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.
