Reliability of Testimonies of the Holocaust Survivors: Elie Wiesel's Night and Binjamin Wilkomirski's 'Fragments'

This essay will explore the relationship between fact and fiction in the representation of the holocaust. I will explore Elie Wiesel's Night and Benjimin Wilkomirski's Fragments and analyse the contribution made by these books to the debate about the authenticity of survivor testimony. The two texts I will look at challenge the notions of truth and reality. They both claim to be factual accounts of an actual moment in time, yet there is strong evidence …

…the Revisionist arguments become non-existent since they refer to the inaccuracies of the accounts, not the power of the narrative. If it is assumed that all narratives are in some way fictive, it is the way in which the account is personalised in order to convey emotion to the reader which gives the text its power. For both accounts, the quality of the fiction outweighs the many questions raised about the authenticity of the text.