Author who made up Holocaust memoir ordered to pay back £13.3m

Misha Defonseca was ordered to pay back £13.3m after she admitted that most of her story was pure fantasy.

15:44 13 May 2014

Misha Defonseca, the author of the best selling Holocaust memoir entitled Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, has been ordered to pay back £13.3m after she admitted that most of her 'true life' story was pure fantasy. 

 

The Belgian writer claimed her Jewish parents were taken during World War II and that she killed a Nazi soldier before being adopted by a pack of wolves.  

 

The memoir, which is still on sale in Amazon, was published in 1997 and was translated into 18 languages. It was also made into a motion picture in France entitled Survivre Les Loups. Defonseca sued the publishers for unpaid royalties and wages in 2002 and she, together with her ghostwriter Vera Lee, were paid in millions of damages. 

 

After losing the copyright case, Jane Daniel, the head of the publishing company searched for evidence to prove that the story was not true. She uncovered documents in Belgium proving that Defonseca was born under a different name, was registered as a student at a school in Brussels in 1943, and lived with her uncle’s family after her parents were taken away when she was 7 years old.  

 

In a statement to Associated Press, Defonseca apologized for those she betrayed. She wrote: “This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” she said in a statement to Associated Press in 2008.

 

“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a four-year-old girl who was very lost.”

 

Meanwhile, Judge Marc Kantrowitz wrote: “Here, we express no opinion as to whether Defonseca's belief in the veracity of her story was reasonable.”

 

“However, we agree with the second motion judge that, whether Defonseca's belief was reasonable or not, the introduction in evidence of the actual facts of her history at the trial underlying Mt. Ivy I could have made a significant difference in the jury's deliberations.”