I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.
Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.
His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.
His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.
I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.
I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.
People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.
Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.
Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.
‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’
Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.
‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’
Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.
I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.
Writers are told, never start with the weather. Paul Lynch starts with the weather in his debut novel, Red Sky in the Morning. Prophet Song, Lynch’s latest award-winning novel, starts with the night weather and a knocking on the door.
‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window, looking out at the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whispers.’
Long convoluted sentences that don’t make sense yet they do. A writer’s job is make things worse for his or her characters.
Mother Courage, Ellish Stack has a Phd and a good job. Her dad, Simon, was a scientist too, but her mother is dead, and he’s paranoid, and in the early stages of dementia. Larry, her husband works for the teacher’s union. They’re respectfully upper-middle class and their eldest son is in line to become that icon of respectability—he has a university place to study medicine. His future is set. She has three other children, including baby, Ben.
The knocking on the window is their Kristallnacht. They are not Jews. But Larry Stack as a trade-unionist is an enemy of the people. Two officers from the Irish Government’s newly formed GNSB have come to question him. Have come to warn his family. This will be your fate if you oppose us. In the name of freedom, they’re asking them to give up their freedom of thought and assembly, freedom of the press and mass media. It’s a Trumpian scenario we’re all familiar with.
‘The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another, and the end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country, visits your town, knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.’
Prophecy comes from the prayer-book of it couldn’t happen to us. Inevitably it does. Germany, Chile, Spain and Ireland itself had their ‘Disappeared’. Ellish refuses to believe that Larry is gone. Disappeared.
The Irish Government dictatorship will somehow see sense. Suspend the Emergency Powers and the curfews and the rounding up of enemies of the people. Her son, Mark, the doctor-to-be will not be drafted into the militia and fascist army of the governing forces. The logic of inevitably and disbelief creates a toxic fatalism.
‘We were offered visas to Australia, but we turned them down. How could we have known what was going to happen? Leaving everything behind was impossible.’
The impossible is always impossible until it becomes possible. Prophet Song seems prescient. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ An epigram attributed to the philosopher and essayist George Santayana. It is often paraphrased as ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’
Santayana first used this expression in his work ‘The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress,’ which was published in 1905. Mother Courage, the heroine in the novel 2023 by Ellish Stack, illustrates that not much progress has been made. We wait to bear witness to see if the moron’s moron Trump will be re-elected President. Prophet Song may well follow this playbook in American society. Hyperbole? I hope so.
Yellowface wowed me and as a reader (and sometimes writer) I’m not easily wowed. It offers both an insider and outsider account of the publishing industry masquerading as satire. Everyone that had hoped to have something published by the big four publishing companies, get an agent, or somehow get something published online or in print, should read Yellowface.
The setup is simple. Imagine Jesus was hanging about Galilee. Judas comes visiting and notices a manuscript that looks very much like Aramaic notation in Jesus’s copperplate handwriting. He makes off with it, knowing they’ll crucify him for it when he brings it out as his own Biblical book and call it Apocryphal.
‘The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her deal with Netflix.’
That’s a first line to die for. But there’s still another 319 pages to fill. I was discussing book theft or plagiarism with another writing buddy on ABCtales. Mark’s latest book, I told him, sounded remarkably similar to mine. I claimed ownership on the basis I was here first. Since neither of us are likely to sell over ten books in our lifetime, there’s lots of room for saving grace. But we both agreed if the devil came up behind us and told us we’d be an international number 1, New York Times Best Seller and not need to worry about cash again—if we stole our fellow scribbler’s manuscript—we’d jump at the chance. Of course we would. The only question would be if we could use smartphones to sign our contracts with the devil or would we need to use the old-fashioned cloak and dagger and signed in blood with an agreement date of when to collect out soul?
June Hayward knows what it’s like. ‘Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.’
Narrator, June Hayward (Song) is an unknown writer. Her Yaley friend Athena Liu is on a different stratosphere when they move to New York. ‘It’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days,’
June’s worldview comes right out of the Trump’s handbook of cultural malapropisms and cultural appropriation of grievances. The Great Replacement theory, also known as the white genocide conspiracy theory, posits that there is a deliberate plot (or conspiracy) to replace white populations in predominantly white countries with non-white immigrants, leading to the extinction of white culture and identity. The theory has its roots in far-right ideologies and has been propagated by various white supremacist groups and individuals.
‘Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.’
No surprise that Trump claimed to not read books while claiming to have written one (The Art of the Deal).
This tongue-in-cheek references are more feelings than fact mapped by Rebecca F.Kuang’s narrator June and feed her belief that she—and not her literary work—is being discriminated again. She is not part of the quota system.
For this belief to be true, she has to suppress another belief, which she also knows to be true. White, middle-class writers have dominated the publishing industry. They have had and continue to have more opportunities to publish their work than writers of colour.
June Hayward changes her name to June Song (a middle name handed down by a then hippy mom). In ‘The Last Front’ she writes outside her cultural niche about an indentured Chinese Labour Battalion in the first world war she can straddle two belief systems. But the centre cannot hold being Song, but not truly Asian. Like Al Jolson blacking up and singing about ‘Alabammy’ and ‘Mammy’.
‘This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us’ she is told by her Asian nemesis, Candice.
She’s on the wrong side, because she’s no longer able to write, which, as any writer knows, is a different circle of hell. ‘Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic’ is what her life had been about.
Her persona appropriated and aligned with the perspectives of snowflakes or Asian backlash (choose your silo).
A whydunnit combined with old-fashioned morality tales which crawl up inside the publishing industry and readily show its Janus face. A satirical expose of class and racism in the publishing industry and online literary spaces. Read on.
‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided.
‘I want to work,’ Fern tells a job advisor. She lists all the things she can do and has done. The job advisor remains sceptical. Fern is old.
Cannot afford to stop working, or retire, but cannot afford to pay rent. Nomads are presented in a positive way. It’s the journey that matters and living hand-to-mouth is the price they have to pay. Fern’s sisters says much the same thing when Fern has to ask her for her a loan to get her van out of a garage after it has done too many journeys and broken down.
Who does the shitty and worst paid jobs when everyone else has gone home? People like Fern. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, makes use of transient labour. An estimate of one-in-four RV and those who live in cars help make him wealthier. They actively recruit such workers. They are the Joads of modern America, as in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, without the wrath. Used up and spat out again by middle- class Americans.
There was a real hatred for the Okies and the mobile poor in Depression-era America. States with larger urban areas and high housing costs, such as California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and New York, have been reported to have relatively higher numbers of people living not only in RVs but mostly cars. Their presence, as with the Okies, has been criminalised.
Fern goes to a show and sits in Camper Van or a house on wheels. She makes brumming noises like a kid. The average cost of a new single-wide manufactured home can range from around $50,000 to $100,000 or more, while double-wide homes or larger models can cost upwards of $100,000. The Okies had to sell their mules at a carrion price that had once helped them plough a field. Those living in cars or camper vans are as likely to buy a mule as being able to pay for those creature comforts.
The selling point here is Frances McDormand. Without her helping raise the money to make the film, there is no film. Without her as the main character, there is no film. But with or without McDormand an increasing number of Americans are being criminalised for being poor and homeless. I don’t expect the moron’s moron Trump to win the next election, but if he does, shit flows downhill. There’s an in-film joke in a scene about different-sized containers and taking care of your own shit in cars and RVs. My worry would be closer to home. But my kinship and compassion would increase for people like me. The nomads, immigrants, outcasts and Okies of our modern world, when state-sanctioned hatred grows exponentially into a black hole that swallows us all and benefits only the super wealthy. We’ve already lost the propaganda war to the super-rich like the Koch brother’s shrink-tank tactics and sponsors of Trump’s hatred and lies. We’re already on that road. Nomadland is a feel-good stopping-off point.
