Telling Tales (28 page)

Although Ganzfried’s research seemed scrupulous, so many people had already pledged their love and support to poor old Wilkomirski that the journalist found himself shouted down by a number of irate critics, and Binjamin did the round of television studios again to protest his innocence. By 1999, however, Koralnik herself was starting to doubt her client’s testimony, so she retained the services of the historian Stefan Machler to try to separate fact from fiction. Until then, it was only Wilkomirski’s work against Ganzfried’s. Six months later, in 1999, Machler’s report was complete. Regrettably for everyone involved, it upheld every single one of the doubts expressed in the articles in
Weltwoche
.

It found that Wilkomirski was born in the Swiss town of Biel in 1941 to a poor young woman called Yvonne Grosjean who had indeed given him up for adoption. The child’s father had contributed to his foster-care expenses until he was adopted by a wealthy Swiss couple, Mr and Mrs Doesseker, in 1957, from which point he had lived the life his friends and colleagues knew about – that of a talented musician living comfortably in German-speaking Switzerland, where he resides to this day. Machler also discovered that as a young man, Binjamin/Bruno had developed a consuming interest in the history of the Second World War and simultaneously an obsession with discovering more about his true biological identity. Clearly an emotionally fragile man, it was beginning to become clear how he might have conflated these two fixations in a work of autobiographical fiction that he may well believe, in some sense, to be true. Further weight was given to this argument when it was discovered that the pattern of events in his book mirrors almost exactly the circumstances of his unstable ‘real’ boyhood being shunted around institutions in Switzerland.

It was now clear to his publishers and literary agency that there was something very complex going on in their damaged author’s mind. This was not a straightforward instance of hoaxing for political, financial or professional gain, and Wilkomirski genuinely seemed to stand by his explicitly blurred and imagistic story as a fair approximation of what his early boyhood had been like.

Nevertheless, as professionals in an industry fraught with recent examples of memoir-writers who turned out not to be quite what they seemed when selling their manuscripts, it was essential that Jüdischer Verlag took a stand for authorial integrity. People had a right to know what was real and what was not. So, at the Frankfurt book fair in 1999, a spokesperson for Wilkomirski’s publishers announced ‘with regret’ that they had decided to withdraw all copies of
Fragments
from sale. Heide Grasnick, one of his editors, told journalists: ‘I feel pity for him because I know him personally. He’s not a happy person.’

And his is not a happy story. Academics, critics and psychologists continue to debate the workings of Binjamin/Bruno’s mind, but if there is anything approaching a consensus about the man and his deceptions it is that he should not be condemned along with other fake Holocaust memoirists like Misha Defonseca or Helen Demidenko, but rather forgiven, if at all possible, for using the real horrors of other people to illustrate the real pain of his own memories. The fall-out from his debunking heaped yet more humiliation for the lonely Swiss orphan, and the fact that he was not taken to court to account for himself shows a rare corporate compassion.

One of the saddest and strangest postscripts to this sorry tale is that one of the names which crops up in
Fragments
is Laura Grabowski – a fellow survivor who also went on to speak publicly about her experiences in Auschwitz – whom Wilkomirski affectionately mentions having known in the camps. Only Laura Grabowski wasn’t real either: that was the pseudonym of the detested serial literary hoaxer Laurel Rose Willson. Seemingly, Grosjean did not subscribe to the magazine
Cornerstone
, in which she had been sensationally outed as a ruthless liar several years earlier.

T
HE SAME WEEK
that Margaret B. Jones’ fake gangland memoir
Love and Consequences
was outed as a hoax, and its author revealed as about as far from a mixed-race gun-runner as she could be, another book, also by an American woman of questionable racial origins, was also debunked. But that other book, and the twisted saga behind its publication, had been turning heads in Europe and America for ten years by the time it was revealed as untrue. And bizarrely, it was the book’s own publisher who caused its author to be outed as a fantasist, finally, in March 2008.

