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Best-Selling Holocaust Tale Untrue, Author Admits
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After a few months of research, she found Defonseca's Belgian baptismal certificate and school record, as well as information that showed her parents were members of the Belgian resistance.
"Each piece was plausible, but the difficulty was when you put it all together," Sergeant said.
Others also had doubts.
"I'm not an expert on relations between humans and wolves, but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews, and [Defonseca's family] can't be found in the archives," Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL, a German television station. "The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish."
Defonseca's attorneys, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, contacted the author last weekend to show her evidence published in the Belgian daily Le Soir, which also questioned her story.
"We gave her this information, and it was very difficult. She was confronted with a reality that is different from what she has been living for 70 years," Nathalie Uyttendaele said.
Defonseca's admission is just the latest controversy surrounding her 1997 book, which also spawned a multimillion-dollar legal battle between the woman, her co-author and the book's U.S. publisher.
Defonseca had been asked to write the book by publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard her tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue.
Daniel and Defonseca had a falling-out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghostwriter, Vera Lee, $22.5 million. Defonseca's lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the award.
Daniel said Friday she felt vindicated by Defonseca's admission and would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca's story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents' names, her birthday or where she was born.
"There was nothing to go on to research," she said.
Lee, of Newton, Mass., muttered "Oh, my God" when told Defonseca made up her childhood and was not Jewish. She said she always believed the stories the woman told her as they prepared to write the book, and no research she did gave her a reason not to.
"She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said. "I was just totally bowled over by the news."
Associated Press writer Constant Brand in Brussels contributed to this report.
