Boston, MA – It was a shock to Misha Defonseca’s readers this year when she admitted that the best-selling story of her tortured childhood during the Holocaust was false, but her U.S. publisher saw it as an opportunity to undo a stinging, 7-year-old court judgment.
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Jane Daniel says she never would have been ordered to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer $32.4 million over her handling of profits from “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” had the jury known the book was filled with lies.
Defonseca never lived with wolves to escape the Nazis, never killed a German soldier in self-defense, never walked 3,000 miles across Europe in search of her parents. Contrary to the book’s claims, Defonseca admitted in February that she isn’t even Jewish.
Daniel is asking a judge to throw out the verdict; a hearing is set in Middlesex Superior Court.
The harrowing tale of a little Jewish girl’s survival became a best-seller in Europe, was translated into 18 languages, was turned into a feature film in France.
But the book sold only 5,000 copies in the United States after Daniel had a falling out with Defonseca and Lee.
The two sued Daniel for breach of contract. In 2001, a Middlesex District Court jury found that Daniel had failed to promote the book as promised and had hidden profits. The jury awarded Defonseca $7.5 million and Lee $3.3 million, but those amounts were later tripled by a judge who found Daniel and her small publishing company, Mt. Ivy Press, had misled them and tried to claim royalties herself by rewriting the book.
In a brief telephone interview, Defonseca said “This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement released by her lawyers.
Defonseca admitted the book was not true after a genealogical researcher working with Daniel on her own book about the case uncovered inconsistencies in her story, including records that showed Defonseca was baptized Catholic and had attended an elementary school in Schaarbeek, Belgium, in 1943, during a time in which she said in her book she was living with wolves in Ukraine.
Daniel’s lawyers are asking a judge to overturn the jury’s award because Defonseca “perpetrated a hoax” on Daniel, her publishing company, the public, the trial judge and a state appeals court that upheld the verdict. They said Defonseca directly violated a provision in her publishing contract with Daniel in which she affirmed that the content of the book was true.
Daniel acknowledges she had doubts about portions of Defonseca’s story, but said she believed it after talking to Holocaust survivors. “If you read a lot of Holocaust literature, all survivor stories are miraculous,” she said.
She should be forced to give back the money. I’ve known real Holocaust survivors, including some who put their stories down in book form, and this woman’s hoax is a big slap in the face to all real Holocaust survivors who really DID undergo these kind of things and didn’t just fantasize about them like some kind of a European Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke or Stephen Glass (all well-known writers who turned out to have made up their widely-praised, supposedly true stories).
This gives Holocaust deniers a burst of energy, and history revisionists feel vindicated by these events. They will say very simply that the Holocaust is a flight of fancy, and folklore.
A scammer tried to scam a scammer.
That said part of money should be returned.
All proceeds of all revsions of the book should be taken from writer and publisher and returned to purchasers. No one should profit from lies of this magnitude.