The publishers of a fraudulent Holocaust memoir must pay its ghost writer $10m because she did not realise Misha Defonseca’s story was a fake.
US author Ms Defonseca published “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” in 1997, telling a story of her survival from the Holocaust, roaming through Europe on foot, receiving food from a pack of wolves. It was a bestseller and the film rights were sold to Disney. Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel wrote the foreword for the book.
But it emerged that the author was not even Jewish and had, in fact, attended school in Brussels during the war, while her father was allegedly a Nazi collaborator.
After nearly a decade of litigation, a court in Gloucester, Massachusetts, found that Jane Daniel, the sole owner of Mt Ivy Press which published the book, did not have to pay Ms Defonseca more $22.5m for allegedly concealing profits from the sale of the book.
