Misha Defonseca, author of the best-selling book "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust years," admitted over the weekend that the story told in her book was not true. The author admitted that she had not wandered Europe alone after her parents were taken by the Nazis, but rather was adopted by her grandmother and uncle. Her parents were not Jewish, she said, but were Belgian resistance fighters.
Defonseca explained that the story told in her book was "my reality, my way of surviving." Her parents were killed by the Nazis, she said, and her remaining relatives were ashamed by her parents’ resistance activities and treated her poorly. The story she created in which she set off on a search for her parents, lived with wolves, and killed a German soldier helped her to survive those years, she said, and she later found it difficult to separate fact and fiction.