Sam Hobkinson discusses his Netflix documentary which tells the story of Misha Defonseca, who claimed that she escaped the Nazis and trekked through the woods with a pack of wolves
Sometimes a story can be so strange and specific, it surely has to be true. Right? It was in the 1990s that Misha Defonseca, a Belgian woman born in 1934, started regaling locals in Massachusetts with her own strange, specific story. During World War 2, Defonseca was a little girl in Brussels whose Jewish parents were dragged away from their home; the child, confused by events, was then secretly housed by a Catholic family. However, in 1941, Defonseca fled Belgium in search of her mother and father; she traipsed through freezing forests across Europe and was protected from foes by a pack of wolves. And, if that wasn’t enough, Defonseca also killed a Nazi in self-defence on her way to Ukraine via Germany and Poland. Equally impressive is that Defonseca kept her death-defying adventure a secret for nearly five decades.
Around 1990, Defonseca finally started clarifying the details of her mysterious childhood. At a synagogue on Holocaust Memorial Day, the otherwise shy, reticent figure presented herself to the crowd as a Holocaust survivor who was literally raised by wolves. Soon, the miraculous story spread around the community. In 1994, a publisher, Jane Daniel, convinced Defonseca to write a memoir, which emerged in 1997 as Misha: a Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Subsequently, Defonseca was invited to appear on Oprah and Disney purchased her life rights; in Europe, the book was a bestseller and adapted into a movie.
However, Defonseca was a girl who cried wolf in a more allegorical sense. In 2008, a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, published an exposé: Defonseca had made the whole thing up. In reality, Defonseca was born in 1937, not 1934, and her family were Catholics. She didn’t leave Belgium during World War 2, and nor did she befriend any wild creatures. In a defence issued by a lawyer, Defonseca claimed that her memoir wasn’t a literal reality, but felt true to her – her parents were resistance members murdered by Nazis, and inventing a wolf-related fantasy was her personal coping method.
“It was difficult to get people to sit in front of a camera and talk,” says Sam Hobkinson, the director of Misha and the Wolves, a new documentary speaking to several of the key players involved in Defonseca’s hoax and its unravelling. “A lot of people would prefer it stayed in the past. A lot of people were tricked and didn’t want to come across as fools in front of the camera.” One absent interviewee is Vera Lee, the actual author of Defonseca’s memoir. “Even after the story ended, things rumbled on with court cases for Jane and Misha. A ghostwriter was involved in suing both of them. It became quite nasty.”
Hobkinson first came across Defonseca’s story six years ago in a news article. The London-based director has a two-decade history in documentaries, including The Love of Books: A Sarajevo Story and Netflix’s hit miniseries Fear City: New York Vs the Mafia, and seemed like an ideal journalist for such a juicy scandal. Although he’s not so keen on that job description. “I see myself as a film director before I see myself as a journalist,” he tells me over Zoom. “The way I make documentaries, I’m interested in devices and forms that are more traditional in the drama world. I don’t see why holding information back and misdirection should be purely tools for the drama filmmaker. They’re some of the strongest weapons in the filmmaker’s arsenal.
“Clearly when you’re working in the world of true stories, you bring a journalistic sensibility to it, because ethics are involved. But I think with a story like this, what’s important is that the viewer leaves the cinema knowing everything there is to know. Some information, you might have held back, but I don’t see why a documentary maker can’t do that.” So now, during our interview, has he switched to journalist mode? “I hope not. I hope I’m in film director mode – because that’s how I’ve approached it.”
“I don’t see why holding information back and misdirection should be purely tools for the drama filmmaker. They’re some of the strongest weapons in the filmmaker’s arsenal” – Sam Hobkinson
As all the events happened in the past, Hobkinson was able to plot the 90 minutes in advance like a traditional movie with a three-act structure – note how two of the major twists occur at half-hour intervals. Jaw-dropping revelations are thus delayed to maximise their dramatic potential, even though everything could have been revealed in the opening minute. “I wanted to make a film that started like one kind of film, a Holocaust documentary, and became something else – a psychological thriller.” It’s the only time I’ve heard of a documentary screening in front of test audiences – a practice usually reserved for comedies and four-quadrant studio releases. “It has big twists and turns. We wanted to make sure they landed with the majority of people.”
One major turn was in 2002 when Defonseca successfully sued Daniel for $22 million in unpaid royalties. In the court case’s aftermath, Daniel started investigating Defonseca’s backstory – a convenient moment for the publisher to become sceptical, some might say. Daniel soon discovered that in Defonseca’s legal paperwork, she’d written down her mother’s maiden name, her birthday, and her place of birth – all information supposedly lost during World War 2. Further evidence revealed that Defonseca enrolled at a Belgian school in 1943 and had lied about her age – not to mention the furious wolf experts who had voiced their disbelief.
