Look, spoilers, look away now, next paragraph gives the game away:
She lied through her goddamn teeth. It was all bullshit.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s (the exact date is debatable) Belgian immigrant Misha Defonseca stood up at Temple Beth Torah in Holliston, Massachusetts on Holocaust Remembrance Day and told her own story of escaping death at the hands of the Nazi regime. Born into a Jewish family, her parents were imprisoned and carted off to Germany for their activities in the Resistance. Under an assumed name, she sheltered with a Catholic family before resolving to seek out her real parents. Armed with a pocketknife and a dream, she set off across war-wracked Europe on her own.
She was seven. Or possibly six.
Which means she was almost certainly doomed. And she would have been, except a pack of wolves took her in and shared their kills with her. Unfortunately, she never found her parents, but she did survive and finally got to tell her tale. Fellow Temple member Jane Daniel was so impressed that she encouraged Defonseca to write a book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, which Daniel marketed through her own small publishing house. Published in 1997, it was a hit. Oprah endorsed it. There was a 2007 French film, Survivre Avec les Loups and, as is often the case in such matters when huge sums of money are up for grabs, a court case, with Defonseca suing Daniel for profits. Which is when Daniel started pulling at the loose threads in the author’s story.
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