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[evocative music slowly rising]
[birds twittering]
I can still remember laying in my bed,
my little night-light on, crying over this.
I was so overwhelmed by this story.
Misha Defonseca checked every single box
for the type of woman that we looked for to interview on Exceptional Women.
I'll just take a beat and then turn.
I got you. Okay.
Stand by.
Her story originated in Belgium,
but she was living in Millis, Massachusetts,
20 miles away from the radio station.
You wanna give me a countdown?
[radio producer] Three, two, one.
♪ Magic 106.7… ♪
[Candy O'Terry] Sometimes a story is so astonishing
it seems unbelievable.
Sometimes the sadness one person feels is so big, it's overpowering.
And sometimes courage is so monumental, it humbles you.
[Pat Cunningham] Back in the late '80s, we had been living in Millis for 37 years.
Pretty much everybody knew everybody.
And we had new neighbors.
They were a couple from Belgium, Maurice and Misha.
There's a saying in Millis, "Small town, big family."
It's a small-knit community, and we became friends.
[cat meows and purrs]
You want a little kiss?
[Pat] Misha was a very nice person. Very friendly, um, caring.
I had never met anybody that had a relationship with animals as did Misha.
There were many, many cats.
[inaudible]
Eccentric personality, for sure.
I was there one day having tea,
and she told me about her life during the war and so forth.
She went into some detail.
[Candy over radio] Let me bring you into the life of a little girl named Misha.
She was waiting for her father to pick her up from school one day,
and he never came.
[poignant music plays]
My mouth just dropped on the floor.
[Candy] Instead a woman tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Come with me."
This little girl was taken into a home with a family she didn't know.
She was given a new name and different clothes.
[explosions]
[Candy] When she was only seven years old,
she walked alone for years,
through Nazi-occupied countries, across thousands of miles,
in search of her deported parents.
Misha is now a grown-up Jewish woman
living in the Boston area. She's a Holocaust survivor.
And she's here to tell her astonishing story
of courage and survival.
I think about my parents every day.
My mother's name was Gerusha,
and my father, Robert.
Reuven in Hebrew.
But our surname,
I don't think I ever knew.
I never discovered what became of my parents.
Not where they went or how they died.
To this day, I do not know.
[sustained, dramatic music plays]
[director] Settle, everybody, please.
So, Misha, tell me the story of the first time
you spoke about your experiences.
[inhales deeply]
One day…
in a synagogue…
on the occasion of Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance…
I was asked to talk about me and my story.
My husband convinced me to do it,
telling me it would free me.
When I went up to the bimah,
I suddenly realized that I was going to speak for the first time.
I burst into tears.
And slowly, snatches, I began to tell.
I was cold and I had to keep going
one step at a time.
That is survival.
You have to go forward
one step at a time.
I was, like, mesmerized.
People never knew about her being a Holocaust survivor.
I had tears in my eyes.
She was hungry. She was cold.
She was lonely. She wanted her parents.
How did this person survive?
[Misha Defonseca] I told myself,
"They think I'm alive."
"If they think I'm alive,
I can't let them down."
"So I have to keep going."
[Jane Daniel] You could've heard a pin drop.
Everybody there was just completely entranced with her story.
[people clamoring]
[dramatic music playing]
[Jane] I never expected that I was gonna hear what I heard.
When Misha was seven years old, her parents were arrested by the Nazis,
and she was told that they had been deported.
She was placed in the care of a Catholic family
called de Wael.
So it was a safe place for her.
They gave her a new identity, Monique de Wael.
The deception saved her.
But she felt very alienated there.
[delicate music playing]
[Defonseca] I ended up in a family that didn't love me.
That's the least you could say.
They hated me there. They would call me worthless.
[Jane] There was a grandfather in that foster family who was kindly to her.
[Defonseca] He told me my parents were in Germany.
He showed me with a compass that it was in the east.
So Germany didn't seem that far.
[Jane] At that point, Misha made a tremendous decision.
It turned her whole life upside down.
She decided, at the age of seven,
she was going to walk to Germany to find her parents.
[pants]
[Jane] So she took her little compass and took some supplies
and started heading east.
I know exactly what I need.
I need the basic.
I need food, something to drink,
to have a knife for protection.
The first night I slept below a bridge.
It was not far from home.
[pants]
It was absolutely naive when I think about it today.
On the map, Belgium seemed really small, and Germany was really close.
But if I went back, what would I find?
[cries echoing]
[Defonseca] Nothing was waiting for me back there.
And I had the idea to find my parents.
So I had to finish it.
[panting]
Each time I approach a village, I see devastation.
[Jane] What she experienced as a child,
having to hide from the Nazis,
being alone in the forest,
having to steal food,
freezing temperatures…
She had had a nightmare childhood.
She had been traumatized by this.
[Defonseca] Killing…
I saw killing.
[inaudible]
[Defonseca] The dead people.
It was really desperate.
[plaintive music playing]
[Defonseca] I dreamed of seeing my parents.
So I stayed deeply in the woods away from the war.
[Jane] When she was in the woods,
she was away from people being sent to concentration camps.
She was away from the horror that was happening in the cities.
[plaintive music continues]
-[Jane] She was with birds and flowers. -[bird chirping]
She said that's what saved her.
[Defonseca] I completely gave in to the wildlife.
I saw this wonderful world with animals…
in peace,
living normally,
eating just what they need,
not killing more than they need.
