First published at 11:21 UTC on August 21st, 2019.
Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.
She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported par…
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Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.
She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish.
Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
"This story is mine. It is not actually reality but my reality, my way of surviving," Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press.
"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," the statement said.
-- Holocaust 'pack of wolves' memoir is pack of lies By Associated Press Mar 1, 2008
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