February 29, 2008
Sad … author says her Holocaust memoir is a hoax
The Associated Press is reporting that a best-selling Belgian writer has admitted to fabricating her memoir of growing up as a Jewish child and living with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust.
Here's more on the story:
Misha Defonseca's book, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.
“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed,” Defonseca said, according to a written statement the lawyers gave to The Associated Press.
Defonseca, 71, now lives in Dudley, Massachusetts. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.
Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.
The story goes on to say her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters. She is not Jewish and lived with relatives during the war after her parents were arrested.
This is a sickening story. She should be fed to the wolves.
NO! Stop it, just because she lied doesn’t change the reality of the holocaust. Yes, it was wrong for her to lie but don’t let that change your view on the holocaust as a whole.
I’m an avid reader and collector of Holocaust Survivor memoirs and familial history, as you well know. It is my way of remembering the victims, both the deceased and the living. It is a form of keeping what they endured alive.
Fortunately, this is not one of the books I have read. To think that she fabricated the information…there are no words…
it’s even worse than what i’ve posted above. this author apparently sued her publisher for not doing enough to promote the book and she won millions of dollars. it’s caused financial ruin for the publisher.
Good grief, on the publisher being sued.
It’s such an appalling situation.
Greetings of Peace:
I wonder if the publisher can counter sue her or something. I mean, asking him to do more to publish a book of deception!
Good question, safiyyah.
i’m no lawyer but i assume publishers take on those types of risks all the time when they agree to publish a book and so they can’t go and sue an author who writes something that turns out to be false.
but, in this case, we have someone who apparently wrote something false knowingly.
also, the publisher would have to somehow prove that she was hurt or damaged by the deception.
I wonder how many other stories are fake as well…
Stop!
Chicago Jews managed to get a law passed in Illinois that mandates annual holocaust training for gentile kids.
The local Jewish groups who take over the training program send out these storytellers to indoctrinate the gentile kids so they don’t slaughter Jews when they grow up.
The stories have gotten more and more outlandish. By the end, some grade school kids are crying, asking forgiveness, the whole shmear. It leaves quite a mark on their minds.
Listening to the old women, I figured at the time there was no way they could remember all the touching details, but the weepy administrators who run our school think the more tragic and melodramatic the better.
We will have to be more careful who works on our kids, I guess.