The balance was so… just right.
With animals I didn't need any words.
We were near each other
in silence
and understood without words.
[Jane] I was thinking, "This would make a fascinating book."
It was the early '90s.
I had a small publishing company.
When I say small, I mean tiny.
And I was looking around for a new project.
I was the first one that came along and said,
"Could we make this even more public?"
"Can we take this to another level?"
"I could probably make something big out of this."
"There's a market for this story."
Because it had an amazing twist.
[panting]
I remember I had just been caught by a farmer
who saw me stealing food from his farm.
[panting continues]
I run away, full of fear.
And he ran after me.
When you run for your life, you run very hard.
[panting continues]
And suddenly,
I had the impression that somebody was watching me.
I turn around and…
[twig snaps]
And I see this magnificent animal.
To me, it was like a huge dog.
The wolf seemed alone and I needed a companion.
-[wolf howling] -It was a beautiful gray she-wolf.
[howling]
I look in my bag for something to eat,
and I give a piece to the wolf.
And she doesn't take.
[pensive music plays]
[Defonseca] It takes a lot of time,
but after a while, we would walk in parallel.
I was able to see its generosity…
to appreciate the strength it had.
I was able to live with it.
She was like a mother to me.
Much later, it was a whole pack of wolves.
I don't know how long I was with them.
They accepted me and protected me.
That was an amazing twist in her story.
It was like, "Who ever hears of that?"
"Wow, this is quite a story."
[Joni Soffron] Misha was very different from most people I'd ever met.
My first impression was,
"She probably should've been an animal."
"Or her spirit is an animal."
She spoke about being accepted by the pack but being treated as a low-ranking member
and that she had to exhibit submissive, low-ranking behavior
in order to, uh… to be with them.
Misha said the alpha male typically would eat first.
The others would lay around the carcass waiting for their turn.
They would leave little scraps,
sort of in close proximity to where she was
when they were finished.
[Defonseca] Wolves eat ten kilos in one meal.
The leftovers were more than enough for me.
Get it.
Go get your dinner. It's right there.
[Soffron] We became very good friends.
You got it.
-You got it. Good girl! -[Soffron] She visited multiple times.
She would hand-feed them the pieces of meat.
I think they sensed in Misha
that she was a friend, as opposed to a foe.
She had such a sense of being with them,
that it's like she belonged in there.
[evocative music playing]
[Defonseca] I had no reason to stop walking.
It's what I did every day.
[panting]
Day after day, month after month.
I have always the hope to find my parents,
because I figure, "I have survived till now,
and if I have survived as a child, my parents must have survived."
And this belief makes me continue.
[howls]
[Jane] I thought, this is a moral narrative.
It's the battle between good and evil, the innocent child and the evil Nazis.
And the child survived.
It had mythic qualities to it.
And it could take my publishing company, Mount Ivy Press,
from a little local happening
to a worldwide happening.
So I asked Misha if she would be interested in publishing her stories.
I brought it up very tentatively.
With everything I went through,
I'd learned to mistrust people.
[Jane] I don't think she was terribly impressed with me,
and there was no reason she should be.
The kind of book I had published before was a legal financial book,
not exactly her kind of thing.
[Defonseca] For more than two years I refused,
but my community and my friends said to me, "Misha, do it."
"For future generations."
I found myself in hell again.
[uneasy music playing]
[Jane] It was a painful process,
but it was as if she was compelled to tell her story.
As if it was some kind of a catharsis.
Everybody was stepping up.
All the foreign publishers, one after another, after another.
We were selling the translation rights all over the world.
[tense music playing]
[Jane] My agent came back from California,
and said, "Disney wants this. Period. They want this."
This was a case of a hot property.
[The Oprah Winfrey Show theme song playing]
[audience cheers]
[Jane] When the book was published in April 1997,
I said, "Let's see if we can get Oprah to do this."
Okay, this is one of my all-time favorite moments I'm having on television.
[Jane] At that time, Oprah had her book club.
If you were one of Oprah's books,
you had a guaranteed sale of a million books.
It was like… That was the jackpot.
Then we'll meet back here in a month, and we'll talk…
[Jane] And they said, "We're interested."
I love it!
So that's a big, big, big deal.
And we were beginning to say,
"We are heading into a monster bestseller here."
[Soffron] Jane Daniel told me that Oprah was considering doing the Misha story,
and could they send a production crew here to film Misha in with a wolf.
So, I said, "Yes, of course."
I told Misha before we went into the enclosure,
this was an adult wolf, he was a very big boy.
His name was Petro.
[low growl]
[Jane] Nobody went in but Misha.
The sound man had his boom over the fence. He didn't go in.
[laughs]
So, Misha squatted down, and she's feeding this one wolf cheese.
And the wolf is very friendly.
Everything's going fine.
And then the wolf decides to put his paws on her shoulders.
[growl]
[Soffron] Petro jumped up on her shoulders,
and he was much taller than she.
And then all of a sudden, very quickly, the wolf opened his mouth…
[growls]
[tense music playing]
[Soffron] …and put her whole head in his mouth.
Very gently.
Fangs on both temples.
[Defonseca] I felt no fear.
Nobody talked about the big bad wolf to me, you know.
The wolf held her head for a minute.
We've stopped breathing.
Oprah's producer with her eyes like…
[Jane] And then just as fast as it happened,
it was over.
