Eleven years after the publication of her best-selling Holocaust memoir - a heartwarming tale of a small Jewish girl trekking across Europe and living with wolves - the Massachusetts author yesterday admitted the whole story was a hoax.
In a statement issued by her Belgian lawyer, Misha Defonseca of Dudley, whose book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," has been translated into 18 languages and is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" ("Surviving With the Wolves"), confessed that she is not Jewish and that she spent the war safely in Brussels.
The 1997 book was the center of a multimillion-dollar legal battle pitting Defonseca and her coauthor, Vera Lee of Newton, against publisher Jane Daniel of Gloucester. The book was a bestseller in Europe and Canada, and attracted attention from Walt Disney Co. and Oprah Winfrey, but it sold few copies in the United States, largely because the marketing stopped after the authors sued...
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Author admits making up memoir of surviving Holocaust - The Boston Globe