Misha Defonseca admits to fabricating her memoir, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, in which she claimed to have lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust.
Misha: A Mmoire of the Holocaust Years is a literary hoax by Misha Defonseca, first published in 1997. The book was fraudulently published as a memoir telling the supposed true story of how the author survived the Holocaust as a young Jewish girl, wandering Europe searching for her deported parents. The book sold well in several countries and was made into a film, Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with the Wolves), named after the claim that Misha was adopted by a pack of wolves during her journey who protected her.
However, on 29 February 2008, Defonseca publicly admitted what many had already suspected, that her book was false. Her real name was Monique de Wael; while her parents had been taken away by the Nazis, they were not Jews but Roman Catholic members of the Belgian Resistance, and she did not leave her home during the war, as the book claims. In a statement released through her lawyers to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir, de Wael attempted to defend the hoax, claiming that the story of "Misha" "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving" and that there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."
Misha Defonseca (born Monique de Wael) is a Belgian-born impersonator and the author of a fraudulent Holocaust memoir titled Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, first published in 1997 and at that time professed to be a true memoir. It became an instant success in Europe and was translated into 18 languages. The French version of the book was a derivative work based on the original with the title Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with Wolves) that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film of the same name.
On 29 February 2008, the author as well as her lawyers admitted that the bestselling book was fraudulent, despite its having been presented as autobiographical.
In 2014 a US court ordered Defonseca to repay her US publisher Mt. Ivy Press $22 million that she had been awarded in an earlier legal suit against the publisher.