FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Susie Davidson
617-566-7557
Susie_d@yahoo.com
New panel explores widespread ramifications of recently-revealed Holocaust memoir hoax
In February, 2008, Misha Defonseca confessed that her bestselling autobiography, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” published in 1997, was a hoax. Publisher Jane Daniel appears in a new speaking tour addressing the hoax, along with genealogist Sharon Sergeant, who compiled the evidence that led to Defonseca’s confession; oral historian and Holocaust author Susie Davidson (“I Refused to Die”); and Holocaust child survivor Rosian Zerner.
The panel will explore the following areas:
° What are the consequences when an impostor usurps Holocaust history and places real survivors in question?
° In the light of other recent fake memoirs, how can publishers be sure that what they publish is true?
° What effect does a fake Holocaust testimonial have on deniers of the Holocaust?
° How did Misha Defonseca sustain the hoax for ten years and how was it exposed?
An open discussion period will follow the presentation.
Full information follows.
For booking information, contact Susie Davidson at Susie_d@yahoo.com or 617-566-7557.
New panel explores widespread ramifications of recently-revealed Holocaust memoir hoax
In recognition of Yom HaShoah, I would like to bring to your attention a new program being offered in the Boston area. As you may be aware, recently a Massachusetts woman, Misha Defonseca, confessed that her internationally-bestselling autobiography, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” was actually a hoax.
This new program, called “Deception and its Aftermath,” presents four women affected by the challenges that stem from this revelation, who discuss protecting the truth of the Holocaust from those who would usurp it.
Misha Defonseca began telling her fabricated story in 1989 when she spoke at a local synagogue on Yom HaShoah. Defonseca recounted that, as a seven-year-old child living in occupied Belgium, she set off on foot across the European theatre of war in search of her parents, who had been arrested by the Nazis. Twice during her travels, she said, she was befriended by wolves. It was all a lie. The truth is that she spent the war years at home with her Catholic family.
Nevertheless, for years Defonseca was warmly embraced by the local Jewish community. Those who were deceived by her story booked appearances for her, attended her speeches in schools and universities, and donated money. Such prominent figures as Elie Wiesel, the late Leonard Zakim, and Rabbi Albert Axelrod, then Chaplain of Brandeis University, contributed liner notes for her book.
The aftermath of her confession personally and profoundly impacts thousands in the Boston area who heard her speak and offered their support. Beyond that, this revelation affects those who gather stories of Holocaust survivors and Holocaust survivors themselves. There remain innumerable questions as to how such a monumental fraud could have occurred.
The panelists include:
Jane Daniel of Mt Ivy Press, the publisher whose original American edition of “Misha” was the basis of an international bestseller and a French feature film. Daniel herself painstakingly fact-checked the story line by line and employed other researchers, but in the end was also taken in. Defonseca sued Daniel, her U.S. publisher, in 1998, winning a $22 million judgment and the return of all rights to the story based on the finding that Mt Ivy had failed to sufficiently promote her book. Daniel has filed a lawsuit to overturn the judgment and posted chapters of her upcoming book on a blog.
Sharon Sergeant, the forensic genealogist who put together the team of researchers, who included real “hidden children” Holocaust survivors, that amassed the indisputable evidence leading to Defonseca’s confession. Sergeant’s work was made more challenging by the fact that Belgium has privacy laws that seal vital records for 100 years. As a member of the Massachusetts Genealogical Council Board of Directors, Sergeant advocates for open records to prevent fraud; in this instance, she employed a methodology that can be used by anyone doing historical research on their own family.
Susie Davidson, journalist for the Jewish Advocate and weeklies, poet, and author of "I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston-Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II" and "Jewish Life in Postwar Germany." She speaks about and teaches courses on the Holocaust and global genocide with Dachau liberator Chan Rogers, and organizes genocide awareness events with the local Armenian and Rwandan communities. Davidson is a co-coordinator of the Boston chapter of COEJL, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and a board member of the Boston-based activist umbrella organization Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow.
