Misha Defonseca is a sweet looking woman, 71 years old, living in Dudley, Massachusetts. She is also the author of a best-selling book that chronicles a remarkable story of how she, as a child, traveled 1,900 miles across Europe, sometimes in the company of a pack of wolves, in search of her deported parents.
The book, entitled "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," has been translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
Not one word of it is true.
Defonesca is not her real name, she is Monique De Wael, she is not Jewish and she never left her home in Brussels.
She is now claiming that her parents were resistance fighters, executed by the Nazis. That may be the case, but I for one would want an independent investigation before believing her.
In one of the most dissembling remarks of all time, Misha or Monica or whatever, said that she "felt Jewish" because she was ill-treated by the family that adopted her. She went on:
"This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving." See, there is actual reality and then there is subjective reality, where you can kind of make stuff up.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost," she said in her statement. "To all who felt betrayed" as opposed to all those real people who died, or who lost real family members, whose actual memories she actually denigrated.
I feel for a 4-year old child who was unhappy and felt alone. I don't feel for a grown woman who wrote a book of lies and made money from it.
This book was recommended to me sometime back. When I heard the part about the pack of wolves, "Mowgli versus the Nazis" if you will, I said that I thought it was fake. I just underestimated the extent to which the author would dare to go.
I only hope that, in partial expiation, she will donate the money that she received to a worthwhile charity, like the Wiesenthal Institure.
What really infuriates about this story is how this fraud will be used by the Holocaust deniers. She has done an incaluable amount of harm with her lies.