In hindsight, Defonseca’s claims are absurd, and most viewers will enter Misha and the Wolves already aware that it’s a hoax. (Hobkinson admits that he wanted the marketing to preserve the secret, but that producers changed his mind.) However, Defonseca truly did fool many. Before her scheduled Oprahappearance, Defonseca filmed a pre-recorded segment howling with wolves in front of enraptured onlookers. When Defonseca pulled out of Oprah at the last moment, Daniel was enraged – a spot on Oprah’s Book Club usually meant a million in guaranteed sales.
While the Disney deal didn’t materialise into a movie, Defonseca’s life story was adapted by the Belgian director Véra Belmont into 2007’s Surviving with Wolves. Wild Bunch, the drama’s sales agent, still describes it on their official website as “This film is based on a true story”. When clips of Surviving with Wolves appear in Misha, the bizarre, Disney-ish sequences further highlight the ridiculousness of Defonseca’s fantasies. Hobkinson notes of the 2007 movie, “It’s truly one of the worst films of all time.”
“I wanted to make a film that started like one kind of film, a Holocaust documentary, and became something else – a psychological thriller” – Sam Hobkinson
One reading of Hobkinson’s documentary is that Daniel, not Defonseca, was the driving force. Defonseca seemed satisfied enough disclosing an elaborate lie in social circles; it was actually Daniel with dollar signs in her eyes. By the end, did Defonseca want to get caught? “Potentially with Misha, it may have been a lie that grew too big,” Hobkinson says. “It’s fine within the local community, but once it starts to get international, then maybe she’s looking for a way out. And maybe a way out is starting to act strangely, and deciding not to go on Oprah Winfrey.”
Then there’s the pertinent question of why Defonseca went through with it at all. Mental health problems? Processing childhood trauma? Or sheer boredom? “If you ask a lot of people, they’ll say it’s just for the money. But I don’t believe that. If you’re going to perpetuate a hoax for money, there are much easier and less ethically dubious ones. The way it started out, I think it was a desire for sympathy and to associate with victims. But I think as things went on, money became a co-motivation.”
While Misha and the Wolves is a past-tense story, Hobkinson cites a major discovery during the filming to be his time spent with Evelyne Haendel, a real Holocaust survivor who was also a hidden child in Belgium. “Evelyne had a past very much like the one that Misha was claiming to have,” Hobkinson explains. “Evelyne was wary of being involved in the film to begin with. But once we persuaded her, she became the third main character, after Misha and Jane. She became what I call the centre of good of the story.”
Haendel, a genealogist, was crucial in debunking Defonseca’s story in the build-up to the 2008 exposé – as a Holocaust survivor, Haendel also offers a nuanced take on Defonseca that differs from the other talking heads. Defonseca, Haendel suggests, is both a victim and a villain. “I think what Evelyne says is poignant, but it’s the fact that she’s struggling with it, as a humanist, but also as somebody who was, herself, a survivor of the Holocaust, and someone who has every right to be incensed with what Misha has done and hate her forever.”
Next up for Hobkinson is a documentary series for Sky. “It’s about a man who created a fantasy world for himself in which to live,” he says. “It’s less heavy in tone. It’s a bit of a cat-and-a-mouse game. It’s about this man, this fraudster, and the fraud squad detective who made it his life’s work to bring him down. It’s a real Catch Me If You Can.” In the meantime, Hobkinson has been following the conversations sparked by Misha and the Wolves – thankfully, it hasn’t been picked up by Holocaust deniers to support their cause.
“A lot of people were queasy about telling a story about a false narrative of the Holocaust – will it fan the flames of Holocaust deniers? That’s something we were sensitive to” – Sam Hobkinson
“From the outset, we slightly struggled to fund the film in certain areas of the world, mainly the States,” Hobkinson says. “A lot of people were queasy about telling a story about a false narrative of the Holocaust – will it fan the flames of Holocaust deniers? That’s something we were sensitive to. I felt it’s something that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. If the film does it in a responsible way, then it will wrestle the narrative back from the Holocaust deniers. It will make people think in much more of a broader sense about how and why we believe things to be true.”
He adds, “The story Misha told was unbelievable. If you told it straight without the backdrop of the Holocaust, would anyone have believed her from the outset? But what I find fascinating about this – and I think it’s the same with other Holocaust hoaxes – is that because she was saying she was a survivor of the Holocaust, it was difficult to question her. It wasn’t so much the story that people believed, as the person who was telling it, and the context she was coming from.
Why we believe things is not necessarily to do with what we’re told, it’s to do with where they’re coming from. If you create a fake news outlet that feels bona fide, and frame something as if it’s within the frame of truth, then it’s believed.”
Misha and the Wolves opens in cinemas on September 3