Bad moon rising: The truth behind a Holocaust hoax
Author Misha Defonseca often used to say that if she were in a
sinking boat with a dog and a human, she would rescue the dog
and toss the human overboard.
No doubt. Dogs aren’t sticklers for facts, and they hardly ever do
the kind of research that would expose a bestselling memoir of
the Holocaust as an international fraud.
That’s what happened last week when fact took down fiction and
Defonseca admitted that her book, “Misha: a Memoir of the
Holocaust Years,” which has been translated into 18 languages and
made into a feature film in France, was a hoax.
Defonseca’s story is a gripping World War II account that begins
when she is 7 years old and her parents, members of the Belgium
resistance, are arrested by the Nazis. Defonseca then sets out on a
five-year journey that takes her thousands of miles through war-torn
Europe as she searches for her parents. Along the way, she visits the
Warsaw Ghetto, travels for a while with a band of resistance fighters,
kills a German soldier and, oh yeah, hides in the forest with a
pack of wolves who adopt her as one of their own. The book was published in 1997, and from the beginning there were
some who questioned her story. But it was only over the past couple
months that Sharon Sergeant, a genealogist from Waltham, Mass.,
and two of her contacts in Europe dug through the records and
discovered that Defonseca had actually spent the war at a desk in a
small elementary school in Etterbeek, Belgium. They also found a
baptismal certificate that showed not only was this heroic story about a
child surviving against all odds a lie, Defonseca isn’t even Jewish. “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality,
my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement to The Associated
Press last week. “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.”
It’s not clear yet if there will be much forgiveness for Defonseca,
simply because there are so many who do feel betrayed. Holocaust
historians, students and survivors not only feel angry and disappointed,
they worry about the possible fallout in a world where many continue
to insist that that death marches and concentration camps are a myth.
Meanwhile, writers and publishers are wincing at the potential effect
this latest literary hoax will have on readers who crave true accounts
and the book business that seems less and less capable of delivering them.
And Jane Daniel of Gloucester, the original publisher of “Misha,”
also has a story of betrayal to tell. Shortly after the book was published,
Defonsca and her co-author, Vera Lee, sued Daniel, claiming that she
kept royalties and hid the proceeds from international sales for
translations in offshore accounts. They also claimed that Daniel
didn’t do enough to market the book in the United States.
In 2000, a jury awarded Defonseca $7.5 million while Lee won
$3.3 million.A judge stepped in and found Daniel’s business practices
so egregious that she tripled the damages. Daniel, who has spent
the past eight years with a $33 million judgment hanging over her head
and no way to pay it, has always maintained that the facts of the case
do not support the complaint or the award. She now plans to head
back to court to have the judgment vacated.
A must-read Last summer, Daniel launched a blog called “Bestseller,” an online
real-time book that offers her behind-the-scenes account of how
“Misha” was written, published and promoted.
Daniel writes that she met Defonseca back in the ’90s while she
was doing some PR work for Jan Schlichtmann, the Beverly lawyer of
“A Civil Action” fame. One day, Schlichtmann happened to mention
that his brother had a business making commemorative videos from
family photos. He asked Daniel if she could help promote it.
Daniel decided the best place to start was with a client who had made
an unusual video. That led her to Defonseca, who had commissioned
a two-hour film tribute to her recently deceased dog, Jimmy.
Daniel recalls her first close-up impression of Defonseca on her blog. “Misha was a short, plump woman, somewhere in her 60s, with
pixie-cut platinum blond hair and icy blue eyes that glittered with
extraordinary intensity,”she writes. “She wore a dress patterned with
leopard spots and heavy Native American silver jewelry. Her eyes were
rimmed with startling yellow-green liner. Long glue-on nails, white,
tipped her fingers like claws.”
Over lunch, Defonseca told Daniel about her video but then began
an even more interesting story of how she was a Holocaust survivor.
When Daniel heard she had walked across Europe searching for her
parents and had spent time eating and sleeping with a pack of wolves,
she was sold.
Daniel had recently started a small publishing house called Mt. Ivy Press.
It was a one-woman show that had produced some cookbooks and
“a prurient but not hard-core tome, ‘Gigolos — The Secret Lives of
Men who Service Women.’”
When she heard Defonseca’s story, she immediately smelled not only a
book but a potential blockbuster. Defonseca has always said that she
never wanted to write the book, because the memories were too painful,
but that Daniel eventually talked her into it.