And at that point, Misha rears back, lets out a big howl.
I get goosebumps telling this story.
From the back, way back in the back of the pen,
we hear…
[wolf howls]
…an "awoo" coming back.
When she howled, they immediately howled back.
[howling]
[Jane] There it was. You could see.
There's the connection between the human and the wolf.
[howling continues]
I saw it, you know. It was amazing. It was a shocking moment.
So, they had got a lot of really interesting wolf footage,
and I thought, "This is gonna make a great Oprah show."
The next step was that she was to go to Chicago for the studio portion.
[Soffron] Things were going swimmingly well.
And then, I began to see some tension
between Misha and Jane.
[sighs]
It wasn't very pleasant as time went on.
[Pat] The book wasn't selling very well,
so Misha and Maurice, her husband, were having financial difficulties.
So then she started selling things, from her house.
And, um…
I felt bad that they were losing everything.
[Karen Schulman] She kept saying, "I have no money. I have nothing."
"Jane Daniel's no good."
I felt saddened,
but then Misha was sitting at my table one night and said to me
she didn't wanna go on Oprah Winfrey.
I said, "Gee, Misha, I don't understand that."
[Jane] All of a sudden, Misha's not cooperative,
doesn't return phone calls, has one objection after another.
She doesn't wanna go, it's inconvenient,
she needs somebody to take care of her animals at home.
[cats meowing, purring]
[Defonseca] Jane made me so mad, so insecure.
My husband said many times to her,
"With a survivor, you don't use that kind of attitude."
[speaking indistinctly]
[Jane] Come on. It's Oprah.
You find a dog-sitter or a pet-sitter or whatever.
You make yourself available.
"No."
[purring]
[Defonseca] Well, the memory, the bad memory, came back.
I have a nightmare. I was very anxious.
[cat yowls]
[Jane] We tried everything.
I wrote her notes and said, "This is a million sales."
"No. No. No."
-[meows] -[whispers indistinctly]
I thought, "This is crazy."
"Any other author would be falling all over themselves to do this."
[sighs]
It never happened.
-[church bell tolling in distance] -[thunder rumbling]
[Jane] A year after the book came out,
there's a knock on the door, and I'm handed a big package.
It's Misha filing a lawsuit against me.
It's like, "Oh, my God." And at that point, everything stopped.
No other country wanted to do business with us.
We had a lawsuit attached to this project.
[Ramona Hamblin] The first time I met Misha,
I felt very compelled by the circumstances of the case.
[tense music playing]
It was clear to me
that several things had, um, been done that were improper, illegal, fraudulent.
Misha was asking for the return of the copyright to her name
and for all of the royalties that she was due for book sales.
Jane Daniel saw in my life a gold mine,
and she took advantage of it.
[Hamblin] There was so much anger and bitterness
between the parties by the time that I got involved,
there was not much room for negotiation.
And it was clear we were gonna be going to trial.
It wasn't gonna settle out of court.
[sinuous music playing]
[Soffron] The sense in the courtroom was a lot of drama.
The atmosphere was pretty tense.
And then, of course, the money comes up.
[Hamblin] We found that Jane Daniel had set up a company in the Turks and Caicos,
so that royalties that came from overseas
went directly into her account and never paid royalties on them.
We had documentation.
We had royalty statements to show that she was paid.
We had canceled checks that showed that she was paid.
So everything she was saying, we had documentation to refute.
But she could speak no falsehood.
You know, "Where's the money?" And I think the jury was very sympathetic.
[sinuous music continues]
[Hamblin] The jury was riveted.
In front of you is a person who'd survived the Holocaust as a child
and written a memoir about it.
They were engaged and absolutely enthralled by this story.
Misha was a good witness.
All what I lived is on the manuscript,
because it's my life.
[sinuous music continues]
[Jane huffs] It just made me look like a monster.
And I thought, "This is not going well."
Jane was always fighting. She enforced what she want.
[Jane] It was a ten-day trial, and it was grueling.
The judge asks the jury, "How do you find on count one?"
The jury found unanimously for Misha on all counts.
I mean, ultimately, they came in with a massive judgment against me.
It was kind of mind-boggling to hear the number.
22.5 million.
So it was a very large verdict.
[sighs]
I am an optimistic person, but that hit me like a ton of bricks.
I was blown away.
[chuckles]
I said, "Are you kidding me?"
[tense music playing]
[Hamblin] The money damages against Jane Daniel
were largely based on Jane Daniel's testimony.
This was gonna be on Oprah, there was some contract with Disney.
There were things that Jane Daniel testified to
to really elevate the level of damages
well beyond what would seem supportable for a book like this.
So everybody paid attention.
People love a big verdict.
[Jane] Disney had fallen through. Oprah had fallen through.
There were no millions of dollars.
It's an untenable position to be in.
A cruel exploiter of an innocent Holocaust survivor.
You know, your world falls apart at that point.
-[birds squawking in distance] -[rain pattering softly]
[Jane] After the trial,
this was the lowest point in my life.
I ended up going into therapy and being diagnosed with PTSD.
And I had horrible insomnia.
I was hanging on by my fingernails.
My publishing company was gone.
The copyright was taken away from me.
I mean, I was destroyed at that point.
I ended up doing a post-mortem on what had happened,
looking at it piece by piece by piece.
I was in my lawyer's office going through old records and documents.
I had no idea what I was gonna find.
I open a file, and it's Misha's bank account.
