Surviving with wolves

"Misha and the Wolves" is a 2021 Netflix documentary about Misha Defonseca (or Monique de Wael), a Belgian-American writer of a memoir titled "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years". A French derivative work by the same author is titled "Survivre avec les loups" (Surviving with the Wolves). Both were published in 1997. There is also a French film of the same title based on the latter book. 

According to the memoir, Misha is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who ran away from the Catholic family that was hiding her after her parents had been deported by the Nazis (who occupied Belgium during World War II). At the time, Misha was only seven years old. The most sensational part of the story claims that she was adopted by a wolf pack in the Belgian forests! She also claimed to have killed a Nazi soldier who tried to rape her, by repeatedly stabbing him. 

The story was almost too good to be true. As indeed it was. "Misha and the Wolves" tells the story of how Defonseca´s lies were exposed. It´s an intriguing detective story, almost as hard to believe as Defonseca´s memoir. 

Somewhat ironically, it was Defonseca´s American publisher, Jane Daniels, who worked overtime to expose the hoax. Daniels claims that she initially believed in Misha´s story. The two women had a fall out after the memoir had been published, Misha Defonseca accusing Daniels of keeping most of the royalties. A US court sentenced Daniels to pay 22 million dollars to Defonseca, money Daniels claimed she didn´t have. So Daniels certainly had a vested interest in suddenly realizing that Misha´s memoir was a literary hoax, and hire people to prove the fact. (According to Wiki, the US court system has indeed revised its verdict and now demands that Defonseca pays Daniels a substantial sum instead!) 

After painstaking research in various archives (including preserved secret lists of Jewish children hiding from the Nazis during the war), Daniels´ team discovered that Misha Defonseca´s real name is Monique de Wael, she is a Belgian Catholic rather than a Jew, and was safely in parish school during World War II. Two reporters from the Belgian newspaper Le Soir did further research and came up with a possible motive for the hoax (apart from the money to be gained). It turned out that Misha´s parents *were* deported and killed by the Nazis. Both were members of the Belgian resistance. Misha´s father, Robert de Wael, is believed to have cracked under torture and turned in other resistance members. For this, he was widely regarded as a traitor after the war, and Misha became known as "the traitor´s daughter". This triggered Misha to invent a new identity for herself as a lone Jewish child and Holocaust survivor as a coping mechanism. After Misha Defonseca moved to the United States, this psycho-drama took on further life, as she joined a Jewish synagogue and began to tell her story to a gullible audience. As for Daniels, she was warned by a Holocaust historian that Defonseca´s story was impossible, but decided to publish her memoir anyway. The historian believes that Daniels was simply greedy. The most bizarre episode in the entire saga took place when The Oprah Show became interested in Defonseca´s story. They sent a team to the small town in Massachusetts where Defonseca was living in order to film her interacting with live wolves from a local wildlife sanctuary. The alpha wolf more or less attacked Defonseca under the very nose of Oprah´s producer, but then decided to let the "wolf-whisperer" go?!

While "Misha and the Wolves" is interesting, it´s frankly too kind to the people involved in this affair. I never read "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years", but if Wikipedia´s description of it is correct, it´s remarkable that *anyone* believed in this story. Here is Wiki: "At a time when she faces starvation in a forest, she is adopted by wolves, becoming a feral child. Protected by the pack, she survives by eating offal and worms. All in all, she treks over 1,900 miles (3,100 kilometers) through Europe, from Belgium to Ukraine, through the Balkans and Germany and Poland (where she sneaks in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto), to Italy by boat and back to Belgium through France. Before the war is over, the character has taken human life to survive, stabbing to death with a pocket knife a rapist Nazi soldier who attacks her." Either Americans are extremely badly informed about World War II history (and wolf biology) or Misha was automatically believed due to her status as a Holocaust survivor. But note that *Holocaust historians* (hardly Nazis) didn´t believe her, while many European readers *did*. So perhaps something else is going on here. And why wasn´t the above information included in the documentary?

With that little reflection, I end this blog post. (Swedish readers might want to know, that "Misha och vargarna" is available on SVT Play.)