From the start nothing about the book was easy. Defonseca spoke
some English, but not enough to write her memoir. Daniel hired her
good friend and next-door neighbor, Lee, a former French professor
and chairman of the Romance Language Department at Boston College,
as a ghostwriter who would help translate Defonseca’s memories.
As the story began to take shape, there were more problems.
The three women all seemed to have different ideas of the direction
the book should take. Daniel wanted a straight narrative that would
offer a message of hope; Lee felt the book should be simple and geared
toward younger readers; and Defonseca wanted to include more about
her personal beliefs that animals were morally superior to human
beings. By the time the book was published in 1997, the disagreement
had turned ugly, and the lines were drawn for a legal battle. But along the way there were other concerns. Daniel sent the
manuscript out to several different Holocaust writers and scholars
hoping to score a couple blurbs for the back cover. And she did.
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel — who has
written more than 40 books, including the seminal Holocaust memoir,
“Night” — took a look at Defonsca’s story and wrote back that he
found it “very moving.”
Leonard Zakim, who was then the executive director of the New
England Anti-Defamation League, described “Misha” as “A scary
‘must read’ for anyone interested in the Holocaust. Humans acted
‘like animals’ and animals acted ‘humanely.’ Her story is
heartwarming and bone-tingling, all the more so for being true.”
And the wolf experts, including Joni Soffron — who runs Wolf Hollow,
a park on Route 133 in Ipswich, Mass., that features a pack of wolves
that visitors can watch safely from the sidelines of a big backyard pen —
were also on board. Although documented accounts of wolves raising
human children were extremely rare, Defonsca’s account was consistent
with what the experts knew about wolf behavior.
But there were others who weren’t quite as enthusiastic. Yale
Professor Deborah Dwok, an expert on children and the Holocaust,
told Daniel the book was a fantasy filled with historical inaccuracies.
Lawrence Langer, a history professor at Simmons College, also felt
the book was contrived.
“She just happens to get into the Warsaw Ghetto right before it
burns down, but she doesn’t have a tattoo. And she manages to escape
over a wall. Why didn’t everybody escape over that wall? You can’t
publish it as factual,” Langer told Daniel.
Now that the book has been exposed as a hoax, everyone seems to
be asking why there wasn’t more fact checking. Why didn’t Daniel
question Defonseca harder?
Daniel’s good friend Kathleen Valentine, a fellow writer from
Gloucester, says you have to remember what it was like back in the
’90s when the book was being written.
“Jane was being told by all these local Jewish organizations that
Misha was a hero,” says Valentine. “There were a couple of authorities
who said they didn’t believe the story, but you had to weigh that in the
balance with everyone who did.” And, as Valentine points out, you
don’t question a Holocaust survivor.
“I believed her, and a lot of people believed her at the time,” says
Daniel, who has been spending this week racing between her
lawyers and television and radio reporters, all asking why the book
wasn’t better vetted.
Daniel also says it was impossible to do specific background checks
since Defonsaca claimed she didn’t know her real name or birth date —
information she said her parents kept from her in case she was
taken by the Nazis.
“I didn’t have a true name, a birthplace or a single person who knew
Misha,” says Daniel. And Daniel believes it wasn’t her job to check all the facts. “As
the publisher, I was not responsible for being the gatekeeper of the
truth,” she says, adding that Defonseca signed a standard publishing
contract with a clause that stipulated all statements in the book
would be true.
Daniel believes that the proper stage for vetting a book is the
marketplace. And although it took more than 10 years,
“Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years,” did finally receive the
attention that ultimately revealed it as a fraud.
A beautiful story? Unfortunately, the truth about Defonseca came a little too late
for a lot of people. Soon as the book was published, it became a
bestseller in France and several other European countries. Late last year,
French film director Vera Belmont released her full-length film,
“Survivre avec les Loupes” based on Defonscea’s memoir. In Italy,
the story was made into an operetta.
A spokeswomen for Belmont said this week that Defonseca’s recent
confession wasn’t really that important.
“No matter if it’s true or not — (Belmont) believes it is, anyway —
she just thinks it’s a beautiful story,” she says.
Daniel also says the fact that the book is fiction doesn’t mean it’s not good. “I still think it’s a beautiful story,” she says. “It’s a classic story of
good against evil — the Nazis against a child. You have to separate the
message from the messenger.”
