These days literary circles in the US and Europe are preoccupied with the acclaimed book by Belgian-born Jewish author Misha Defonseca, who had written about her childhood in the Nazi era.
Titled “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years , the novel, depicting in extraordinary detail, the horror of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, was translated into 18 languages and sold millions of copies. It told the story of the suffering of a six-year-old child whose parents were sent to a concentration camp, and who sought refuge in the forests and villages of Europe where she was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her from the Nazis for four years.
Defonseca was recounting her story in a synagogue in Massachusetts in the US where she had immigrated with her husband. Publisher Jane Daniel was there and commissioned her to write a book about her intriguing life story which Defonseca did with the help of ghost writer Vera Lee. The book became an instant bestseller and was even adapted to the screen in France.
However, the reason why people are talking about the book now, over 10 years after it was first published in 1997, is not because of the stranger-than-fiction story, but because it turns out that the whole tale was completely fabricated; that the author’s real name isn’t Misha Defonseca but Monique De Wael; that her parents were never held in a concentration camp but were executed during the war; that she never lived with wolves in the forest but with her grandfather and uncle. She wasn’t even a Jew, but a Christian Catholic.
The whole scam was exposed when author and publisher were dividing up the spoils. Daniel and Defonseca were caught in a multi-million dollar legal battle when they fell out over profits received from the bestselling book. A Boston court had ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer $22.5 million, but when Daniel refused, the disagreements between the two kept growing and then the truth emerged after the press started running reports about the author’s real history.
An exposé in the Belgian daily Le Soir revealed De Wael’s baptismal certificate and school records which directly coincided with the dates Defonseca claimed she was living with wolves in a European forest.
In the end, Defonseca was forced to confess that her story was fabricated, but defended herself by saying that she was forced to write a story she didn’t wish to write.
This little tale is of particular interest for several reasons: first, it draws attention to the fact that some people make up stories to serve their cause, while we have thousands of real stories taking place every day in the Occupied Territories that go unnoticed.
Second, even though the Holocaust and the Nazi persecution of the Jews is an undeniable truth, it has been exploited to an unprecedented degree. This was the theory posed by Jewish-American author Norman Finkelstein in his book “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, where he says that the US Jewish establishment has created a lucrative Holocaust industry to further its interests.
The third is the double standard of the West, which sympathizes with the Jewish cause to the extent that books about it become instant bestsellers even if they’re fabricated, while at the same time they lend a deaf ear to another Holocaust which the Israeli Deputy Defence minister recently promised to unleash on the Palestinians; the Holocaust which the Palestinian people have indeed been living for over half a century, while the world continues to shed tears for the suffering Jews who have been forced to live with false wolves in the forest!
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writer’s Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
