The amazing story of Misha Deponska, who wrote a best-selling book about her fake memories in World War II and made a fortune, has become a fascinating docu
A documentary called "Misha and the Wolves", which premiered last Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival and will be screened again today (Tuesday), details how Misha Dafonska managed to make everyone believe she was a Holocaust survivor living with wolves, write a book translated into 20 languages and inspire the book Another and earn millions, when in fact she is a Catholic Christian living in Belgium during the war, according to the New York Post website.
Last night it was reported that Netflix had acquired the streaming rights to the film.
"Survivre avec les loups" costs love to Misha Defonseca - 7SUR7.be http://t.co/41vb2Lj0nk via @ 7sur7 @LeontineCab pic.twitter.com/y85lQhvmpm
- Léontine Cabriolet (@LeontineCab) May 13, 2014
Worked on everyone. Misha Defonska
The story begins in 1997, when a woman named Misha Defonska from Massachusetts published her difficult memories and her impossible journey to survive the Holocaust.
After her Jewish parents were exiled by the Nazis from Belgium to Germany, according to the story of Deponska who was then seven years old, she said, she wandered in the woods and tried to find them.
Later in the story she develops in particularly strange and extreme directions, when she says she joined a pack of wolves, who accepted her as one of their own.
Defonska claimed she had no memories of her home after leaving him when she was so young, and had never been able to find her parents, Jarusha and Robert again.
The book, which in Hebrew translation is called "Surviving with Wolves", has been translated into 20 languages and has sold millions of copies.
He even inspired a 2007 French film, "Survivre Avec les Loups" ("Survive with Wolves") and caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey and Disney.
Defonska herself was invited to lecture to students across Europe and told her story in tears.
As mentioned, not a word from her book was correct.
A year after the film was released, in 2008, the affair exploded and it was finally revealed that it was a fiction.
Dafonska was a Catholic girl who went through a safe childhood and attended school when other girls her age.
"She was not near wolves at any stage," wrote the publisher of her book, Jane Daniel, "she pretended for the audience. She knew very well what she was doing."
Defonska claimed that initially a Catholic family agreed to hide her and that she was given a new identity so that she would not be caught by the Nazis, and her name was changed to Monique de Val.
She said the old couple hated her, and she fled Brussels to look for her parents in Germany, taking with her only a knife, water and food.
The day after she began her journey, she met a wolf: "He looked lonely, and I needed an escort," Deponska said in one of the interviews, "later the pack of wolves arrived. I do not know how long I was with them. They received me and protected me."
The story, which seemed too good to be true, came to Jane Daniel, who owned a small, local publishing house that wanted to break out.
"I was looking for a new project," Daniel said in the movie "Misha and the Wolves," "I was the first to come to her and ask, 'Can we spread this more widely? I think I can get something big out of it.'"
Dafonska agreed, and her memoir was published by Daniel in April 1997. To speed up sales, which were slow at first, Daniel handed the book to Disney, who thought it could be produced into a film, and Oprah Winfrey, hoping to put it in her book club.
When that failed and the money did not go into the account - the annoyed Dafonska began to sever contact with Daniel, and was forced to borrow tens of thousands of dollars from her friends.
Following this, in 1998, Defonska sued Daniel and her publishing company.
The jury was captivated by Defonska's story, and ruled in her favor in 2001.
The publisher had to pay it $ 7.5 million, with the book itself selling only 5,000 copies.
Dafonska managed to convince the judge that Daniel also promised her television and film options, and he tripled the amount she was compensated for: $ 22.5 million was tossed into Dafonska's pocket by the publisher, and Daniel's character was blackened and portrayed as someone who tried to steal from a Holocaust survivor.
In an effort to regain her good name and possibly the money she lost, Daniel began to re-examine the documents from the trial in order to discover new information that might help her.
During the tests, Daniel came across Defonska's bank account, which was written in the writer's handwriting, her mother's name before her marriage (Donville), date and place of birth (Aterbeck, near Brussels), data she claimed she did not know or remember.
Daniel began recruiting a team to help her discover: Is Defonska who she claims to be?
The team found that there were inconsistencies between the English and French editions of the book - Defonska's last name.
After pocketing the millions, Deponska sold the rights to her book to a French publisher who printed millions of copies of it, and unlike her name in English books, de Val, in the French version her name Val was spelled differently.
An examination of the telephone books at her birthplace from the 1930s and 1940s did not find the surname Val, but hundreds of de Val were found.
Further examination of children hidden with Christian families did not find the name Misha de Val and no mention of Jarusha and Robert de Val as a couple deported from the Nazi lists.
Sam Hobikinson, director of "Misha and the Wolves," talks about the filming
As a result, it was decided to check if she was Jewish at all.
On the lists of a local Catholic church was found Monique de Val, who was born and raised as a Catholic and even attended a Catholic school in the area.
A Belgian journalist later revealed that he had managed to locate her cousin Emma de Val, who was still living in Belgium.
When asked if Monique had run away from her family at the age of seven, de Val replied: "Oh God, no! She lived with her grandparents."
It turned out that her parents had indeed been expelled by the Nazis, but following their affiliation with the Belgian underground.
Her father broke down under the pressure of investigations and revealed the names of the other rebels in exchange for the privilege of seeing his little daughter once again.
He and his wife died in a concentration camp in Germany, and Defonska was notorious in the city as "the daughter of the traitor."
In 2014, the court forced Defonska to return the millions of dollars she received.
Defonska, now 84, lives with her husband in the United States, and refused to participate in the documentary about her life.
In a press release she released when her book was discovered to be false, she wrote: "They called me 'the daughter of the traitor' because my father was suspected of speaking out following torture. This book, this story, is mine. It is not the real reality, but it was my reality, my war to survive".