Author of Holocaust book admits survival story is not true

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true. She did not live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She did not trek 3,060 kilometers across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She is not even Jewish. Defonseca, a Belgium 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.