Posted on February 29, 2008 by Steve Pollak
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.