Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn

For more than a year the publishers of a slender 155-page memoir of a young Latvian Jewish orphan's early life of struggle in two concentration camps stood firm against accusations that the memories of terror were nothing more than vivid fantasies.

But today the German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, which had once vigorously defended the author, Binjamin Wilkomirksi, announced with expressions of pity that it was withdrawing from stores all hardcover copies of the book, ''Fragments.'' It was acting on information in a historian's 100-page confidential report that had recently been presented to it that concluded that Mr. Wilkomirski had not been a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born child named Bruno Doessekker.

The announcement, in which the publisher continued to refer to the author as Binjamin Wilkomirski, was made in a brief statement in what amounts to the public square of international publishing, the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, which draws more than 6,000 exhibitors annually. And it is likely that the Suhrkamp announcement will have a ripple effect since many of the other publishers of the book around the world had relied on the well-respected German publisher to vouch for Mr. Wilkomirski.

Mr. Wilkomirski did not respond to messages left for him at his home in Switzerland. But two people with knowledge of the report said that when he was confronted with its findings, he stood up and declared defiantly, ''I am Binjamin Wilkomirski.''

The frail, reclusive author has been immersed in an international controversy since a Swiss writer, Daniel Ganzfried, first raised doubts publicly last year about whether Mr. Wilkomirski was actually Jewish or even old enough to have witnessed the terrors of two concentration camps in Poland. The author described watching rats rummaging among the corpses and starving babies sucking their fingers to the bone.

In translations, the book's simple, searing language has reaped a number of honors like the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France. Mr. Wilkomirski also toured the United States to deliver lectures in major cities sponsored by the Umited States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

But as the nagging doubts about his identity increased, Mr. Wilkomirski's Swiss agent, Eva Koralnik, decided to hire a Swiss historian, Stefan Machler, to investigate the author's murky past. Mr. Machler's preliminary report, six months in the making, includes new information from documents, which indicate that Mr. Wilkomirski was living in Switzerland and never left the country during the war years, a period when, he has said, he was struggling to survive in the camps of Majdnek and Auschwitz. A Swiss television station also reported this week that the historian had tracked down the author's living natural father.

A final report is still scheduled to be issued, Suhrkamp said, but there was enough troubling information to prompt the publisher to pull several hundred hardcover copies in circulation in German bookstores and to banish the title from the back list of its Jewish-interest publishing imprint, Judischer Verlag. Suhrkamp will continue to sell paperback versions until the final report comes out sometime in the next three weeks and the company makes what it says will be its ultimate conclusion.

''We are very disappointed to make this decision,'' said Nadine Meyer, the editor of Judischer. ''We are sad about it and we feel sorry about it, but also have a responsiblity as a publisher.''

Heide Grasnick, a spokeswoman for Suhrkamp, said the company did not condemn Mr. Wilkomirksi but rather felt sympathy for the author, who was raised by his adoptive parents in Switzerland and spent decades searching for his identity.

While awaiting a response from Mr. Wilkomirski, Ms. Grasnick said, the company decided to move right away to withdraw books published by Judischer because it now seemed inappropiate for a Jewish publishing imprint to be circulating the book.

''It's a problem,'' Ms. Grasnick said. ''What do you do when you have an author who maintains that this is his identity and still believes it and there are these documents?'' She added: ''I feel pity for him because I know him personally. He's not a happy person.''

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