The woman who lied about a childhood among wolves

The congregants heard how, as a six year-old Jewish girl in Brussels, she had been separated from her parents when they were “deported” to Germany by the Nazis. Taken in by a Catholic couple as a “hidden child” and renamed Monique De Wael, she longed to be reunited with her mother and father. She ran away, and trekked through Europe in search of them. Along the way, she befriended a wolf, and later found a temporary haven among an entire pack.

Defonseca’s jaw-dropping revelations enthralled neighbours and friends, including a wolf expert, in her adopted hometown of Millis, Massachusetts.

Local small-time publisher Jane Daniel saw Misha’s story as a “mythic” tale of “good child versus evil Nazis”, she says in the film, and sensed a way to raise the profile of her fledgling company, Mt. Ivy Press. Over time, she and the “community” persuaded the reluctant Defonseca to write a book, which appeared in 1997 as Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years.

It attracted Disney and Oprah, but instead of jumping at the opportunities, Misha grew inexplicably distant. Then, out of the blue, she took Daniel to court for unpaid royalties. Gripped by the survivor’s story, the jury unanimously found in her favour, and she was awarded a $22.5 million settlement.

Humiliated and suffering from PTSD, Daniel looked for a way to overturn the verdict. Among court papers, she found a bank form in which Misha had written her place of birth and mother’s maiden name — details she claimed in her memoir not to know. Something was fishy.

Hobkinson’s documentary segues from Holocaust story to psychological thriller, as he details the detective work done by a forensic genealogist, Sharon Sergeant, and a Belgian Holocaust survivor (the film’s moral centre), Evelyne Haendel, to discover Misha’s true identity (she was neither Jewish nor a hidden child), and the subsequent investigation by a French journalist that uncovered the real-life trauma that had blackened her childhood.

Defonseca’s exposure was seized on by Far Right groups, and Hobkinson admits he struggled raising financing because “many broadcasters and funds felt queasy about telling a story about a Holocaust hoax. They said, ‘We’re concerned this will fan the flames of Holocaust denial.’” Though concerned himself, Hobkinson says he always felt that there “should be a way of investigating it in a responsible way that actually wrestles the narrative back from the Holocaust deniers, slightly.”

His solution was to approach the subject as what I suggest is an “experiment in belief”. “It absolutely is,” he agrees. “Although I would like to think that it’s not an experiment in a dry way . . . I wanted to create levels of truth within the film to draw the audience in.”

Hobkinson makes it impossible to dismiss the people of Millis simply as naive by effectively placing us, he says, “in the same position as those who experienced Misha’s lies had been. I wanted to weave an element of the deception into the filmmaking to make the audience question, ‘why was I drawn in by that?’, if they were, or ‘why would I have been drawn in by that?’”

You have to question the frame within which truth is presented, he says. Just because we are used to certain formats — the written memoir, the documentary — being signifiers of truth, it doesn’t mean we should turn off our critical faculties. Nor should someone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor be unchallengeable. Daniel, who had been warned by a Holocaust historian that Misha’s story didn’t stand up to scrutiny before publishing the memoir, probably relied on this, somewhat, as the book, Hobkinson believes, wasn’t written well enough to be published as fiction.

“How can you question this little girl alone in the woods?” he says. “How can you question her interaction with wolves she might have encountered? How can you question how she lived? She was just there by herself. I think that was definitely something [for Daniel] to fall back on.”

Sergeant and Haendel’s work in Misha and the Wolves is like a case study in how to challenge someone suspected of faking their Holocaust experience. And while it’s not in the film, Hobkinson says that as the geneological investigation was taking place, wolf biologists were also pulling Misha’s story apart.

“So I think they don’t need to be blindly questioned,” argues the filmmaker; “they need to be questioned with knowledge and documentary fact.”