But the question of whether or not it’s true, particularly when it was
billed as the truth, matters a great deal to others. Peabody’s Sonia Weitz
survived five concentration camps and knows a little about Holocaust memoirs. Her book, “I Promised I Would Tell,” is her own personal
testimony. In 1981, Weitz founded the Holocaust Center of the
North Shore Jewish Federation in Peabody, Mass., where she
continues to educate people, particularly young people,
about the Holocaust.
When “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” first came out,
Weitz says she was very excited about the book.
“Some of it was sort of unbelievable, but I’ve learned that unexpected
things did happen during the war,” she says. However, after hearing
last week that the book was a hoax, Weitz said she felt angry
and disappointed.
“It’s hurtful and it’s harmful to the history of the Holocaust,”
she says. Still, Weitz has reserved any judgment on Defonseca.
“Am I angry at her? I can’t really say that. I guess I think that
maybe there’s more to it,” says Weitz, who wants to know more
about Defonseca’s true story during the war.
Weitz does agree with Rabbi David Mayer of Temple Emanu-El in
Marblehead, who feels Defonseca’s deception will be used against
other Holocaust survivors who have told their stories.
“What bothers me most aside from the unconscionable disrespect
for those who perished is that it fuels the flames for the Holocaust
deniers,” says Meyer. “That makes it even more heinous.”
Weitz says that’s a problem Holocaust educators will face in the
wake of the Defonscea story. But her greatest concern is the hundreds
of young students at the Holocaust center. Defonseca’s book was a
great story that engaged young people and now, it’s just a fraud.
“She should have been a role model,” says Wietz. “Young people
will be very disappointed to hear it’s not true. The book should have
been worthy of their attention, and it’s not.”
E-mail Barbara Taormina at btaormin@cnc.com.
You only makes things worse when you try to HIDE TRUTH FROM MY EYES.sinking boat with a dog and a human, she would rescue the dog
and toss the human overboard.
No doubt. Dogs aren’t sticklers for facts, and they hardly ever do
the kind of research that would expose a bestselling memoir of
the Holocaust as an international fraud.
That’s what happened last week when fact took down fiction and
Defonseca admitted that her book, “Misha: a Memoir of the
Holocaust Years,” which has been translated into 18 languages and
made into a feature film in France, was a hoax.
Defonseca’s story is a gripping World War II account that begins
when she is 7 years old and her parents, members of the Belgium
resistance, are arrested by the Nazis. Defonseca then sets out on a
five-year journey that takes her thousands of miles through war-torn
Europe as she searches for her parents. Along the way, she visits the
Warsaw Ghetto, travels for a while with a band of resistance fighters,
kills a German soldier and, oh yeah, hides in the forest with a
pack of wolves who adopt her as one of their own. The book was published in 1997, and from the beginning there were
some who questioned her story. But it was only over the past couple
months that Sharon Sergeant, a genealogist from Waltham, Mass.,
and two of her contacts in Europe dug through the records and
discovered that Defonseca had actually spent the war at a desk in a
small elementary school in Etterbeek, Belgium. They also found a
baptismal certificate that showed not only was this heroic story about a
child surviving against all odds a lie, Defonseca isn’t even Jewish. “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality,
my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement to The Associated
Press last week. “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.”
It’s not clear yet if there will be much forgiveness for Defonseca,
simply because there are so many who do feel betrayed. Holocaust
historians, students and survivors not only feel angry and disappointed,
they worry about the possible fallout in a world where many continue
to insist that that death marches and concentration camps are a myth.
Meanwhile, writers and publishers are wincing at the potential effect
this latest literary hoax will have on readers who crave true accounts
and the book business that seems less and less capable of delivering them.
And Jane Daniel of Gloucester, the original publisher of “Misha,”
also has a story of betrayal to tell. Shortly after the book was published,
Defonsca and her co-author, Vera Lee, sued Daniel, claiming that she
kept royalties and hid the proceeds from international sales for
translations in offshore accounts. They also claimed that Daniel
didn’t do enough to market the book in the United States.
