Misha Defonseca has written a bestseller with “Survival among wolves”. A movie also tells the story of how, as a Jewish child, she looked for her deported parents and made friends with wolves.
Berlin – It’s a story that is unbelievable – and yet strangely gets under your skin: A seven-year-old Jewish girl who lived with a foster family in occupied Belgium during World War II breaks free to look for her abducted parents in Poland .
Little Misha walks thousands of kilometers, mostly through forests, with only the bare essentials including a compass. There she meets wolves with whom she befriends and whom she protects. At the end of her journey, Misha realizes that the Nazis murdered her father and mother. A moving story. And none of it is true.
Nevertheless, the Belgian Misha Defonseca, who was born in 1937 and lives in the USA, won over the world in 1997. With a ghostwriter, Defonseca described the story in the bestseller “Survival Among Wolves” as her own long-suppressed past.
The star presenter Oprah Winfrey wanted the protagonist on her TV show at the time, Disney expressed interest in the material. In 2008 the French filmmaker Véra Belmont brought “Survival with Wolves” to the cinemas – but a little later the author had to admit that it was all a lie.
This Tuesday (November 23rd) at 8:15 p.m. Arte will throw the spotlight on the cryptic story, which feeds on human vulnerability and weakness, madness and greed against the background of genocide, with the documentary “Misha and the Wolves” from 2020.
The British director Sam Hobkinson puts together a typical documentary mix of witness memories, game scenes and historical recordings as well as old conversation excerpts with the protagonist, who did not give a new interview, a puzzle that leaves you shivering.
Because although the Catholic Defonseca is shown as a liar who made profits with a false Holocaust fate, her fate is also cruel. Her father Robert de Wael, who belonged to the Belgian resistance, was abducted and tortured by the Germans in 1941. Against the promise that his wife and daughter would get away, de Wael, who later died like his wife in a camp, named the names of his comrades-in-arms.
Little Monique, who lived on under the name Misha, was insulted and marginalized by the Belgians after the war as a “traitor child”. One who sensed the market value of their fantasy biography when she met Defonseca by chance is the American small publisher Jane Daniel. She initiated the book, got the ghostwriter, and was soon able to sell the rights for translations into 20 languages. The good relationship between the writer and publisher, however, broke when Defonseca refused to go on the Oprah show. And it ended up in court, where the author was awarded tens of millions by the publisher.
The Belgian genealogist Evelyne Haendel, herself a survivor, found out the true identity of her compatriot in old church and school books. And how did Defonseca justify her wrong doing? “This story is my own. It’s not reality, but my reality – my way of surviving, ”an early statement said. She later commented, “I entered a soap bubble, my own world. My world was full of animals. Animals that protect me from people. ”Defonseca was both perpetrator and victim, the film says. Maybe that’s it. dpa
