Best-Selling Holocaust Tale Untrue, Author Admits

BOSTON -- 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, nor 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 bestseller, "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.

Defonseca, 71, has an unlisted number in Dudley, about 50 miles southwest of Boston. Her husband, Maurice, told the Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.

Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto and was adopted and protected by a pack of wolves.

Her two Brussels-based lawyers said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical. In the statement, Defonseca said she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.

Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters.

The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a "daughter of a traitor" because of her parents' role in the resistance, which she said led her to "feel Jewish."

She said there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."

Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks, after the release of evidence found by Sharon Sergeant, a genealogical researcher in Waltham, Mass. Sergeant said she found clues to the tale's fraudulence in the U.S. version of the book, including Defonseca's maiden name, De Wael -- which was changed in the French version -- and photos.