Zurich withdraws literary award

The city of Zurich has stripped the author Binjamin Wilkomirski of a literary prize it awarded in 1995. It said recent research showed that Wilkomirski's book of Holocaust memoirs was a freely invented autobiography.

The author had claimed to be a Latvian Jew who had seen his father beaten to death while imprisoned in a concentration camp in Poland. He said he had recovered details of his childhood for the book “Fragments of a Childhood 1939-1948” after undergoing therapy.

But Zurich officials said that Wilkomirski was really a Swiss citizen named Bruno Doessekker, who could not claim any Jewish identity. They are not demanding the author return the SFr6,000 prize money

Swiss authorities have been investigating Deosseker after a Swiss lawyer filed a criminal complaint, accusing him of deception in publishing the book.

In 1998, the journalist, Daniel Ganzfried, cast doubt on the authenticity of the book. He said Wilkomirski had not been born in Riga as he had claimed, but in the Swiss town of Biel, under the name Bruno Grosjean.

Ganzfried said Grosjean had not grown up in a concentration camp, but with his adoptive family, the Doessekers, in Zurich.

Last year, the publishers of the original German version, Suhrkamp Verlag, recalled hardback copies of the book.

swissinfo with agencies