STEPHANIE TANIZAR
Assistant Perspectives Editor
In 1997, South Coast Today ran an article about Misha Defonseca, a then-64 year-old Holocaust survivor and book author. When she passed a dead animal on the street, she stopped her car to reverently move the corpse to the side of the road. The carcasses reminded her of the dead children she had seen.
Nearly 11 years, a lawsuit and millions of dollars later, Defonseca has confessed that the memory of those corpses, detailed in her bestselling autobiography, was almost completely fabricated.
“Misha – A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” is the story of a Belgian Jewish girl’s attempt to find her parents after they are arrested by Germans. Over the next four years, she wanders through various countries in Europe before finally returning to Belgium through France. Along the way, she witnesses the aforementioned execution of children, kills a German soldier with a pocketknife out of self-defense, sneaks into and out of the Warsaw ghetto, and is raised by wolves — all before the age of 12.
By all accounts, it is a compelling story, not in the least substantiated by its wide popularity in Europe, though it sold poorly in the United States. As CNN reports, it was recently made into a feature film in France.
The road to publication has not been without pitfalls, however. According to the Boston Globe, Defonseca and her co-author, Vera Lee, sued their publisher for breach of contract, as the book was never properly marketed in America, nor did they receive their share of overseas royalties.
More than that, the book itself had critics even before it was published. Lawrence L. Langer, a preeminent authority on Holocaust survivor narratives, reportedly warned Jane Daniel, the publisher in question, against publishing the story when she sketched the details for him. Other Holocaust experts, including Deborah Dwork and Raul Hilberg, also indicated that the plot points within the memoir were not historically possible. Daniel refused to listen, batting away the facts with the excuse of a young girl’s faded memory.
Her tune changed, however, after the lawsuit, which cost Daniel $32.3 million in damages. With a vengeance, Daniel set out to expose Defonseca’s tangled lies. She began by drawing on the Internet, according to Slate.com, starting a blog that detailed her mishaps in the publishing of “Misha.” Daniels found breadcrumbs leading to Defonseca’s birth certificate, which she posted on her blog along with a school register proving that Monique de Wael – Defonseca’s true identity – had been enrolled in a Belgian school two years after she had purportedly left.
Faced with the mounting evidence, Defonseca confessed to the deception. As Monique de Wael, the only truth in her tale was the death of her parents, who were killed as Catholic resisters. Adding insult to injury, Defonseca is not even Jewish, though she claims a tenuous kinship through her parents’ death at German hands.
“That Monique, she’s got some imagination!” said an 88 year-old cousin of Defonseca’s, according to Belgian newspaper Le Soir when they tracked her down, still living in Belgium.
In the United Kingdom’s Telegraph, a former friend claimed, “She belonged to a very good family and lived in the most beautiful house on the street.”
A far cry from an impoverished girl forced to eat mud and raised by wolves.
Defonseca is not the first to falsify a Holocaust survival story. In 1997, a man by the name of Binjamin Wilkomirski took it upon himself to create a fake survival experience. His book, “Fragments,” was debunked in 1999.
Defonseca paints herself as a victim in her public statement and apology to her readers, claiming that the book had become her reality over her privileged past.
“I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community,” Defonseca said.
The problem with deceptive Holocaust tales, or even deceptive tales of any tragedy, goes beyond the tame misleading of a few readers. Each new lie allows true survivors of a tragedy to doubt their own memories. Each new lie lends doubt to true accounts of tragedy, an affront and one more weight in the yoke that survivors must bear.
03-20-2008
