On This Day in History: February 29

Misha fake memoir scandal

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Remember when Oprah picked James Frey’s “memoir” of addiction titled A Million Little Pieces for her book club and it turned out to be full of shit then Oprah lost her shit? That was nothing. A couple of years later the Holocaust also-needs-quotation-marks memoir Misha turned out to be completely made up, and the author had to repay her publisher a whole ton of money.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 29, 2008--

First published in 1997, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust was later reclassified as a literary hoax. The author’s real name is Monique de Wael, and she was born to Catholic parents in Belgium in 1937. During World War II her parents were murdered by those fucking Nazi fucks not for their religion, but for fighting in the resistance. Sounds like her parents were cool, because resisting Nazis is awesome. Alas, their surviving daughter was not awesome.

With her parents dead, she was raised by family members. It’s not a happy story, but nothing like the whopper she fabricated for Misha. She actually changed her name to Misha Defonseca and told everyone she was Jewish. She said her “Jewish” parents gave her to a Catholic family to be raised during the war and changed her name to her actual real fucking birth name to hide her identity. In the story—I mean outrageous fucking lie—she said she left the family to wander across Europe in search of her parents. In the middle of a world war.

According to the tale she walked almost 2,000 miles, stealing food and clothing to survive. This is where she decided “Fuck it; if I’m going to lie, I’m going to lie big.” She said when she was starving, she was adopted by a pack of wolves who protected her and let her eat the organs from their kills to survive. She wrote that. Holy shit. The fictional character of Misha makes it all the way to Poland, sneaks in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and kills a Nazi with a pocketknife when he tries to rape her. Sure.

The book was published by a small press in the U.S. and sold poorly there but did a lot better in Europe. What did Monique do then? She sued her publisher for poor marketing and for screwing her on overseas royalties, and the fucking judge awarded her $22.5 million. People had been saying the story was bullshit even before it was published, when those asked to provide endorsements said it was a crock. But with the judgment against them, the publisher worked to actively expose de Wael as being a liar.

It took time to unravel, but when Monique’s Catholic baptism and school records during the war surfaced, she admitted on February 29, 2008 that she’d made it up. Six years later a court ordered de Wael to repay her publisher the full judgment amount.

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