Mistakes were made (Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson) p108-9
But Wilkomirski was not interested in these explanations. On a quest for meaning in his life, he stepped off his pyramid by deciding he would find the true reason for his symptoms in his first four lost years. At first, he didn’t remember any early traumatic experiences, and the more he obsessed about his memories, the more elusive his early years felt. He started reading about the Holocaust, including survivors’ accounts. He began to identify with Jews, putting a mezuzah on his door and wearing a Star of David. At the age of thirty-eight, he met Elitsur Bernstein, an lsraeli psychologist living in Zurich, who would become his closest friend and adviser on his journeys into his past.
Hunting down his memories, Wilkomirski traveled to Majdanek with a group of friends, including the Bernsteins. When they arrived, Wilkomirski wept: “This was my home! This was where the children were quarantined!” The group visited the historians at the camp’s archive, but when Wilkomirski asked them about the children’s quarantine, they laughed at him. Very young children died or were killed, they said; the Nazis didn’t run a nursery for them in a special barracks. By this time, however, Wilkomirski was too far along on his identity quest to turn back because of evidence that he was wrong, so his reaction was to reduce dissonance by dismissing the historians: “They made me look really stupid. It was a very rotten thing to do,” he told Maeehler. “From that moment on, I knew that I could depend more on my memory than on what is said by the so-called historians, who never gave a thought to children in their research.”
The next step for Wilkomirski was to go into therapy to get help for his nightmares, fearfulness, and panic attacks. He found a psychodynamically oriented analyst, Monika Matta, who analyzed his dreams and worked with nonverbal techniques, such as drawing and 0ther methods of increasing “awareness of the body’s emotions.” Matta urged him to write down his memories. For people who have always remembered a traumatic or secret experience, writing can indeed be beneficial, often enabling sufferers to see their experience in a new light and begin to put it behind them. But for those who are trying to remember something that never happened, writing, analyzing dreams, and drawing pictures – techniques that are the staples of many psychotherapists – are all methods that quickly conflate imagination with reality.
Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process “imagination inflation,” because the more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened – and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go. (Scientists have even tracked imagination infiation into the brain, using functional MRI to show how it works at a neural level.)
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