The book was
Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years
and its author, Misha Levy Defonseca, claimed to be a Belgian-Jewish immigrant to Massachusetts who had settled near Boston with her husband in the late 1980s. At some point over the next few years this attractive, dog-obsessed woman in her sixties began to tell friends and neighbours the story of how, as a child, she had done a most extraordinary thing: she had trekked nearly 2,000 miles across Europe in the middle of winter to search for her parents, and on this journey had been saved from death by a pack of wolves who had taken her in and raised her as their cub. She recalled how, while she subsisted on a diet of wild meat and scavenged scraps, she sometimes heard terrible sounds coming from deportation trains and once had to kill a German soldier with her bare hands when her life was in danger. She also spoke of darting in and out of the heavily barricaded Warsaw ghetto in search of food, friends and family. Finally, after an odyssey which would have demanded unbelievable stamina and good luck, the seven-year-old Misha finally found her way home. But, tragically, her mother and father had been killed by Hitler’s soldiers.

This incredible tale gathered momentum and was fleshed out with new details on every telling. Before long, Defonseca was being invited to speak at synagogues and Jewish groups across New England, to share her story with other survivors and their families. Everybody who heard this charming, voluble, animal-loving woman speak was beguiled by her, and one of her new fans informed the local writer and publisher Jane Daniel that here was a tale which really ought to be put into print. Daniel ran a small, one-woman publishing company called Mount Ivy Press from her home overlooking Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts, and immediately knew the potential value of a life story like the one she was hearing about. She arranged to meet Defonseca at a nearby restaurant to discuss the possibility of a book, and as soon as she heard her relate her tale in person she decided to go ahead with the project.

She says now that her first reaction was ‘I thought it was far-fetched, but who knows?’ But her concerns weren’t enough, at that stage, to stop her retaining the services of another local woman to help with the project. To craft French-speaking Defonseca’s imperfect English into readable prose, she invited her friend and neighbour Vera Lee, a former professor of French, to collaborate. Daniel too would lend her stylistic hand to the manuscript, and between the three of them it was not long before the book that would go on to be more famous and expensive than any of them could have imagined, took shape.

In 1997 Mount Ivy published the first run of
Misha
, alerting journalists and film companies to the arrival of an extraordinary new voice on the Holocaust memoir scene. Gold-dust was sprinkled on to the book in the form of a flattering quote from Elie Wiesel; Oprah Winfrey’s camera crew filmed Defonseca at a local wolf sanctuary in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Disney came forward to enquire about buying the rights. Eighteen different foreign-language editions were produced across the world and in France the film-maker Vera Belmont was keen to work the book up into a feature film. An extensive book tour was undertaken by the author and for a while, at least, the three women who had made the phenomenon possible could congratulate themselves on a job well done.

But then the questions started, and the cracks began to show. Certain historians of the Holocaust and of Eastern Europe in general began to query aspects of the text. Such obvious errors as the year in which Belgian Jews were taken to camps were highlighted, not to mention the fact that wolves were highly uncommon in the areas mentioned by Defonseca. What’s more, experts in lupine-human interaction called the idea of a pack like the one she describes taking in a small child and treating it like a puppy ‘absurd’. Ever the professional, Jane Daniel sought the advice of a couple of experts in the field, the historians Deborah Dwork and Lawrence Langer. They immediately found a host of geographical and chronological inconsistencies, but, according to Dwork: ‘She kept finding ways to get around my objections. She said, “Of course, she was a young girl at the time. You are a historian. This is a memoir – people make mistakes on details and dates all the time.” ’

Nothing was done about these doubts however, and as the sales figures continued to climb, Defonseca – and by extension Daniel and her small company – began to make serious money. And this, perhaps unsurprisingly, is where things came unstuck.