And it's in Misha's writing, and it's her signature card.
And on there, it says…
[dramatic sting]
…date and place of birth, filled in in Misha's hand,
and mother's maiden name.
All of a sudden, I suddenly get a flash.
[tense, shrill music playing]
[Jane] She knows who she is.
She knows where she was born.
[chilling music]
[Jane] She knows who her mother was.
This was stuff she supposedly didn't know. She lost her identity in the war.
This doesn't add up.
[tense music intensifies]
[Jane] Clearly, she knew a lot more about who she was
than what she had told me.
What else might not be true?
I had been owned by courts and lawyers.
[panting]
My life had been turned upside down.
I wanted my life back.
[music fading away dramatically]
[Jane] If I can prove that she's not who she's been saying she is,
I can overturn this judgment.
[rain pattering softly]
It was the dead of winter. The days were short.
I was standing in my kitchen,
and I thought, "I have to do something. I have to do something."
[suspenseful music plays]
[Jane] I started recalling all the things that had happened.
How I had met her, what had happened then, what happened this…
How did the lawsuit come about?
And then I thought,
"I'll write a book about the case. I'll do it as a blog."
I was writing my memoir of her memoir.
And maybe somebody will read it.
Talk about a long shot.
[keyboard clacking]
The next day, I get up,
I turn on my computer, and there's an e-mail.
And the e-mail says…
[Sharon Sergeant] "I think I might be able to help find out
what's the real story."
I did a timeline of Misha from a variety of photographs.
First from the book,
and then from other images on the Internet.
So I could get a sense of her life.
I wanted to know who she was.
Who is this person that has just ruined my life?
Each photograph I tried to analyze
and see what kind of information I could squeeze out of it.
[suspenseful music playing]
The first clue was Misha claims she was seven years old
when she was taken in by this foster family.
In the American book there was a series
of what they call polyphoto images.
And the polyphotos were taken at that time.
And I looked at the photos, and I said, [clicks tongue]
"No, this doesn't look like a 7-year-old."
"This looks like a toddler, a three or four-year-old."
Big bow in her hair, frilly clothes and chubby, chubby cheeks.
Something's wrong.
[suspenseful music rising]
The next photograph I looked at
was a picture who Misha said was her foster grandfather and grandmother.
According to the narrative, he's a rustic farm man.
I did a close-up of the hands of Grandfather, which were manicured.
Did not look like a farm person's hands.
And he had a ring on one of his fingers.
Yeah, it was not the kind of thing a farmer would wear.
And then the little dog on Grandmother's lap,
that looks like a little house dog, not a farm dog.
So I thought, "Gee, that's strange."
And that's when I started comparing the French and the American book.
I was looking at names and places and dates.
That was the big red flag.
[Jane] She called me and she said,
"Do you notice that Misha's name that she used in the French book
is different from the name she used in the American book?"
In the American book, the name that she was given
by the foster family that took her in was de Wael.
What Sharon noticed immediately is the French book,
the foster family gave her the name Valle, V-A-L-L-E.
Why would you have two different names?
[suspenseful music continues]
[Sharon] There's too many discrepancies,
between the name changes, the pictures, and so on.
[music climaxes]
Fishy, yep. Definitely seemed fishy.
[director] Take a drink if you want. Just relax.
I know it's a nerve-wracking thing.
[Jane] If her story were true and I were doubting it…
there's something particularly
vicious
to
doubt somebody who's telling the truth
about something awful that happened to them
and the callousness that it takes to say, "I don't believe you."
And the harm you can cause by doing that.
That was in my mind.
On the other hand, what was also in my mind is,
"So many discrepancies."
Why would you be saying things that aren't true, unless you're crazy?
Maybe she's so traumatized that she's just lost her grip on reality.
How much did that explain? I didn't know.
I needed a lot of answers at that point.
We need boots on the ground in Belgium.
[train car whirring]
[tense music playing]
[Jane] Sharon had a connection with a Belgian genealogist
who herself was a Holocaust survivor.
As it turns out,
she grew up in the same area that Misha claims to have lived in.
During the war, I myself was a hidden child.
I went to a Catholic school,
and I became a very good little Belgian, Catholic girl.
I have no recollection of anybody telling me
what happened to my parents.
I have no memory at all.
[gentle, dramatic music playing]
I was about 40 and went through a sort of terrible breakdown…
which led me to find what happened to me, in fact,
and to my parents and my family.
And I started to make research.
I found out my father was deported to Auschwitz in September '42.
My mother was arrested in October in Brussels
and deported to Auschwitz.
I was told that they didn't come back.
So, I went by car to Auschwitz.
I saw the camp…
where there was not a single soul.
The chamber… The gas chambers were exploded.
I found some candles, what we call Jahrzeit,
still burning in the rubbles of some of the gas chambers.
Before leaving,
I had a Star of David done in dried flowers.
I just didn't know…
where to put it.
I couldn't put it at the monument.
So, finally, I chose the…
the little pond.
It floated there.
And I think that was the time that I…
[swallows]
[softly] Sorry.
Sorry.
[swallows]
…that I put my parents to rest.
My parents, my grandmother, my cousin.
[Jane] Evelyne is herself a Holocaust survivor
whose story was very much like Misha's.
So she was the perfect person to find what was going on.
[tense music playing]
[Sharon] In the French book, the foster family had a surname of Valle.
