In the orphanage, they befriend each other as lonely survivors of the death camps.Many years later, in Switzerland as adults, Wilkomirski and “Mila” meet again: “We met quite by chance She was working as a translator, and I’d become a musician. Mila and I saw each other regularly now – we often had long talks. We discussed the present, but what we really meant was our past .. We loved each other, and our love was fed by our sadness. But it was always accompanied by a fear of touching what actually bound us together. So, inevitably, we lost each other again.”Mila was probably a girl who appears in different records as Martha Fligner or Karola Fliegner, born in Lemberg (Lvov) in 1931.

The later part of her life story is consistent with Wilkomirski’s account. She now lives in Paris but spent some time in Switzerland.Do I believe Wilkomirski knew her? Yes – in Zurich, when they were adults. But when they were children in Cracow? That seems less likely. Establishing “Mila’s” identity has its own difficulties, but it seems that at some point in 1946 she moved to the Augustianska orphanage.In 1994, Wilkomirski seemed certain that this girl and the woman he knew in Switzerland 20 years later were one and the same.

Yet, in a fax to a friend on 8 July that year, he concedes that, according to Red Cross records, she had spent the war in hiding and not (as his book has it) in a camp. What is more, she came to the orphanage only after the time Wilkomirski now implies he was there.Despite several approaches from me, Mila declined to be interviewed. She is, however, the woman whom Lea Balint told me could “really help Bruno if she could confirm his memories”. Sadly, according to Balint, she did not remember him at the Cracow orphanage.So what role did “Mila” play in the making of Wilkomirski’s book? I think this: she was another stage in his exercise of imaginative reconstruction. Perhaps it was from her, when they were both adults in Zurich, that he first heard the story of the orphanage on Augustianska Street.Wilkomirski wrote in his afterword: “years of research, many journeys back to the places where I remember things happened, and countless conversations with specialists and historians have helped me to clarify many previously inexplicable shreds of memory…” Novelists sometimes take a similar route. They have an idea for a story in a certain place and time; and then, just to make sure no solecisms crop up in the narrative, they might travel to a city to check its streetlife and spend a few days in the local library.

Wilkomirski wasn’t dealing with a novel, he was dealing with his life; but I began to see how such a process could have led to the writing of Fragments.In Fragments, he mentioned two teachers who inspired him – a maths teacher, who was Jewish, and a history teacher, who was committed to describing the truth about Nazism. According to another student at the same school, Bruno then was “a very happy adolescent, good-looking, popular with the girls … his parents let him do whatever he wanted, he skied a lot, was interested in jazz and dancing” But that seems to have been the public Bruno. His drawings and paintings from that time (he showed me examples) suggest a deeply troubled adolescence; a favourite, which he pinned above his bed, is of a dark prison cell.Wilkomirski often refers to his memories as being filmlike. I think they are more than that: they are, I believe, derived from films. In a documentary about him, he is shown watching concentration-camp scenes on television.

His face has the same suffering expression as when he talks about being there himself. Perhaps, in some sense, he is.And now I consider the main evidence against him. The birth certificate that says he was Bruno Grosjean, born Biel, Switzerland, 12 February 1941; the records which show Bruno Grosjean’s adoption by the Dossekkers; the con- tinual revision of his hypothesis; his absence from the memory of anyone who might have known him in Cracow; and, crucially, an unwillingness – as disclosed by Ganzfried and repeated to me – to submit to a DNA test which might prove his relationship to Yvonne Grosjean’s brother Max. To take that one step might risk everything.For all these reasons, I cannot believe that Fragments is anything other than fiction. And yet, when I came back from his farmhouse that evening, I was, as I said, convinced he was genuine Anguish like his seemed impossible to fabricate.