In 2000, a jury awarded Defonseca $7.5 million while Lee won
$3.3 million.A judge stepped in and found Daniel’s business practices
so egregious that she tripled the damages. Daniel, who has spent
the past eight years with a $33 million judgment hanging over her head
and no way to pay it, has always maintained that the facts of the case
do not support the complaint or the award. She now plans to head
back to court to have the judgment vacated.
A must-read Last summer, Daniel launched a blog called “Bestseller,” an online
real-time book that offers her behind-the-scenes account of how
“Misha” was written, published and promoted.
Daniel writes that she met Defonseca back in the ’90s while she
was doing some PR work for Jan Schlichtmann, the Beverly lawyer of
“A Civil Action” fame. One day, Schlichtmann happened to mention
that his brother had a business making commemorative videos from
family photos. He asked Daniel if she could help promote it.
Daniel decided the best place to start was with a client who had made
an unusual video. That led her to Defonseca, who had commissioned
a two-hour film tribute to her recently deceased dog, Jimmy.
Daniel recalls her first close-up impression of Defonseca on her blog. “Misha was a short, plump woman, somewhere in her 60s, with
pixie-cut platinum blond hair and icy blue eyes that glittered with
extraordinary intensity,”she writes. “She wore a dress patterned with
leopard spots and heavy Native American silver jewelry. Her eyes were
rimmed with startling yellow-green liner. Long glue-on nails, white,
tipped her fingers like claws.”
Over lunch, Defonseca told Daniel about her video but then began
an even more interesting story of how she was a Holocaust survivor.
When Daniel heard she had walked across Europe searching for her
parents and had spent time eating and sleeping with a pack of wolves,
she was sold.
Daniel had recently started a small publishing house called Mt. Ivy Press.
It was a one-woman show that had produced some cookbooks and
“a prurient but not hard-core tome, ‘Gigolos — The Secret Lives of
Men who Service Women.’”
When she heard Defonseca’s story, she immediately smelled not only a
book but a potential blockbuster. Defonseca has always said that she
never wanted to write the book, because the memories were too painful,
but that Daniel eventually talked her into it.
From the start nothing about the book was easy. Defonseca spoke
some English, but not enough to write her memoir. Daniel hired her
good friend and next-door neighbor, Lee, a former French professor
and chairman of the Romance Language Department at Boston College,
as a ghostwriter who would help translate Defonseca’s memories.
As the story began to take shape, there were more problems.
The three women all seemed to have different ideas of the direction
the book should take. Daniel wanted a straight narrative that would
offer a message of hope; Lee felt the book should be simple and geared
toward younger readers; and Defonseca wanted to include more about
her personal beliefs that animals were morally superior to human
beings. By the time the book was published in 1997, the disagreement
had turned ugly, and the lines were drawn for a legal battle. But along the way there were other concerns. Daniel sent the
manuscript out to several different Holocaust writers and scholars
hoping to score a couple blurbs for the back cover. And she did.
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel — who has
written more than 40 books, including the seminal Holocaust memoir,
“Night” — took a look at Defonsca’s story and wrote back that he
found it “very moving.”
Leonard Zakim, who was then the executive director of the New
England Anti-Defamation League, described “Misha” as “A scary
‘must read’ for anyone interested in the Holocaust. Humans acted
‘like animals’ and animals acted ‘humanely.’ Her story is
heartwarming and bone-tingling, all the more so for being true.”
And the wolf experts, including Joni Soffron — who runs Wolf Hollow,
a park on Route 133 in Ipswich, Mass., that features a pack of wolves
that visitors can watch safely from the sidelines of a big backyard pen —
were also on board. Although documented accounts of wolves raising
human children were extremely rare, Defonsca’s account was consistent
with what the experts knew about wolf behavior.
But there were others who weren’t quite as enthusiastic. Yale
Professor Deborah Dwok, an expert on children and the Holocaust,
told Daniel the book was a fantasy filled with historical inaccuracies.
Lawrence Langer, a history professor at Simmons College, also felt
the book was contrived.
“She just happens to get into the Warsaw Ghetto right before it
burns down, but she doesn’t have a tattoo. And she manages to escape
over a wall. Why didn’t everybody escape over that wall? You can’t
publish it as factual,” Langer told Daniel.
Now that the book has been exposed as a hoax, everyone seems to
be asking why there wasn’t more fact checking. Why didn’t Daniel
question Defonseca harder?
Daniel’s good friend Kathleen Valentine, a fellow writer from
Gloucester, says you have to remember what it was like back in the
’90s when the book was being written.