And in the American book the foster family's surname was de Wael.
To reconcile the name changes,
Evelyne went through the city directories
for the 1930s, 1940s.
[Evelyne] I came at least three days
searching for the de Waels and the Valles.
The name Valle was not in the phone books.
The Valle name didn't exist.
De Wael, yes.
There were many de Wael. Many, many, many, many.
[Jane] So, now you start to think,
the French book was distributed in Belgium,
and if something about Misha's story is not true,
it would be important for her not to put her real name in that French book.
There would be somebody over there
who would say, "I knew the de Wael family."
"I know whether or not she was around, or did she disappear during the war."
[Sharon] The fact that she changed the name in France and Belgium
from de Wael to Valle,
suggests to me that she's trying to hide something.
[Jane] Sharon and I both looked at this and said,
"Something's really wrong with this story."
So, at this point, the book had been taken over by a French publisher,
who had published it in 20 languages.
It was a huge bestseller all over Europe.
She was speaking to schoolchildren all over the French-speaking world.
[Marie-Claire Mommer speaking French] In 2005,
I was planning on creating
as a professor of psychology
a project on the story of this young child
who experienced all these adventures.
The project became a huge, magnificent exhibition.
Then we have the idea
to try and bring her to Belgium.
We watched her get out of the train.
It was a fascinating sight.
She was dressed in blue…
like a shining canary
with all its colors…
[chuckles]
…with two,
no, three big suitcases!
She came towards me
all radiant and beaming.
Right away, she exhibits
a very dynamic character,
very welcoming and very generous.
When Misha entered the exhibition,
she collapsed.
[applause]
[Defonseca, in French] I was not warned of this,
so when I visited the exhibition,
I burst into tears
because it touched me very deeply.
[Mommer, in French] She was so delighted to be there.
But on the other hand,
we saw the sadness come out
and the tears, the tears, the tears.
It was very emotional.
[in French] We were all really traumatized by her story
and we all wanted to give
a bit of joy to this woman
by showing our creativity
and our courage, too,
to show what we felt.
[Jane, in English] In the book, Misha says that her parents
were arrested together by the Nazis and deported.
Although she didn't know their surname,
their first names were Reuven and Gerusha.
So, the next step was, Sharon said,
"I have access to the Nazi records of deportations."
"Well, I will take those two names
and see if there are two people who were deported
more or less simultaneously with those names."
[Sharon] When we examined the deportation lists,
they were not found as a husband and wife.
[Defonseca, in French] "I missed my parents terribly."
"My face was covered in mud."
"I screamed…
some nights, from the cold."
"Later on,
I got a second chance."
"I survived because I trusted no one."
"Because I avoided contact with humans."
[tense music rising]
[Evelyne, in English] During the war, the Jewish Defence Committee
had made lists of hidden Jewish children
with the name of their rescuer and the name of their parents.
These lists are now in the archives at the War Victims Services.
It was a real, real, real danger
that these lists would be taken by the Nazis.
Children would be found,
and be, uh, killed.
But it was quite clever.
There were four different booklets.
You needed all four to find the child.
But all four of them were in different places.
If any Nazi found a single booklet,
they would not be able to trace the child,
but at the end of the war,
with the four different booklets,
there would've been a way to find whose child it was.
And so I searched for Misha's parents.
No names of the parents.
So, I knew there that there was something wrong.
And in the lists of hidden children,
they didn't have "Misha," and they didn't have "de Wael,"
that is for sure.
She was not mentioned at all.
[tense music climaxes]
[Mommer, in French] Misha's story
had a snowball effect.
Already millions of books
had been sold.
And thereafter,
we had to work
to prepare the conferences
and get her to them.
So, we were always together.
At that time, she would often
come back to our home.
She would eat with us.
She was like a member of the family.
We had dozens of events.
Of course, we took her to them.
She was always welcomed
by the organizers
and always with a lot of kindness and friendliness.
Everyone left the conferences
dazzled by this character.
[Evelyne, in English] I was stuck, really.
No findings but no proof.
No proof.
So that was the point where I thought that she could've been undocumented.
Some children were hidden
but not necessarily through organization.
As extraordinary as her story was,
I had to keep in mind
that she might have been a Jewish hidden child.
[TV show music playing]
[in French] We are going to talk about this strange and wonderful story.
Misha Defonseca is with us. Hello.
Hello.
Thank you for coming to see us to tell us about this story.
[Jane, in English] Now the stakes go up. I start worrying.
I will feel a lot of guilt, if this is true,
that I am digging into her past.
And what if it is true?
[in French] Misha Defonseca is a witness of the Holocaust.
Hello.
[Jane, in English] How unfair to challenge her.
And even if it's mostly true but not quite true,
how unfair to disrespect what she's been through.
[in French] You have to go through all the tragedy
and all the horrors.
It's very painful.
I felt like I had been cast in a play that I didn't audition for.
I didn't want the part. I didn't wanna be in the play.
[in French] I have known hatred
and I have known the rage to kill
because it's my life or his.
It was devouring me.
[in French] Personally…
I live it every day.
This had taken over my own life.
[in French] I think about my parents every day, and for me,
the Holocaust is every day. The memory stays with you every day.
[Jane] But I'd had this judgment hanging over my head for quite a while now.
I had lost the appeal.
I was looking at the possibility of being completely wiped out.
So it was starting to get pretty uncomfortable,
but I needed to get to the truth.
