Misha Defonseca — a Holocaust survival “memoir” that was wholly invented

In February 2008, in Belgium, the author known as Misha Defonseca admitted that her best-selling Holocaust “memoir” was invented. The book, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, first published in 1997, had presented her as a Jewish child who, after her parents were deported, walked thousands of kilometres across wartime Europe in search of them, was sheltered by packs of wolves, killed a German soldier in self-defence, and slipped in and out of the Warsaw ghetto. None of it happened to her. Her real name was Monique de Wael; she was born in Brussels in 1937, was raised Roman Catholic, and was enrolled in a Brussels school in 1943 — the period during which her narrator was supposedly roaming the forests of Eastern Europe. She was not Jewish and had no such history.

This case must be stated plainly because of what it falsified. A fabricated Holocaust memoir does a specific and serious harm: it borrows the authority of those who actually suffered and died, and it lends ammunition to those who would deny that the genocide occurred at all. Real children were deported and murdered; real survivors carry memories they can scarcely speak. To invent such a history for a book — and to accept the moral standing of a survivor under false pretenses — is to trespass on that testimony. Monique de Wael’s own parents were in fact members of the Belgian Resistance who were arrested and died at Nazi hands; that genuine family tragedy was real, but it was not the story she sold, and it did not make her account of wolves and wandering true.

The mechanism of credulity rested on the near-unchallengeable status that attaches to survivor testimony, and on a story so vivid and redemptive that it discouraged scrutiny. Publishers in many countries, translators into eighteen languages, and the makers of the 2007 French film Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with the Wolves) treated the account as fact. The very sanctity of Holocaust memory, which should protect the historical record, here became the shield behind which a fiction passed as testimony.

The exposure came not from a literary critic but from documents. Spurred by doubts and by litigation between the author and her American publisher, the forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick traced a baptismal record and a 1943 school register for Monique de Wael; the Belgian newspaper Le Soir pursued the story; and on 29 February 2008 the author confessed through her lawyers. The records, not her conscience, ended the deception.