Rosian Zerner, who survived the Holocaust in the Kovno Ghetto, Lithuania, and in hiding. She is the former Vice President of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust, where she also served on the Advisory Board and as elected Secretary. She is the contact person for the Greater Boston Child Survivor group, where she serves as representative on the WFJCS Governing Board and as Liaison to “Generations After,” a group for descendants of survivors. She is the Jewish Community Relations Council representative from the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, where she serves on the Executive Committee. She is on the Holocaust survivors' Advisory Board (Hakalah) at the Jewish Family and Children's Service, is a docent for the New England Holocaust Memorial, and is on the Yom Hashoah Planning Committee and the Board of American Friends of Mogen Dovid Adom. Zerner has been the keynote speaker at the annual Yom HaShoah commemoration at Faneuil Hall, speaks at universities, synagogues, senior centers, clubs and organizations, and is an advocate on behalf of survivors.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Colleen Fitzpatrick, PhD
Tel: (714) 296-3065
Email: Colleen@forensicgenealogy.info www.forensicgenealogy.info
April 9, 2008
Forensic Genealogists’ Investigation Triggers Confession of Fraud by Best-Selling Holocaust Author
“It was not the truth” confessed Misha Defonseca, author of the best-seller MISHA: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. Forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, PhD of Fountain Valley, CA, knew that. Fitzpatrick was called in as an expert by Sharon Sergeant, the investigator who cracked the Defonseca case.
“The photographs provided us clues on her real age and her real relationships to family members. Our breakthroughs with the archival records proved that we were right,” Fitzpatrick stated. “Still I almost feel disappointed that Misha confessed. I was looking forward to identifying her through DNA. This would have verified that she had not been substituted for a deceased child as she claimed, but that she was actually living with her own family. This case demonstrates the use of all three components of forensic genealogy: photographs, archival records, and DNA.”
Had Defonseca not confessed, Fitzpatrick was prepared to trace the maternal line of her family to obtain living relatives to serve as references for mitochondrial DNA analysis. Fitzpatrick routinely consults with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory on such high profile cases. She has consulted on the identification of the Unknown Child on the Titanic, and on the identification of human remains discovered in the debris of Northwest Flight 4422 that crashed in Alaska in 1948. She is highly successful at locating missing owners of unclaimed property worldwide.
Sergeant comments, “Oddly enough, my work with Colleen on the Sheboygan Dead Horse photograph introduced me to the full potential of forensic genealogy. That was fun. Defonseca’s case was much more serious.”
“I’m really proud of Sharon and the team she assembled,” Fitzpatrick stated. “This puts forensic genealogy on the map.”
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Email contact: Caroline Best distribution.media@gmail.com
April 9, 2008
Publisher seeks to overturn $33 million judgment
The third act of a decade-long legal drama began on April 8 when publisher Jane Daniel filed a complaint to overturn the judgment against herself and her company, Mt Ivy Press, brought by Misha Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee, over their book, MISHA A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. The trial ended in 2001 with an award to the plaintiffs of $11 million, which was trebled by the court to $33 million, then the second largest award in Massachusetts history.
"This case has been an unbelievable ordeal. My hope now is that I will be able to restore my good name," says Daniel. The new lawsuit follows the stunning confession by Defonseca on February 28, 2008 that her autobiographical account of walking 3,000 miles across the European theater of war, at the age of seven, searching for her deported Jewish parents, at times living with wolves, was completely fabricated. Her book, an international bestseller, has been translated into 18 languages and made into a French feature film, "Survival with Wolves," that premiered in Paris in January.
Although there were historians who questioned the authenticity of the story, the hoax went unchallenged for twenty years until an American genealogist, Sharon Sergeant, unearthed documents that proved Defonseca's real identity and showed that she had spent the war years in the home of her Catholic family.
Daniel's attorney, Joseph Orlando of Gloucester, MA says his client's case is unprecedented in his experience. "In my 30 years of practicing law, in the Federal and State Courts of Massachusetts, I have never seen a party commit a fraud on the Court of this magnitude, nor a greater wrong inflicted on a litigant. Defonseca perpetrated a fraud based upon one of the greatest historical tragedies known to mankind, the Holocaust. Her reprehensible conduct mocks the unimaginable suffering of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis."
In July of 2007, Daniel began writing a book based on her decade-long legal battles and posting chapters as a blog, BESTSELLERthebook.blogspot.com , with the request that anyone having information on the case contact her. Five months later, forensic genealogist Sharon Sergeant emailed her expressing her belief that she could solve the mystery. The clues were limited. In Defonseca's account she says she never knew her Jewish surname, her date and place of birth or any family names. The name she used, Monique DeWael, was a "false identity," she said, given to her by the Belgian "foster family" that hid her from the Nazis. In addition to the lack of personal information on Defonseca, Sergeant's efforts were hampered by Belgium's privacy laws that seal all vital records for 100 years.
Sergeant assembled a team that included real Jewish hidden children in the U.S. and Belgium who were the key to bringing the truth to light. "This work was very 'close to the bone' for them. It brought back excruciating memories of their own lost families," says Sergeant. "They obtained Defonseca's baptismal record and her first grade school registration that provided the central evidence needed to uncover the fraud."