So, when we had no Jewish records to support her story,
the question is, maybe she's not even Jewish.
[Evelyne] If she's not Jewish,
then she must be, most likely, Catholic.
If she was Catholic, perhaps she was baptized.
[Sharon] Misha Defonseca's bank record from the trial records
said that she was born in 1937,
her mother's maiden name was Donville,
and she was born in Etterbeek.
[Evelyne] Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels.
So, in Etterbeek, I searched for different churches.
[Jane] So Evelyne went to the first one. The records weren't there.
[Evelyne] Went to another one…
[Jane] No baptismal record that matched Misha's information.
[Evelyne] And to the third one in the area…
[Jane] As it turns out, the church had burnt to the ground.
When we learned that, I thought… [groans]
"We're probably sunk now,
because the records probably were destroyed in the fire."
[Evelyne] But the offices, the presbytère,
was in an adjoining street.
They were preserved.
[inquisitive music playing]
So, Evelyne was looking date by date by date,
all the children born in that parish.
I knew two things:
Her date of birth, 12th of May, 1937,
and the mother's name, Donville.
[music climaxes]
And in that book, I found her.
"Monica Ernestina Josephine de Wael…
daughter of Roberti Henrici Ernesti de Wael
and Josephinae Germanae Barbarae Donvil."
The revelation was that Misha's father's name was de Wael.
So, at that point, it seemed that Monique de Wael was her real name.
It wasn't a name given to her by foster parents
to hide her from the Nazis.
It seemed like she was born Monique de Wael.
She was a Catholic. She was baptized Catholic.
Her father was de Wael.
However, it wasn't proof conclusive.
Because in those days, they used to take names of dead children
and give them to Jewish children, by way of hiding them.
It was possible that the de Waels had taken in a hidden child
and that their own child had died.
I needed further proof.
[director] So what did you do next?
[chuckles] Off the record, this is a good question.
-[crew chuckles] -[chuckling] What do I do next?
[Jane] Evelyne figured out, "All right, where else can I find that proof?"
She would've gone to school.
I tried to find a school on the tram track that she mentioned in her book.
[chuckles] And as I walked by, I hit the school.
The door was open.
I walked in and asked
if they had any record of someone with the name of Monique de Wael.
[Jane] So, we're biting our fingernails,
to the point that they're practically bleeding,
waiting for this information.
Either we've got the records or we don't.
[Evelyne] And there on the register was her name.
"De Wael, Monique."
That was really the final proof, shall I say.
Both the baptism certificate
and her attendance in a school in Brussels.
I got to the phone, and I picked up the phone and it was Sharon.
And Sharon could hardly contain her excitement.
She practically screamed into the phone,
"We've got the records! We've got the records!"
That was the smoking gun.
[intense music exploding]
[music stops]
[Jane] Now I've caught her in a lie.
My life had been contaminated…
[crewman] End board.
[Jane] …by a whole spiderweb of lies.
[director] Take 15 minutes, everybody.
[dramatic music sting]
[Jane] And here it is, exposed as a hoax.
[Defonseca, in French] Could you pass me a bottle of water, please?
-Thank you. -[Jane] I thought,
"Now, the whole story that she has been telling in the book falls apart."
[tense music rising]
At that point, I knew she was not who she said she was.
[chuckles]
[Jane] Not only was she not a Jewish child
hiding in the forest from the Nazis,
she was a Catholic child safely enrolled in school.
[growling]
She wasn't anywhere near wolves.
She was playing to an audience. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Now we can see that this is not just a little white fib.
This is a massive conspiracy over 20 years
to propagate something that was a complete and total falsehood.
This was not the real Misha.
[chilling music playing]
[Evelyne] I had many feelings.
I felt angry. I felt disgusted.
I just saw the fake history, the fake identity,
a way to get money out of the Holocaust.
Somebody stole a very painful part of my life.
[inhales deeply] I felt it for myself, for my…
for all the hidden children
and all the dead children through the Holocaust.
Uh…
For all the parents, for my parents, [inhales]
but in fact for all the Jewish community.
[evocative music playing]
[wolves barking]
[shouts in French]
[Jane] At the point that we got those records,
the book was a huge bestseller all over Europe
and the movie had just come out.
And the movie was called Survival with Wolves.
[wolves barking]
[howling]
[dramatic music rising]
[speaking French]
[wolves whine, howl]
[applause]
[male host, in French] There it is,
the trailer of Véra Belmont's film.
It's very touching to see you both here,
the real person and little Mathilde.
You seem very emotional.
It's as if you are reliving this story every time you see the film?
Yes, that's right.
That's right. It's very difficult.
Do you recognize yourself in Mathilde's acting?
Absolutely, absolutely.
It's very well expressed.
She plays magnificently.
She conveys the emotions very well.
It was the thought of my mother that kept me going.
There is a scene in the film
which to me is extraordinary.
The one where she falls out of the train and she says…
[inaudible]
[haunting orchestral music taking over]
[in French] Cinema, with a beautiful film inspired by a true story.
[in French] You're great.
-You're a great actress. -[chuckles]
[in French] This story is very, very moving.
An incredible story and yet a true story.
[overlapping conversations]
[haunting music climaxing]
[in French] Cut! Excellent.
[in English] It premiered in Paris.
"Based on a true story."
And here we're holding these documents.
So we thought, "Let's go with this. Let's put it on my blog,
and let's e-mail somebody over there in Belgium."
