Misha Defonseca

Misha Defonseca is the alias of Monique De Wael, the daughter of Belgian Catholic parents. She and her husband moved to the USA in 1988. In 1997, she published a fraudulent memoir in which she claimed to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. The book, called Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, was translated into 20 languages and sold millions of copies. It inspired a 2007 French film, Survivre Avec les Loups (Survival with the Wolves) and attracted the attention of Disney and Oprah Winfrey. Eventually the hoax was exposed by infighting between Defonseca and her ghost writers and by historians of the period. Lawsuits followed, and in 2014 a civil court ordered De Wael to repay more than $22 million in profits from the book. A 2021 documentary called Misha and the Wolves, explains how De Wael was revealed to be a fraudster after years of peddling her false story.