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fearfulness, and panic attacks. He found a psychodynamically oriented analyst named Monika Matta, who analyzed his dreams and worked with nonverbal techniques, such as drawing and other methods of increasing “awareness of the body’s emotions.” Matta urged him to write down his memories. For people who always have remembered a traumatic or secret experience, writing can indeed be beneficial, often enabling sufferers to see their experience in a new light and to begin to put it behind them.19 But for those who are trying to remember something that never happened, writing, analyzing dreams, and drawing pictures—techniques that are the staples of many psychotherapists—are all methods that quickly conflate imagination with reality.

Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process “imagination inflation,” because the more you imagine something, the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.20 (Scientists have even tracked imagination inflation into the brain, using functional MRI to show how it works at a neural level.21) For example, Giuliana Mazzoni and her colleagues asked their study participants to tell them a dream, and in return gave them a (false) “personalized” dream analysis. They told half the participants the dream meant that they had been harassed by a bully before the age of three, been lost in a public place, or been through a similar upsetting early event. Compared with control subjects who were given no such interpretations, the dream subjects were more likely to come to believe the dream explanation had really occurred, and about half of them eventually produced detailed memories of the experience. In another experiment, people were asked to remember when their school nurse took a skin sample from their little finger to carry out a national health test. (No such test existed.) Simply imagining this unlikely scenario caused the participants to become more confident that it had happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories (“the place smelled horrible”). 22 Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.23

Writing turns a fleeting thought into a fact of history, and for Wilkomirski, writing down his memories confirmed his memories. “My illness showed me that it was time for me to write it all down for myself,” said Wilkomirski, “just as it was held in my memory, to trace every hint all the way back.”24 Just as he rejected the historians at Majdanek who challenged his recall, he rejected the scientists who told him memory doesn’t work that way.

While Fragments was in production, the publisher received a letter from a man alleging that Wilkomirski’s story was untrue. The publisher, alarmed, contacted Wilkomirski for confirmation. Elitsur Bernstein and Monika Matta sent letters of support. “In reading Bruno’s manuscript I never had any doubt as to its so-called ‘authenticity,’” Bernstein wrote to the publisher. “I shall take the liberty of saying that in my judgment only someone who has experienced such things can write about them in such a way.” Monika Matta, doing a little self-justification dance of her own, likewise had no doubts about the authenticity of Wilkomirski’s memories or identity. Wilkomirski, she wrote, was a gifted, honest man who had “an extraordinarily precisely functioning memory” and had been profoundly shaped by his childhood experience. She wrote that she hoped that any “absurd doubts can be dispelled,” because the publication of the book was very important for Wilkomirski’s mental health. It was her wish, she wrote, that fate not overtake him in such a perfidious way, “ demonstrating to him yet again that he is a ‘nobody.’” 25 The publisher, convinced by the testimonials and