[tense music playing]
The next morning we got up,
it had broken front page of all the newspapers.
[newsreader, in French] A book, then a film,
supposedly an autobiography, but everything was false.
[in French] It was an incredible story, the story of a young Shoah survivor.
We had fired a truth bomb. It had landed.
[in French] Surviving with Wolves, the bestseller that inspired the film
released last month…
And the whole fake thing blew up.
…is not a true story.
Everything is false.
It was a big scam.
[director, in English] House lights.
I came home, I immediately went to my computer,
I put in her name and there it was.
[reporter, in French] The beautiful story was entirely false.
In Belgium, her country of origin,
historians have discovered Misha Defonseca is actually Monique de Wael.
I think I felt like my blood just drained from my body, you know.
How… How can this possibly be?
I was angry.
I was sad. I was hurt.
I felt betrayed.
I felt used.
She became that close a friend to me
that when we had a litter of pups born, we named one Misha.
It was just heartbreaking.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
-Hey, baby girl. -[wolf whines]
We were duped, just like the rest of you.
[dramatic music playing]
[Karen] That fact that she lied about her being a Holocaust survivor
made me cry.
Misha Defonseca played on sympathy.
That's how she became a wonderful storyteller.
Sympathy.
That's how Misha Defonseca was able to fool people.
Sympathy.
[delicate music playing]
[Pat] I burst into tears.
I just felt so taken advantage of and lied to and all…
Ugh! The lies and the bitterness and everything came out.
Some of my neighbors did give her quite large sums of money.
We're talking $25-30,000 to help her save the house.
She'd go to the rabbis and ask for donations from the temple.
The entire community…
that knew her, my neighbors, nobody talked to her again that I knew of.
Everybody felt betrayed.
Yeah.
[pensive music playing]
[Mommer, in French] There was a sort of anger that rose in me
which never left me.
The students who took part in the project,
the day I entered the class,
there was a state of revolt.
You have to imagine a pack in revolt.
Rants, tears, cries.
[exhales] They were standing up on the benches.
I was no longer in control,
and I usually contained my students very well.
I contacted Misha straight away.
I wanted to be honest and authentic with her.
But she said, "Don't worry."
"It must be the doing of the publisher in America."
[crew speaking indistinctly]
[Jane, in English] And then came the next twist in the story.
It couldn't have gotten more bizarre.
I said to myself, "I could never make up this plot."
If I did, somebody would say,
"This is preposterous. This would not happen."
[Marc Metdepenningen, in French] Every journalist dreams of a scoop.
The question for me was,
if her story is false,
then what is her real story?
What I simply did
was go through the Brussels phone book
where there are approximately 400 de Waels.
So I started to call them one after the other.
And at the 44th or 43rd name,
I stumbled across a woman called Emma de Wael.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Marc] My meeting with Emma, Misha's aunt,
was extraordinary.
She didn't go off in search of her parents?
[in French] Good God, no.
She stayed with her grandfather and grandmother.
Emma told me
her niece had always been delusional,
that she would create imaginary worlds for herself.
I went and fetched her regularly
with the number 56 tram to Anderlecht
and brought her to Schaerbeek.
In the evenings, I took her back to Uncle Ernest.
[tense music playing]
[gunshots]
[Marc] Emma de Wael
told me the truth
about what happened during the war.
What happened to Robert de Wael, Misha Defonseca's father.
[soft, solemn music playing]
[man, in French] Robert de Wael worked at Schaerbeek town hall.
He was really very patriotic
and very engaged in his role as a reserve officer.
I met Jean-Philippe Tondeur by chance
but he had a lot of documentation
on Misha Defonseca's father.
So I went to consult Robert de Wael's file.
[restrained, dramatic music playing]
[Tondeur] On 10th of May, 1940, the Germans invade Belgium.
[explosion]
[Tondeur] They crush the Belgian army during an 18-day campaign.
The king surrenders
and Belgium is occupied.
Robert de Wael joins the resistance…
[bell tolling]
…and begins to recruit resistance fighters.
[Marc] As a resistance fighter,
Robert de Wael
was involved in gathering weapons…
activating intelligence networks
and transmitting intelligence to the Belgian government
which had gone to London.
[beeping]
Unfortunately, Robert de Wael wasn't very discreet
about his activities for the resistance.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Emma de Wael] He had a loose tongue.
He was proud of what he was doing.
Because I knew he had
secret documents.
He even showed them to us at home.
My father told him to be careful,
that he was becoming careless.
He risked arrest.
He was denounced by a Nazi collaborator
and was quickly arrested.
[Tondeur] Robert de Wael, his wife
and 41 arrested resistance fighters
are deported to Germany…
and sent to the Brauweiler Prison in Cologne.
The Cologne prison had a very harsh regime.
[Tondeur] He is interrogated by the Gestapo.
He starts to scream.
[chilling music playing]
Robert de Wael cracks.
[Marc] Robert de Wael made a deal in the Cologne prison.
This deal involved him
handing over the names of his fellow resistance fighters
in exchange for his wife being protected
and to once again see his daughter,
Misha Defonseca.
[Tondeur] In August 1942, after betraying his fellow officers,
as the Germans had demanded of him,
Robert de Wael got one last opportunity to see his daughter.
And that would be
the end for…
for Robert de Wael, who was later deported.
Robert and his wife Germaine would both die in the German camps.