When the documents appeared on Daniel's blog, they set off a firestorm across the Belgian and French media, with hour-by-hour new revelations of mounting proof that Defonseca's "memoire" was based on lies, including an interview with her 88-year-old cousin who recalled her as a child. After ten days of intense pressure, Defonseca released a statement in the leading daily newspaper, Le Soir, saying, "It is not the truth but it is my truth. I always felt Jewish."
The text of the entire complaint is online at: Complaint Against Misha Defonseca, et. al.
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Sharon Sergeant has released the preliminary case study provided to her research team on January 5, 2008 leading to the February exposure of Misha Defonseca's true identity and confession in Belgium.
Sergeant says,
"For more than a decade, historians had focussed on the implausibility of the Defonseca popular allegory. We took a page from Pulitizer Prize historian David Hackett Fischer's early work 'Historians' Fallacies' for the process of Inquiry, Explanation and Argument and applied it to the entire body of work created as a result of Defonseca's storytelling: her public appearances and interviews, various book versions and the many lawsuits.
We found many problems with previous inquiries. Question framing, factual verification and significance were definitely lacking. Explanations were generalized and narrations were all tainted by the basic inquiry. Cause and effect, motivations, composition of the information and analogies were all over the board.
Highly charged emotional issues were given undue proportion, distracting the inquiries from actually testing theories against the facts.
We were thus able to frame the inquiry in the search for the factual evidence trail by asking 'What is wrong with this picture?'
I presented these findings to my team on January 5, 2008. “
http://www.generalvoice.com
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Sergeant will also present how her team used this preliminary analysis to find the proof trail for Misha Defonseca's true identity at the Massachusetts Genealogical Seminar on April 26th at Bentley College in Waltham, MA.
http://www.massgencouncil.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Michael Brophy, 781-738-2671
Genealogist Cracks Holocaust Hoax, Discovery Highlights Need for Open Records.
Sharon Sergeant will speak about how she cracked a hoax at the Massachusetts Genealogical Council Seminar on April 26 at noon, at the LaCava Center, Bentley College, Waltham, MA. Sergeant is the genealogist who uncovered the twenty-year multinational fraud by Misha Defonseca, author of “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” and “Surviving with Wolves”, an international bestseller and the subject of a French feature film.
The European press was rocked when, on February 28, the beloved author confessed that her story, translated into eighteen languages, was a fraud. The author had claimed to be a Jewish “hidden child” who had lost her identity in the Holocaust.
“The international scope of this case underscores the need for open records available to the public for inspection. Without this right, researchers are not able to protect the public from frauds of this type,” according to Barbara Mathews, CG, President of the Massachusetts Genealogical Council. Defonseca's native Belgium closed vital records in 1955. Open records in Massachusetts provided new information, and pointed a pathway to Belgian records that were not sealed. When the combined records showed the fraud, Belgian officials decided to release additional sealed documents.
“Once we began releasing the records we had found, the Belgian press took it from there. Within days of receiving the correct name, date and place of birth of the real Monique De Wael, journalists contacted several people who remembered Monique well.” The author wasn’t Jewish and had spent her childhood in Belgium, not wandering across Europe, witnessing the historic tragedies of other people’s lives, as she had claimed.
“She had no choice but to confess,” says Sergeant. “There was a solid trail of who she really was.” The documents included a baptismal record and first grade registration with De Wael’s first husband’s sister, unearthed through the efforts of Sergeant and her team.
“The genealogical methods used are the same techniques that can be used to uncover other frauds or solve every day mysteries in anyone’s family history,” Sergeant explains. “We were guided by a photo time line, verified by photo detective Maureen Taylor of Norwood, Massachusetts and California based forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. We worked with real Jewish hidden children. The internet allowed us to work quickly with people on the ground in Belgium and access the records in public libraries and archives.”
Among the many other speakers at the Conference who will be discussing genealogical tools and methods are Joshua Taylor and Michael Leclerc from the New England Historic and Genealogical Society; and Michael Brophy and Bernard Couming from the Massachusetts Genealogical Council.
The Annual Conference is an all day event sponsored by The Massachusetts Genealogical Council and is open to the public. The registration cost of $75 includes a continental breakfast and luncheon buffet. Registration forms for the presentation are available at the Massachusetts Genealogical Council’s website: www.massgencouncil.com.
Contact:
Michael Brophy, Publicity Director, Massachusetts Genealogical Council
781-738-2671 FAX (781) 878-0720 mbrophy@brophygen.com
Program flyer, registration and directions
http://www.massgencouncil.com/images/2008MGCflyer.pdf
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