“Jane was being told by all these local Jewish organizations that
Misha was a hero,” says Valentine. “There were a couple of authorities
who said they didn’t believe the story, but you had to weigh that in the
balance with everyone who did.” And, as Valentine points out, you
don’t question a Holocaust survivor.
“I believed her, and a lot of people believed her at the time,” says
Daniel, who has been spending this week racing between her
lawyers and television and radio reporters, all asking why the book
wasn’t better vetted.
Daniel also says it was impossible to do specific background checks
since Defonsaca claimed she didn’t know her real name or birth date —
information she said her parents kept from her in case she was
taken by the Nazis.
“I didn’t have a true name, a birthplace or a single person who knew
Misha,” says Daniel. And Daniel believes it wasn’t her job to check all the facts. “As
the publisher, I was not responsible for being the gatekeeper of the
truth,” she says, adding that Defonseca signed a standard publishing
contract with a clause that stipulated all statements in the book
would be true.
Daniel believes that the proper stage for vetting a book is the
marketplace. And although it took more than 10 years,
“Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years,” did finally receive the
attention that ultimately revealed it as a fraud.
A beautiful story? Unfortunately, the truth about Defonseca came a little too late
for a lot of people. Soon as the book was published, it became a
bestseller in France and several other European countries. Late last year,
French film director Vera Belmont released her full-length film,
“Survivre avec les Loupes” based on Defonscea’s memoir. In Italy,
the story was made into an operetta.
A spokeswomen for Belmont said this week that Defonseca’s recent
confession wasn’t really that important.
“No matter if it’s true or not — (Belmont) believes it is, anyway —
she just thinks it’s a beautiful story,” she says.
Daniel also says the fact that the book is fiction doesn’t mean it’s not good. “I still think it’s a beautiful story,” she says. “It’s a classic story of
good against evil — the Nazis against a child. You have to separate the
message from the messenger.”
But the question of whether or not it’s true, particularly when it was
billed as the truth, matters a great deal to others. Peabody’s Sonia Weitz
survived five concentration camps and knows a little about Holocaust memoirs. Her book, “I Promised I Would Tell,” is her own personal
testimony. In 1981, Weitz founded the Holocaust Center of the
North Shore Jewish Federation in Peabody, Mass., where she
continues to educate people, particularly young people,
about the Holocaust.
When “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” first came out,
Weitz says she was very excited about the book.
“Some of it was sort of unbelievable, but I’ve learned that unexpected
things did happen during the war,” she says. However, after hearing
last week that the book was a hoax, Weitz said she felt angry
and disappointed.
“It’s hurtful and it’s harmful to the history of the Holocaust,”
she says. Still, Weitz has reserved any judgment on Defonseca.
“Am I angry at her? I can’t really say that. I guess I think that
maybe there’s more to it,” says Weitz, who wants to know more
about Defonseca’s true story during the war.
Weitz does agree with Rabbi David Mayer of Temple Emanu-El in
Marblehead, who feels Defonseca’s deception will be used against
other Holocaust survivors who have told their stories.
“What bothers me most aside from the unconscionable disrespect
for those who perished is that it fuels the flames for the Holocaust
deniers,” says Meyer. “That makes it even more heinous.”
Weitz says that’s a problem Holocaust educators will face in the
wake of the Defonscea story. But her greatest concern is the hundreds
of young students at the Holocaust center. Defonseca’s book was a
great story that engaged young people and now, it’s just a fraud.
“She should have been a role model,” says Wietz. “Young people
will be very disappointed to hear it’s not true. The book should have
been worthy of their attention, and it’s not.”
E-mail Barbara Taormina at btaormin@cnc.com.
This is a screenshot of Jane Daniel's blog, BESTSELLER! The Book, which details her simple wish to promote what she believed at the time to be a gripping tale of perseverance against all odds...ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT THE ENTIRE BLOODY STORY WAS AN ABJECT LIE.
Note one of the nested postings on the right, specifically the one titled Daily News Tribune: The Truth Behind a Holocaust Hoax.
Where does it go?
Are you surprised?!?
I'm not - when you look for Carl Cameron's 9/11 report for FOX, you will be told THAT IT DOESN'T EXIST...at least, not on FOX's archives...BUT NOTHING DISAPPEARS ON THE INTERNET.
