Misha Defonseca

Misha Defonseca (born Monique de Wael; 12 May 1937 in Etterbeek) is a Belgian-born writer and the author of a fictitious 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 that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with Wolves).

On 29 February 2008, the author as well as her lawyers admitted that the bestselling book was a hoax, despite its having been presented as autobiographical. In 2014 a court ordered Defonseca to repay her publisher $22 million.

Defonseca and her husband, Maurice, moved to the United States from Paris in 1988 and bought a house in Millis, Massachusetts. He was unemployed by the mid-1990s. Misha began to fantasize a vivid story about her childhood; suggesting to have wandering across Europe at the age of six after her parents were deported in 1941, being sheltered by friendly packs of wolves, killing a German soldier in self-defence, sneaking into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and finally supposedly finding her way home at the end of the war.Jane Daniel, a local book publisher, convinced Defonseca to write a memoir about her alleged past after she heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue. Daniel published Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years in 1997 through her "one woman operation", Mt. Ivy Press.

Prior to the uncovering of the hoax, the book had spawned a multimillion-dollar legal battle between Defonseca and the book's ghostwriter, Vera Lee, against Jane Daniel and her small publishing company, Mt. Ivy Press. Daniel and Defonseca fell 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 Lee $22.5 million. Defonseca's lawyers said Daniel has not paid the court-ordered sum. Following her admission, a court in 2014 ordered Defonseca to repay the full amount.

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