Amsterdam screenplay claims to be based ‘mostly on true events’. What it means by that is there was a first world war and a second world war and there is a place called Amsterdam. Hokum stretched thinly over two-and-a-quarter hours.
Anyone that watched Scooby Doo knows how this film will end with those industrialists plotting against American democracy unmasked. It had me thinking there may be some allegory with the moron’s moron, Trump. Maybe that’s why it’s based ‘mostly on true events’. Discuss.
This is Erin Brokovitch in the undertaking industry. Black and white. Good versus bad. A story of triumph we expect when the little guy fights corporate corruption that so rarely happens in real life (as this is purported to be) it becomes memorable.
The Set up.
Calvary of Love Baptist Church, Indiantown, Florida 1995. Will Gary (Jammie Lee Foxx) is bringing the Lord down. At first we think he’s a preacher. And he is in a way. A lawyer, some would call an ambulance chaser. He sticks it to the big man, the white man and makes him pay for the grief of the poor black man.
Kissimee, Florida (court). Clovis Tubbs v Finch & Co. Food Services. $75 million damages. No good Clovis might have been drunk, might have been depressed. He might have been all of these things. But he had himself a green light against Corporate America. Without Will Gary there would be no justice for the poor oppressed blacks of this world. Will Gary takes a cut of the damages. And he never loses. He makes enough to fly his own plane and give himself the kind of life he thinks he and his family deserve. He’s living proof of the American Dream.
Kurt Vonnegut of Slaughterhouse-Five reminds us:
‘Every other nations has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.’
Jeremiah O’Keefe, aged 75, is rich in years and wisdom (he is Tommy Lee Jones after all) and his wife Annete O’Keefe (Pamela Reed) are having a little party at their grand home in Biloxi, Mississippi. He’s a funeral director, but has hit a bit of financial difficulties and has to sell off three of his funeral homes.
It’s worth quoting Jessica Mitford’s (1963) essay here on The American Way of Death.
Jessica Mitford was, of course, one of the Mitford girls. Privileged daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale. Unity joined Hitler’s inner circle in Germany. Diana Mitford married British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Jessica couldn’t therefore be taken as a Red. She’d know more about price and other kinds of gouching better than most.
She quotes from the a handbook used by funeral directors and successful businessmen such as Jeremiah O’Keefe.
[my italics]
A funeral is not an occasion for a display of cheapness. It is, in fact, an opportunity for a display of status symbols, which by bolstering family pride does much to assuage grief. A funeral is also an occasion when feelings of guilt and remorse are satisfied to a large extent by a fine funeral.
In other words a funeral is not a once in a lifetime opportunity. As the bad guy, Raymond Lowen, (of the Lowen Group) explains to Jeremiah O’Keefe and to the viewer, this was the Golden Era of death. When Baby Boomers meet their demise. 51 million Americans over the age of 65 were on their way out. Boom time for funeral directors.
Joseph O’Keefe is forced to sell parts of his business to meet financial demands by the Mississippi State Insurance Commission. He makes a contract with Raymond Loewen of The Loewen Group. But they do not follows through on their oral agreement to buy three funeral homes at the 1995 market rate. In other words, they behave like a big company with leverage. Like Trump that doesn’t pay for his lawyers until they sue his corporation.
The bridge between black and white is a young black lawyer, Hal Dockins (Mamoudou Athie). He suggests to O’Keefe, Loewen is intentionally trying to run O‘Keefe into bankruptcy. A common tactic used by Agrifeed industries to snatch farms from farmers. To snatch up bankrupt businesses at rock-bottom prices. A tactic used by estate agents globally. Capitalism in its usual form.
Hal Dockin represents the better self. American morality that rights all wrongs while whistling The Star Spangled Banner. Selling bullshit that doesn’t stink. But like all stories of injustice. All morality plays. We want the good guys to win. For once the black guy does, even though he’s white.
I’ve read bits of Joan Didion’s writing and decided to read more. South And West translates into two sections on ‘Notes on the South’ and ‘California Notes’.
She explains: ‘John and I were living in Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. I had wanted to revisit the South, so we flew there for a month in 1970. The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan…I seem to remember John drove.’
Her autobiographical impressions resurfaced in Where I Was From. What she already knew. White child, like her, were the most privileged children in America, better still if you were a boy, but everything was melting away. Holding the line was based on lies about their collective past, good old-fashioned Southern decorum and Christian values.
‘On the Road from Meridan to Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Signs: Welcome to Alabama! Take a Fun Break! 782 000 Alabama Baptists Welcome You!
Dixie Gas stations, all over, with Confederate flags and grillwork.
In Dempolis around lunchtime the temperature was around 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid. An Alabama state trooper drove slowly around town. I put a penny in the weighing machine on the main street. My weight was ninety-six and my fortune was “You are inclined to let your heart rule your head.”
In the drugstore a young girl was talking to a woman at the counter. “I’m gonna run off and get married,” the girl said. “Who to?” the woman asked. “The girl crumpled her straw paper. “I’m gonna get married,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t care who.”
Didion was an anomaly because she kept her hair straight. Only girls under twelve kept their hair straight like that in the South. She asked the girl doing her hair if she was still at school. She snorted, she was almost twenty. She’d been married for three years and lived in a trailed with her husband and three kids. It was too hot at night and too hot during the day. They hoped for better.
‘Downriver and Home
The names of plantations going south on 61: Baconia, Lydia and Evanna. On the billboards: PESTICIDE DYANAP. A plantation sound of Onward: Reality Plantation.’
Agent Orange is alive and well and has come home. ‘Silent Spring’ did not reach the South.
‘We stopped at Walker Percy’s in Covington, Louisiana. We sat out the back by the bayou and drink gin and tonics…Walker never paid us any mind: “The South,” he said, “owes a debt to the North…tore the Union apart once…and now only the South can save the North.”
Didion’s road trip offers a snapshot of where America was more than fifty years’ ago. Good-old-boys hanging onto power and keeping their boot firmly down on ‘Riggers’ (source of content, the moron’s moron, and former President Trump). A system of privilege based on large chunks of government cash and subsidies keeping the system afloat. But a flaunting of the myth of frontier autonomy and going it alone mixed in with a hatred of government rules and taxation of any kind.
Didion called these places the ‘psychic centre’. A kind of American Stonehenge. The future… a ‘secret source’ of either benevolent or malevolent energy.’ With the election of Trump in 2016, it turned wholly malevolent. Perhaps the great tidal wave of history is turning? I’m not so sure.
Betsy Lerner has won a stack of awards. Since the publication of her book over twenty years ago, there’s more wood, more forest, more trees. She tells us this book is not a book about how to write. Anne Lamott (1994) Bird by Bird, one of my favourites, is listed in her bibliography. Rather, Lerner’s book is about pattern recognition. How writers can’t really see what they (we or I) write, but engage in magical thinking. To ad lib William Blackstone, it is far better if ten gifted writers go unpublished that I suffer the same indignity. A loss is twice as painful as a gain, but the latter is not twice as sweet, perhaps even soured by other’s success.
Pick your pattern. What kind of writer are you? I don’t consider myself a writer. Writing being a verb rather than a noun, I’m a writer, now, when typing. In other words, I’m ‘The Ambivalent Writer’.
Here I am here.
‘When I entered the business, I believed that writers were exalted beings.’
Ambivalent writers ‘have a new idea almost every day for a writing project’.
Lerner’s advice it pretty simple here. I’d already worked that one out. Shut up and write. Don’t talk about it, blabbing on about your research and what you’ve read and what you plan to do. Do it.
‘Most writers have very little choice in what they write about.’
Find your lodestar. Start drilling down. This fits with my notion that most authors write much the same book again and again. If I got it right, I could retire happy.
But Lerner is quick to point out, writing is a calling and a profession. Publication does not make you happy. And there is no finishing line. We’re not going to write Catcher in the Rye and shut up shop. Far more likely we stop writing because we can longer stand that sense of failure and inability to get published, to be recognised, to be the kind of person we imagine ourselves to be. When a writer stops writing, the publishing world does not mourn your passing, or pause. You are forgotten before you’re remembered.
‘The Natural’ writer is the real thing. I’m not the real thing. Lerner gives the example of Robert Redford in the film, The Way We Were. I think Barbara Streisand was in the same film. She’s got a big nose. I’ve got a big nose. Maybe I’m a natural after all.
‘equal we are not.’
‘What does this really mean to the struggling writer?’
We can follow the moron’s moron, Trump rule: I know poor people exist, but I don’t know them personally. Therefore, they may exist hypothetically as potential billionaires. A correlation exists between being a multi-millionaire as a child and billionaire as an adult.
Lerner suggests there is a correlation between writing as a child and continuing to write as an adult and becoming a published (and successful) author. I sure fail that test. I’m not a natural, even though I have a big nose.
But she has a word of warning for such child prodigies. Burn bright. Burn out. The industry is insatiable. For every rising star, black holes suck up all money and rights.
Here I am here again, popping up. The late bloomer section. She gives the example of Frank McCourt.
‘Most editors will agree that the work of reviewing a manuscript feels like slow death.’
Especially, if it’s your own. Get used to ‘silence, solitude, and rejection’.
What kind of silence do you share? The Wicked Child hooks his family on the line and reels them in word for word. Philip Roth tore up his Jewish faith, his Jewish upbringing, and created character so real he seemed to blaspheme. But few could agree what they were arguing about and those that did agree argued the other side were wrong.
Gordon Lish is served up like a gorgon. As an editor he claimed credit for among others, the head of Raymond Carver. As a deal maker, he out trumped Trump in The Art of the Deal. A father figure that is not a father, but demands loyalty and subservience of the would-be-writer, like those that broke their oath to the Godfather, and ‘will swim with the fishes’.
The second part of her book gives an overview of the publishing industry. ‘Making Contact: Seeking Agents and Publication,’ and ends not with ‘The Book,’ but ‘Publishing’. Most of us know the difference between the two now. Self-Publishing is where most of the trees go now. But it’s all here if you want to have a look. Read on.
The Doomsday Clock sits 90 seconds to midnight. The closest the clock has been since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists established the clock in 1947, when two superpowers first developed the means of ending civilisation and life on this planet. The USSR and USA faced off. With around 200 000 dead in the latest war in Ukraine, Putin is in the dock.
The BBC has assembled a star-spangled cast. No Putin, but a Putin representative. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ is now acknowledged formally in Russia as a war, but because Germany are finally offering tanks, it’s rebranded by Putin as another German invasion. A re-running of the second world war in which Russia lost around 20 million combatants. Later called The Great Patriotic War. The difference here, of course, is Putin is the invader. Ukrainians the patriots. But truth tends to be complex.
Boris Johnson. ‘Putin is a very difficult and calculating man. It was very, very difficult to find leverage, and to find ways of constraining him. You know, he threatened me and at one points said, you know, “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute”’.
Boris Johnson is an equally difficult and calculating man. Let’s not forget he adopted Brexit. Three years later it has proven to be an increasingly disastrous economic and social policy based on nationalism and racism, but which got him the office he coveted as Prime Minister. The Conservative Party received donations of millions from Russian billionaires and oligarchs who had looted the former USSR and managed to escape with their wealth largely intact. Boris gave a life peerage to a former USSR spymaster and a seat in the House of Lords. Nigel Farage channelled money from the KDP, Russian security services, and into mainstream politics. Johnson was the figurehead that was going to redirect £150 million a week to the NHS. The erstwhile hero that got it done, while enriching himself and promoting brand Johnson. Here he plays Putin’s nemesis while trashing British democracy. Don’t forget, among his lesser crimes, he tried to illegally suspend British Parliament and ride roughshod over the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the EEC.
Jose Manual Barroso, President European Commission.
‘I’ve met Putin 25 times. And to me Putin is someone who knows how to manage risk. When I saw him in the days before the invasion of Ukraine, I think emotion was stronger than rational thinking. Now he’s expressing and very, very deep frustration and resentment against the West—but not only against the West, against the past, against history.’
No President Barrack Obama. His remark about Russia being ‘a regional power,’ was meant to have chaffed at Putin’s pride. Gorbachev was meant to have experienced something similar. But we don’t know because this programme is told from the side of the right and the true.
No moron’s moron and 45th American President. Trump’s election victory in 2016 was celebrated in the Russian Whitehouse. He favoured dogmatism over dialogue. In other words he lied, lied and continued lying as he faces multiple charges ranging from fraud to rape. Money was funded directly to the Trump brand via Russian players in the Great game. Facebook and Twitter aren’t Russian stooges, but Russian bot factories churning out propaganda for the Trump brand proved not too good to be true, but to be true.
Instead we have a low ranking official from Obama’s administration giving the official view, which is Putin is a dictator. We know that. Trump is a would-be-dictator.
Petro Poroshhenko, Former President of Ukraine.
‘After the election, I called the Whitehouse for congratulate Trump. And definitely, er, I tried to prepare for this, er because I doubt Ukraine was among his first priorities. My message to the Trump, was exactly this, from the very first conversation, “Don’t trust Putin”’.
Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister, Poland.
‘Eastern Partnerships were not always attended by everyone. This time everyone came, including the Prime Minister of Britain, because we knew this would be a historic moment.’
If President [of Ukraine] Viktor Yanukovych signed, it would be his country’s biggest step towards the West since his country leaving the Soviet Union in 1991.
But after a recent trip to Moscow, rumours had started that he was feeling the heat from Vladimir Putin about joining the EEC.’
Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative.
Simon Smith, UK Ambassador to Ukraine.
‘He really had the frightners put on him.’
Dalia Grybustkaite, President of Lithuania, ‘I and Merkel, we had been speaking to him eye-to-eye, And, because we spoke Russian, he was more sincere. And he gave us some kind of understanding that he was under pressure personally, under pressure.’
Christoph Heusgan, Merkel’s Diplomatic Advisor, ‘Chancellor Markell told Yanukovych very clearly, we expect you to agree to it. We believe that also, this is what your population believes. This is what we have been striving for, for the last few years, actually. And not you are backing down. This is incomprehensible to us.’
The same incomprehension could be attributed to Boris Johnson and his decision to leave the EU.
Simon Smith UK Ambassador to Ukraine.
‘There was this expression in the Ukraine about milking two cows.’ Boris milking two [or more] cows?
Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister, Poland.
Putin was offering cash, virtually the next day. The kind of opportunity Farage, Johnson and David Cameron have recently jumped at.
David Cameron.
‘I was pretty clear that everything I heard from Yanukovych that he wasn’t serious about a partnership with the EU.
I spoke with President Aliyev from Azerbaijan, who I always who I always thought was quite a good reader of the situation.’
David Cameron was clearly not a good reader of the situation in Europe, Ukraine or at home in Britain. After thirteen years of taking money from the poorest in Britain and giving it to the richest, including recent Russian billionaires buying fast-streamed citizenship and property. Cameron and Osborne, the Laurel and Hardy of British politics, without due diligence, pandered to Farage and his rich-wing, Putin-backed, gang of xenophobes. Later, the former Prime Minister of Britain was caught trying to milk his former comrades and contacts for public money to enrich himself—tens of millions—and his chums, hundreds of millions sterling in dodgy deals. Here he’s shown as a great world leader, who is worth listening to. The British version of Viktor Yanukovych.