Seeing how well the book was doing, Vera Lee became annoyed that she was not being credited with enough authorial input and fell out with her former neighbour. In 1998, she formally sued Daniel for not citing her as a coauthor on the book’s jacket or publicity material, despite the fact that it was she who had put into words the often incoherent recollections of the book’s named author. At the same time, a far more serious case was brought against the publisher by Defonseca herself: an accusation that Daniel had siphoned off millions of dollars of royalties and hidden them in an off-shore account in Turks and Caicos to prevent Defonseca gaining access to them. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the paranoid babble of a war-damaged woman but a hard fact: Daniel had indeed failed to declare or share large sums of money arising from sales of the books, and had presumably considered Defonseca incapable of catching her out. A long legal investigation swung into action and by 2005 the judge was ready to deliver her decision: Daniel must repay $33 million to Defonseca and Lee, with two-thirds of that amount going to Defonseca who was still, of course, at that point, considered to be a heroic survivor of Nazism. The following year, with the money apparently still not forthcoming, Lee’s lawyer brought Daniel back to court to demand that she pay $2,000 a month to his client. Daniel’s vociferous protest to the judge resulted in her being held in contempt of court and spending a night in the cells. Finally, she agreed to put her house up for sale as a way to pay back some of the money she had illegitimately taken.

So enraged was Daniel about all this, she decided to get her revenge on her author by returning to the two historians, Dwork and Langer, who had suggested the story was a fake several years earlier. She resurrected their claims and put them up on a website, asking for any expert or genealogist who might be able to help expose Defonseca to come forward. And before long, one did. The findings of forensic genealogist Sharon Sergeant would blow Misha’s claims out of the water and, for a while at least, swing the balance of opinion back towards the benighted publisher. Sergeant found out that rather than being called Defonseca, the woman who told stories about wolves was Monique de Wael, a Brussels-born Catholic who had lived through the entire war in perfect safety with her grandparents. She had spent the early 1940s enrolled in a Belgian primary school rather than traversing Europe as she had claimed, and the only echoes of truth in her made-up story came from the fact that her parents, who had been Resistance fighters, died mysteriously in Germany towards the end of the war.

Monique de Wael could not deny any of this, especially when presented with documentary evidence of her true biography. In an emotional statement said:

Yes, my name is Monique De Wael, but I have wanted to forget it since I was four years old. My parents were arrested and I was taken in by my grandfather, Ernest De Wael, and my uncle, Maurice De Wael. I was called ‘daughter of a traitor’ because my father was suspected of having talked under torture in the prison of Saint-Gilles.

She apologized unreservedly to the readers who had bought her book in good faith, and in the now familiar terms of a hoaxer pleading an alternative truth as a reason for their deception, went on to say: ‘There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality – it was my reality, my way of surviving.’

Daniel herself has tried to use the revelations of her author’s deception as grounds to appeal the multi-million dollar judgement against her, but as her appeal was lodged more than a year after her initial conviction, the statute of limitations had timed out so she has no legal right to do so. Even if she had, the court would most likely hold that the misappropriation of millions of dollars has little to do with the deluded or duplicitous state of mind of her former author. Now, in a final attempt to rescue her reputation, Daniel has written and published her own account of the saga which she refers to as a decades-long con perpetrated against her. Somehow, it seems unlikely that
Bestseller! The $33 Million Verdict. The 20-year Hoax. The Truth Behind the Headlines
could generate anything like the amount of interest
Misha
did, even if Daniel herself turns out to have been raised by wolves. But in a case as bizarre and seemingly never-ending as this one, you never know.

O
UT OF THE
grim darkness of the Holocaust there very occasionally comes a story with an ending so lovely that it offers a real message of hope to the world. Herman Rosenblat’s romantic autobiography, which did not come to light until 2008, was one such tale. As he sat on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa with Roma, his loving wife of fifty years by his side, he beamed as theirs was called ‘the greatest love story ever told’. As Herman told it, he had been taken from Piotrokow in Poland along with twenty-one young boys as part of a larger group of Jews rounded up for transportation to a camp. They ended up in Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where the conditions were as dire and brutal as can be imagined. But one day, when out strolling near the perimeter fence, young Herman spotted something remarkable on the other side: a flash of colour. A red jumper over a blue skirt. This was unusual enough in his world of grey mud, dirty rags and sickly faces. But to find it was attached to a lovely young girl with a kind, healthy face was something like a miracle: