From the Courier Mail/AU:
THE memoirs of a girl of eight who wandered almost 5000km across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her missing parents was amazing enough.
Add in her claims of surviving two freezing winters living with a pack of wolves and you have a truly astonishing tale.
Unfortunately, the life story published in 1997 that earned its author $21 million and was translated into 18 languages was just that. A story.
Yesterday, Misha Defonseca (real name Monique De Wael) admitted that her bestseller, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, was made up. Or, as she preferred to put it, "not the real reality".
She did not live with wolves and she did not spend four years crossing Europe from Belgium to the Ukraine during World War II. She isn't even Jewish.
"I ask for forgiveness from all those who feel betrayed, but I beg them to put themselves in the shoes of a little four-year-old who had lost everything," she said.
Rather than being the daughter of Jewish parents, Misha was in fact brought up a strict Catholic.
At the time she claimed to be skinning rabbits in the snow and stealing food from farmhouses on her way to Poland, she was a four year old living with her grandparents in a Brussels flat.
The only truth in her story seems to have been the disappearance of her parents, deported for joining the Belgian resistance movement.
Doubts over her claims arose when animal experts questioned whether wild wolves would have treated her as a cub as she claimed.
"My name is Monique De Wael, and since the age of four, I have wanted to forget," she told Le Soir.
She explained she had always wanted to distance herself from relatives who regarded her as "the daughter of a traitor".
"So it's true that I have always recounted to myself a life, another life. That's also why I fell in love with wolves."
Sunday, March 2, 2008
'Wolf girl' admits story a hoax
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