Obama. The White House, 28th February 2014.
‘Putin has now crossed a line. And there will be costs for any military intervention in the Ukraine.’
Caroline Atkinson, Obama’s Adviser for International Economics.
‘The President was very keen for action, but not military action but economic action- which can be very powerful if the US is doing it. And the natural thing was to turn to sanctions. But we also wanted to be joined together with allies in Europe.’
Kim Darroch, Cameron’s Security Adviser.
‘One country has literally seized a chunk of territory from another.’
[When was the last time Israel has done that?]
‘Number 1, if you talked about energy, a lot of European countries, particularly central European, but also Germany had quite a heavy reliance on Russian oil and gas. Some European countries, notably Germany and Italy, sold a lot of stuff to Russia.’
Francoise Hollande, President of France. ‘in the Italian political class there was a certain indulgence towards Putin.’
‘in London, a number of Russian oligarchs had been welcomed there.’
As there was towards Le Penn. Her nationalistic party and racist agenda came close to the highest office of French political power, and it was recently funded by Putin’s KDP in terms of ‘loans’. Leaving the EU is no longer part of Le Penn’s party appeal. The UK has proven a cautionary tale.
Putin’s invasion has also proven a cautionary tale. His triumphant march towards Kyiv didn’t happen, but might still. The threat of nuclear war increases. But most of his military hardware was found to be outdated and not fit for purpose. His troops unmotivated and ill-used. For very little US investment in money or manpower, the Russian army was largely taken out. Win-win for the US. Another geopolitical win in Europe’s reliance of Russian gas was overstated. Putin’s leverage slackened. Win-win for green-energy policies that took up slack. But with energy for sale at cost price, a closer alliance between Putin and President Xi brought other threats.
But in the same way that even Le Penn would no longer countenance leaving the EU, another dictator President Xi has been shown what could happen if his plans for the reunification of Taiwan with China, despite the increasingly volatile rhetoric, might well be left to wither. Another win for the US.
Dalia Grybustkaite, President of Lithuania.
‘The reaction of Europe at the time was very upsetting. The cheap energy was so comfortable. And so addictive they were not able to overstep their pragmatic policies.’
Obama.
‘Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours…not out of strength, but out of weakness.’
Jose Manual Barroso, President European Commission.
‘He said that Russia was a regional power and this is not helpful, because it feeds on resentment. And for me, Putin is essentially a product of resentment because of the decline and also humiliation of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’
What is to be done? As Lenin asked in 1901-02.
NOTES
‘This first episode tells the story of how, when Putin first attacked Ukraine in 2014, Europe’s leaders clashed over how to stop him. Amidst massive demonstrations demanding closer ties with the EU in Kyiv, Ukraine’s president flees to Russia. Putin exploits the power vacuum to make the most audacious move of his presidency to date: sending troops into Crimea.
We go behind the scenes for the critical summits and fraught phone calls as the west tries to find a way to push back. The crisis heightens as the fighting spreads to Donbas in Eastern Ukraine and Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 is shot down. Key players including David Cameron, Francois Hollande, Jose Manuel Barroso and Ukraine’s then-president Petro Poroshenko relive the EU’s indecision and the all-night negotiations with the warring parties: a ceasefire is signed in Minsk, but Russian forces remain in Donbas.
Putin, meanwhile, appears more confident than ever. The lesson is clear, says French president Francois Hollande: ‘When we do not punish at first, we are forced to punish more severely later
Putin turns to the Middle East. After Gaddafi’s overthrow in Libya, Putin shows just how far he’s willing to go to keep his ally, President Assad of Syria, in power.
Leaders including Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and Volodymyr Zelensky discuss how they confronted Putin and manoeuvred to try and prevent his invasion of Ukraine.’
Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel takes lessons from screenwriters.. The Hero’s journey. The ‘shard of glass’. ‘A psychological wound that has been festering beneath the surface of your hero for a long time.’