We called her "The Traitor's Daughter."
Because it was said that her father
sided with the Germans.
[mournful music playing]
[Tondeur] The municipality of Schaerbeek would engrave a plaque
in the name of the resistance fighters who died during the war.
Robert de Wael,
whose name was listed last…
was later erased.
[Marc] On 22nd of February 2008,
once things were very clear,
uh, we published Robert de Wael's whole story,
the betrayal,
the falseness of Misha Defonseca's account.
And in the hours that followed,
a statement was issued.
This is Misha Defonseca's statement.
[haunting music playing]
"They called me 'The Traitor's Daughter'
because my father was suspected of having spoken under torture."
"This book,
this story, is mine."
[evocative music rising]
"It is not the actual reality,
but it was my reality…
my way of surviving."
"I ask forgiveness."
"All I ever wanted was to exorcise my suffering."
[growling]
[in French] I felt so rejected,
but I could not explain it to myself,
neither to my grandmother or my grandfather.
I am not the girl I thought,
but there are times…
when I still hesitate.
I say to myself,
"Did I or didn't I experience it?"
I have to think.
Particularly with animals.
-[growling] -I can still see myself
rolling on the ground with wolves.
[delicate music playing]
Have you seen my lovely wolves?
They will always be
my wolves.
I will be always at their side.
Even if I know the truth now.
I am at their side.
[wolves whining]
I got into a bubble,
a world of my own.
And this world of mine was filled with animals.
Animals that defended me
against humans.
[birds twittering]
[Candy, in English] Listening back to this interview,
the first words in the intro to the show were…
[on radio] "Sometimes a story's so astonishing,
-it's unbelievable." -[mouthing along]
That's pretty astonishing. [chuckles] That those were the first words.
And then it turns out, it's not true.
I believed her.
I didn't see anything in those eyes
that made me think she wasn't telling me the truth.
[Defonseca on headphones] Fear for me, at this time, was the German.
It was the…
[Candy O'Terry] All I was doing was looking for more truth
to confirm what I already believed.
In hindsight, it's chilling.
But for me, at that moment,
I was so respectful of someone's experience,
at what I think we all, as citizens of the world,
will recognize was the darkest time in the history of our world.
Far be it from me to question her.
[film projector whirring]
[Debórah Dwork] Questioning someone's claim to be a Holocaust survivor
is very difficult.
One brings a great deal of diffidence to those claims.
[projector stops]
But the danger of believing everything
puts history
and the historical reality
of genuine survivors at risk.
In December 1996,
I got a letter and a manuscript from Jane Daniel.
That manuscript was Misha: A Mémoire
by a young girl during the Holocaust.
I called Jane Daniel
to explain why this narrative just did not work.
I said to her,
"I would not publish this book."
I have thought a lot over the years
as to why Jane Daniel decided to go forward with publication.
She clearly hoped
that the manuscript was true,
but she clearly worried that it was not.
I think it was greed
that powered this narrative
for Misha and Jane Daniel.
And then, as those sales figures rose,
more and more people
accepted the memoir as real and as true.
[Jane] I admit it, I had created the monster.
She was my monster.
I had created this person with enormous sympathy as a character.
Somebody who had suffered terribly.
Somebody who deserved respect and, in fact, awe.
And nobody wants to admit that they were tricked.
And I admit it, I was tricked by her, I believed her.
Everybody was seduced.
The American jurisprudence system, the judges and the juries,
we were all seduced by the story.
[Evelyne] It's human to believe.
Credibility is something else.
It's your need to question if things are not
that will help you discern what's true and what's not true.
[in French] You killed a human being with a knife?
Because I saw the rape
of a little girl.
[Mommer, in French] I have enough distance
to take a more analytical look at Misha's character.
When I saw that, I jumped
because he turned and came towards me.
At that moment, I only thought about one thing,
to live.
Because I wanted to live.
Misha created a world for herself,
a world of her own belief.
When he was close, I stabbed him in the stomach.
I slashed everywhere.
The throat, the face.
I was covered in blood.
It was horrible.
Writing this book
has caused me to relive…
[voice breaking] …my nightmares.
[Mommer] Misha sought refuge in mythomania,
and with time,
she slowly becomes
a character in her own story.
Every time I stabbed,
it was for this little girl, it was for the children,
it was for my parents.
[in English] I think that we would like to believe
that Misha Defonseca believed
that she was a survivor of the Holocaust.
I think we would like to believe
that we were not so naive,
that we believed it because she believed it.
And we would even like to believe
that this narrative has a redemptive purpose,
because it made right the wrong of her childhood.
I think it's nonsense.
There is no redemptive purpose.
We were so naive.
It was all a fabrication.
[Evelyne] How I feel about her today…
[smacks lips]
Mixed… Mixed emotions.
I think that she was a protagonist of this story, but she was not alone.
There were other people that helped
to make this, uh,
biography be a bestseller.
[delicate music playing]
[Evelyne] Just talking about her right now, and the search,
and the years that went by…
Some pity…
Some pity.
Uh…
Some repulsion…
Maybe it's too hard a word, but…
I'm feeling some uh, understanding.
As a child, it must have been very difficult for her after the war,
the fact that her father was called a traitor, a collaborator.
She's both a victim and a villain.
She's both.
She is both in this story.
[plaintive music playing]
[wolf howling, distant]
[delicate, evocative music playing]