London - A best-selling memoir of a "Jewish child" who claimed to have survived the horrors of Auschwitz has been exposed as a fraud and withdrawn from bookshops.
Fragments in which "Binjamin Wilkomirski" recalled his harrowing experiences as an orphan adrift in the death camps won the Jewish Quarterly literary prize in Britain and several book awards in other countries before doubts were raised about the writer's identity. In the meantime, the slim volume had become the most successful Swiss book since Heidi, acclaimed as a "masterpiece" of Holocaust literature. Wilkomirski's German publishers, Suhrkamp Verlag, who had stoutly defended the author when questions about his bona fides were first raised, yesterday withdrew hardback copies of the 155-page book from the shelves.