Author admits faking holocaust autobiography

A best-selling writer has admitted her supposed autobiography of a Jewish child who lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust was fiction, not fact.

Misha Defonseca’s book, 'Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years', was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.

Her Brussels-based lawyers said that she now acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during the Second World War.

“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed,” said Defonseca.

Defonseca, 71, who now lives in Dudley, Massachusetts said in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years.

She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defence and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.

In a written statement, Defonseca acknowledged the story was a fantasy and that she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.

Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters.

“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” the statement said.

“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,” the statement said.

The statement said her parents were arrested when she was four and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle.

She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a “daughter of a traitor” because of her parents’ role in the resistance, which she said led her to “feel Jewish”.

She said there were moments when she “found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of (her) imagination”.