The Best Holocaust Memoir is Fake

"I ask for forgiveness from all those who feel betrayed," said De Wael.

The best-selling Holocaust autobiography over the past ten years has turned out to be fiction and a story of the prolific imagination of its Catholic writer, who made millions of dollars out of claiming to be a Jewish victim of the Nazi, The Independent reported on Saturday, March 1.

"The book is a story, it's my story," the writer said in a statement issued under her real name, Monique De Wael.

"I ask for forgiveness from all those who feel betrayed."

From 1997, when best-selling "A Memoir of the Holocaust Years," De Wael, a Belgian but lives now in the US, had been hoodwinking readers worldwide into buying her memoir.

Taking the name Misha Defonseca in her book, De Wael, now 71, claimed to be the daughter of Jewish parents, who had been carted off to a Nazi concentration camp during World War 11.

It tells the story of eight-year-old Misha, who trekked across Nazi-occupied Europe during the World War II, searching for her missing parents.

She collapsed in a forest but was rescued by pack of wolves who adopted her as their cub.

Today and just a few weeks after a film adaptation, Survivre Avec Les Loups (Surviving with Wolves), premiered in France, it has been revealed that not only did De Wael invent the story but that she is the Roman-Catholic daughter of an alleged wartime collaborator.

De Wael had admitted under pressure and hard evidence from Belgian newspaper Le Soir that she had fabricated the Holocaust tale.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Holocaust refers to "systematic state-sponsored killing of Jewish men, women, and children and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II."

The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million.

But the figure has been questioned by many European historians and intellectuals, chiefly French author Roger Garaudy.

"Good Faith"

De Wael said she invented the story because of an inner complex that made her feeling victimized as Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

"Yes, my name is Monique De Wael, but I have wanted to forget it since I was four years old," she said in her statement.

"It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world."

The only truth in her story seems to have been the disappearance of her parents, who were deported for their membership of the Belgian resistance movement.

"My parents were arrested and I was taken in by my grandfather, Ernest De Wael, and my uncle, Maurice De Wael. I was called 'daughter of a traitor' because my father was suspected of having talked under torture in the prison of Saint-Gilles. Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish," she added.

De Wael's fake memoir had been translated into 18 languages.

She has recently received £100,000 for the French rights to her memoirs.

She also won a £10million court case in April 2005 against her American publisher for allegedly withholding royalties and not doing enough to market the book.

De Wael's lawyer said the fiction story was written in "good faith."

"It matters little whether the account is real or partly allegorical, it is the product of absolute good faith, a cry of suffering and an act of courage," Marc Uyttendaele said.

Moral of the story? Millions of Goyim worldwide believed a fiction to be truth.

A hallmark of self-deceiving cowards is their acceptance of authority as their truth rather than the truth as their authority...