Talk about Shrinking Fiction! Several weeks ago Sharon Sergeant contacted me through this blog to ask my professional comments on why someone fakes a memoir. More on my thoughts later. What do you think?

- from Sharon Sergeant

I am the researcher that led the Defonseca genealogical investigative team. Misha Defonseca, a Belgian national, was exposed as a fraudulent Holocaust survivor in February of 2008. Various book versions of Defonseca's story have been bestsellers, and the recently released French film "Survivre avec les Loups" (Surviving with Wolves) has reportedly had more than 600,000 ticket sales in France and Belgium. I became involved after I read a  blog written by Jane Daniel, the US publisher of Defonseca's first book in 1997. Daniel's saga with Defonseca began in 1994, when Defonseca  was speaking and soliciting financial aid in the local Jewish community. Lawsuits against Daniel by Defonseca and her ghost writer, Vera Lee, resulted in a 33 million dollar judgment. Daniel was facing the seizure of her home, her last asset and wanted to know what the real story was behind this bizarre turn of events.

In the meantime, Defonseca had become an icon in Europe with her story of a heroic Jewish child traveling through war torn Europe, protected by wolves and partisans, surviving significant events during the Holocaust. The French film heightens these fairy tale themes with visual cues, emotive scenes and sweeping landscapes. More than a decade of interviews with Defonseca in print, audio recordings and videos demonstrate her ability to suspend disbelief. Defonseca created a world that people wanted to believe in. Those that did question her story were dismissed by Defonseca and attacked by her believers. Although I believed that Defonseca's claims could be proved or disproved, I suspected that I was facing a formidable illusion. In addition, the appellate court ruling in the lawsuits against Daniel was an excoriating opinion of Daniel, extolling Defonseca's credibility. I contacted Daniel to tell her the case was solvable using modern forensic genealogical methods and asked for her cooperation no matter what the investigation revealed. She agreed, sent me several copies of the original US publication, ordered copies of other versions, supplied trial documents, and the meager results she had gotten from private investigators. 

Name, photograph and story changes had been made since Daniel's now defunct 1997 US publication. Forensic genealogist Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, photo detective Maureen Taylor and Polish genealogist Ceil Jensen contributed significantly to my initial analysis of the clues found in those changes. Daniel continued to try to work through other private detective and genealogy resources in Belgium to no avail. Evelyne Haendel's astute and meticulous work on the ground in Belgium followed the divining rod of clues to Defonseca's Catholic baptismal certificate naming her as Monique De Wael, a school register tie to a first husband's family, and many records belonging to Defonseca's real parents, grandparents and living relatives.

 When our team began releasing evidence to the Belgian press on February 19, we had no idea that Misha Defonseca would actually confess. Her public denials, law suit threats and unwitting statements made by supporters of her iconic status allowed us to counter each claim with additional evidence. It was an usual 10 days as this story played out in Belgium. The US press broke the story on February 29 with Boston Globe, Slate.com and AP articles.

Dr. Serge Aroles, a researcher of fraudulent wolf child stories, consulted with Maxime Steinberg, and first brought the story to the public in Belgium through a Regards magazine newsletter publication of the baptismal certificate and school record images we provided. Journalists interviewed two of Defonseca's childhood friends who had tried to expose the fraud since 1997, reporting accusations of anti-Semitism and jealousy by the French Laffont publishing house and various journalists. Marc Metdapenningen carried the story through the initial denials, Defonseca's public confession and the ensuing firestorm in Le Soir, a national newspaper in Belgium. US journalists David Mehegan and Blake Eskin followed the breaking story in Europe, and contributed additional information when they broke the story in the Boston Globe and Slate.

There have been many reactions I did not anticipate.  The international press cast the Defonseca story as simply another literary fraud when her confession was immediately followed by the exposure of Margaret Seltzer's US "Love and Consequences" fraud. Seltzer claimed she was representing people who couldn't speak for themselves. Defonseca's damage control confession on February 28, issued by her Belgian lawyer, Marc Uyttendaele, cited a "my reality" identification with the suffering of Jewish hidden children. Her own parents had also died in the Nazi camps, Defonseca said she felt "other" because her father was named as a traitor to Belgian resistance fighters. Many people are sympathetic to this theme. Even journalist Blake Eskin, author of a book about another Holocaust fraud Binjamin Wilkomirski, ruminates about such psychological landscapes on International Public Radio and BBC in interviews following his Defonseca essay in Slate. Bernard Fixot, her global publisher at Laffont in France held an emergency meeting and decided to republish the story with letters of apology, formalizing the shift from Defonseca's Holocaust survivor story to that of a war orphan who identified with the Holocaust. Uttendaele, Fixot and the French film producer Vera Belmont, all issued public statements supporting Defonseca's claim that it was US publisher Jane Daniel who convinced her to believe her own mythology.

Even if they did not know that Defonseca's story was being told and supported by her local Jewish community as early as 1989, they made statements that indicate that they still have not come to terms with the continuing fraud. Uyttendaele carefully described his legal consultations with Defonseca as though they were therapy sessions to bring her into the "actual reality," but failed to note that the confession was issued, less than two hours after Belgian reporter Marc Metdepenningen called Uyttendaele with another piece of fraud evidence.  Uyttendaele did acknowledge that he spent 10 of the 24 hours preceding the confession with Defonseca on the phone in her Massachusetts home. Vera Belmont described removing "exaggerated" parts of Defonseca's story in the film version, despite episodes of Defonseca howling like a she-wolf and rolling on the ground in protest. Belmont said that such fits reinforced her belief that Defonseca's story was esentially true. Bernard Fixot actually went so far as to say that he relied on Daniel's vetting of the story when in fact he is the publisher that removed the very clues that led us to the facts.

Public reactions that decry the fraud span a wide ranging scale from Holocaust denier glee to the shock that real Holocaust survivors and their families feel. Tangents about publisher's responsibilities to verify their author's memoirs were fueled by the Seltzer fraud exposure. What surprised me most was that this two decade old fraud has not prompted more interest in the details. More than a month after the story broke in the news, journalists and readers alike are still debating theories without investigating further. Even those who have been given many more details are skeptical of the potential criminal elements in financial transactions, prior law suits, damages and complicit parties.Public opinions include cynicism about what should have been obvious (now that some pertinent facts are known) without recognizing that the longevity of such an international fraud  speaks to a masterful manipulation of many people, organizations, and the US court system. I have the advantage of having compiled the documentation for how the fraud was maintained.

My team would be interested to know if there are psychological case studies, stories in fiction that explore similar patterns, and what writers feel about these events.

 -Sharon Sergeant

Waltham, MA