1997 Holocaust "memoire" admitted to be all false

Misha Defonseca

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha:_A_M%C3%A9moire_of_the_Holocaust_Years

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,334171,00.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2185493/pagenum/all/#page_start

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Published in 1997, Misha is about a Jewish girl from Brussels who walked across Europe by herself during World War II and spent months living in the forest. Like Fragments, it's the story of a vulnerable child, alone in the world, who travels great distances and faces perils as chilling as they are difficult to verify. Even if you forget for a moment that Defonseca has two prolonged encounters with wolves in war-torn Europe, her story strains credulity: She walks from Belgium to Ukraine, sneaks into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and stabs to death a Nazi rapist who attacks her—all between ages 7 and 11.

Now, 11 years after publishing her memoir and almost two decades since she went public with her story, Defonseca has admitted that she is actually Monique De Wael, the orphaned daughter of two Catholic members of the Belgian resistance. Yesterday, through her lawyer, she released a statement to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir. The story of Misha, she said, "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving."

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Defonseca also claims she was the victim of her publisher. "At first, I didn't want to publish, and then I let myself be talked into it by Jane Daniel. She made me believe, and I believed it." Daniel may have persuaded Defonseca to publish Misha, but Rabbi Heiligman says that the core of Defonseca's story did not change since the first time she told her story, years before Defonseca met Daniel. And Daniel had no hand in the U.K. edition or Véra Belmont's film.

Defonseca is no innocent, but she could not have made Misha into an international phenomenon on her own. When the historian Debórah Dwork told Daniel that Misha was not authentic testimony, that didn't stop Daniel from publishing the book. Nor did these questions keep Véra Belmont from making her film and comparing those who dared question its authenticity to Holocaust deniers.

Since Defonseca came clean, Rabbi Heiligman told me, "I wish she had published it as fiction—it's a compelling story." And a spokesman for Belmont told the Boston Globe, "No matter if it's true or not—she believes it is, anyway—she just thinks it's a beautiful story." In her statement, Defonseca says,

I always felt different. It's true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community.

Defonseca has suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis. But her empathy with Jewish suffering went too far, and "feeling Jewish" does not give her license for such narcissistic disregard for the suffering of actual Jews. For others to continue telling the story of Misha, especially now that she acknowledges it's a fable, is an affront to those authentic Holocaust survivors with sad but not otherworldly stories, to the memory of those who did not live to document their own fate, and to those who take the study of history seriously.