramid by deciding he would find the true reason for his symptoms in his first four lost years. At first, he didn’t actually remember any early traumatic experiences, and the more he obsessed about his memories, the more elusive his early years felt. He started reading about the Holocaust, including survivors’ accounts. He began to identify with Jews, putting a mezuzah on his door and wearing a Star of David. At the age of thirty-eight, he met Elitsur Bernstein, an Israeli psychologist who was living in Zurich, a man who would become his closest friend and adviser on his journeys into his past.
Hunting down his memories, Wilkomirski traveled to Majdanek with a group of friends, including the Bernsteins. When they arrived, Wilkomirski wept: “This was my home! This was where the children were quarantined!” The group visited the historians at the camp’s archive, but when Wilkomirski asked them about the children’s quarantine, they laughed at him. Very young children died or were killed, they said; the Nazis didn’t run a nursery for them in a special barracks. By this time, however, Wilkomirski was too far along on his identity quest to turn back because of evidence that he was wrong, so his reaction was to reduce dissonance by dismissing the historians: “They made me look really stupid. It was a very rotten thing to do,” he told Maechler. “From that moment on, I knew that I could depend more on my memory than on what is said by the so-called historians, who never gave a thought to children in their research.” 18
The next step for Wilkomirski was to go into therapy to get help for his nightmares,