News Source: Last Updated: Friday, February 29, 2008 3:35 PM ET
CBC News
A Belgian writer has admitted her bestselling memoir about how she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods to escape from the Nazis during the Second World War was fabricated.
Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (also known as Survivre avec les Loups) by Misha Defonseca was translated into 18 languages during the 1990s and made into a feature film in France.
Misha Defonseca, left, and co-author Vera Lee pose for a photograph on Sept. 20, 2001, in Newton, Mass.
(John Blanding/Boston Globe/Associated Press) The author admitted on Friday that her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek more than 3,000 kilometres across Europe with a wolf pack in search of her deported Jewish parents.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed," Defonseca said in a statement released by her Brussels-based lawyers, Nathalie and Marc Uttendaele.
The 71-year-old author now lives in Dudley, Mass.
Author never fled Belgium in war years
In her book, Defonseca said the Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years.
She also claimed she was trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier and was adopted by a group of wolves.
In the statement, she concedes that the story was a fantasy and she never fled her home in Brussels during the war.
She also divulged that her real name was Monique De Wael and her parents were taken and killed by the Nazis because they were Belgian resistance fighters.
The writer says she invented the tale because of the hard life she had growing up as an outsider of sorts.
'There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe.'
—Misha DefonsecaShe was often called "daughter of the traitor" because her father was rumoured to have given up information under torture. She was cared for by relatives.
"Apart from my grandfather, I hated the people who looked after me. They treated me badly … [I] always felt Jewish," she told French newspaper Le Figaro in an article published Friday.
She was fascinated by wolves as a young girl, she told the paper, and that also became part of her fantasy life.
"There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe," she said.
The revelation comes amid some controversy that had already been swirling around Defonseca for the past few weeks. There have been rumblings that she was not Jewish in addition to a protracted battle she's had with her American publisher over royalties.
Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg, interviewed on television, says the Defonseca family can't be found in Jewish archives and says the De Wael family is not Jewish either.
The story was written with the help of ghostwriter Vera Lee, who says she was shocked to hear Defonseca made up the story.
"She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said.
CBC News
A Belgian writer has admitted her bestselling memoir about how she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods to escape from the Nazis during the Second World War was fabricated.
Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (also known as Survivre avec les Loups) by Misha Defonseca was translated into 18 languages during the 1990s and made into a feature film in France.
Misha Defonseca, left, and co-author Vera Lee pose for a photograph on Sept. 20, 2001, in Newton, Mass.
(John Blanding/Boston Globe/Associated Press) The author admitted on Friday that her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek more than 3,000 kilometres across Europe with a wolf pack in search of her deported Jewish parents.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed," Defonseca said in a statement released by her Brussels-based lawyers, Nathalie and Marc Uttendaele.
The 71-year-old author now lives in Dudley, Mass.
Author never fled Belgium in war years
In her book, Defonseca said the Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years.
She also claimed she was trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier and was adopted by a group of wolves.
In the statement, she concedes that the story was a fantasy and she never fled her home in Brussels during the war.
She also divulged that her real name was Monique De Wael and her parents were taken and killed by the Nazis because they were Belgian resistance fighters.
The writer says she invented the tale because of the hard life she had growing up as an outsider of sorts.
'There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe.'
—Misha DefonsecaShe was often called "daughter of the traitor" because her father was rumoured to have given up information under torture. She was cared for by relatives.
"Apart from my grandfather, I hated the people who looked after me. They treated me badly … [I] always felt Jewish," she told French newspaper Le Figaro in an article published Friday.
She was fascinated by wolves as a young girl, she told the paper, and that also became part of her fantasy life.
"There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe," she said.
The revelation comes amid some controversy that had already been swirling around Defonseca for the past few weeks. There have been rumblings that she was not Jewish in addition to a protracted battle she's had with her American publisher over royalties.
Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg, interviewed on television, says the Defonseca family can't be found in Jewish archives and says the De Wael family is not Jewish either.
The story was written with the help of ghostwriter Vera Lee, who says she was shocked to hear Defonseca made up the story.
"She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said.
2 comments:
That's a good question. How many other fake stories are out there? This was sold as fact for more than a decade, while the author made millions out of her lies, and also sued an earlier publisher for damages.
Some other fake memoirs are "Kathy's Story", "Burned Alive", and "Honor Lost".
How awful that the Rosenblats lied about their story and that the publishers and movie makers fell for it. Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was a great book and now movie, never pretended to be true. The Rosenblats, like Madoff, are harming the good Jewish name and it's terrible.
I read a New York Times article about Stan Lee and Neal Adams the comic book artists supporting another TRUE Holocaust love story. There was a beautiful young artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children's barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. Dina's art became the reason she and her Mother survived Auschwitz.
Painting the mural for the children caused Dina to be taken in front of Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he decided to make her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber as long as she was doing painting for him.
Dina's story is true because some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. Also, the story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children's barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also a fact.
I wish Oprah would do a story about Dina and her art not about the Rosenblats who were pulling the wool over all our eyes.
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