The moron’s moron, for example, a narcissistic psychopath with a troubled childhood that lies, lies and lies again. He hooks up a band of far-right fundamentalist Christians and other far-right hate groups until he begins to believe everything he says must be true because they’re saying it too. Find support from the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, and Kremlin backed ability to produce propaganda and hatebomb through Facebook, predominantly. And he gets elected the 45th American President.
Misha Defonseca stood up in her local synagogue in the early 1990s and told an extraordinary story about Holocaust survival and triumph. The shard of glass was shown, and people wept. Jane Daniel owned a small publishing company in Millis. She urged Misha to write her story down. For around two years Misha refused, but then the true hero finds his/her truth, and she writes her extraordinary story.
Jane Daniel’s recognised its potential for commercial value. Because not only was it Holocaust literature, which generally sold well, but it had a Save-the- Cat-type twist. Misha, the seven-year-old heroine, trudged from her Belgian home in search of her parents. She was befriended by a she-wolf in the forest and became part of the wolf pack living off scraps of meat, and distrustful of humans.
Misha and the Wolves published April 1997, Mt. Ivy Press, Boston. It sells reasonably well internationally and at home. Oprah Winfrey comes calling. A spot on Oprah’s Book Club, Jane Daniel’s explains guarantees over a million sales. Disney talk about making a film of the book. A virtuous circle of sales and publicity. Win-win.
Lose-lose. Misha balks at going on Oprah. She sues Jane Daniels for return of her book rights.
Middlesex Superior Court, Massachusetts, August 2001. Jane Daniels is shown to have deposited money in the tax haven of Turks Cacao (beloved of crooks and internet giants) which she never paid royalties, and which she disputes. After a ten-day trial, the jury found for Misha on all counts and awarded her $22.5 million damages.
The Hero may not be as simple as you think, Save the Cat advises writers.
ACT 2. The Hero decides to accept the call to action. The Hero ‘shard of glass’ is the court judgement against her. Jane Daniel takes on the world of Misha and the Wolves. She assembles a team and cast of characters to help her.
ACT 3. Setbacks and false defeats. The HERO triumphs. But there is a sting in the tale. Trump gets elected President, fails to win re-election and commits treason. His supporters attempt to stage a right-wing coup.
Misha does not go to live with the wolves, but is fed to the wolves.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) I think we would like to believe that [the moron’s moron Donald Trump] Misha Defonseca believed. That [he]she was a survivor of the Holocaust [electoral fraud]. I think we would like to believe that we were not so naïve. That we believed it, because she believed it. And we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose. Because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose. We were so naïve. It was all a fabrication.
Evelyne Haendel: ‘It’s human to believe. Creditability is something else. It’s your need to question things or not that will help you discern what’s true and what’s not.’
NOTES:
There’s a saying in Millis, small-town big family. We became friends with Maurice and Misha. Belgian refugees. Eccentric personality. I never saw anybody that had such a relationship with animals and had so many cats. She told me about her life, during the war.
Misha was waiting for her father to pick her up from school. And he never came. A woman tapped her on the shoulder and said ‘Come with me’. She was taken into a family that she didn’t know. She was given a new name and different clothes.
When she was only seven years old she walked alone through Nazi occupied countries. Across thousands of miles in search of her deported parents.
Misha: ‘I never discovered my parents or where they went to. To this day, I do not know’
I was asked to speak about my story. Temple Beth Torah. My husband convinced me to do it. Saying it would free me. When I went up to the Beema. I realised I was going to speak for the first time. I burst into tears. And slowly, snatches. I began to tell.
The dramatic tale of a woman whose Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher – who turned detective – revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Karen Schulman (The Friend) I was mesmerised. I had tears in my eyes. She was hungry. She was thirsty. She was cold. She wanted her parents. How did this person (this little girl) survive?
‘If they think I’m alive, I can’t let them down. I have to keep going.’
You could hear a pin drop. Everyone was entranced with her story. I never expected to hear what I heard. When Misha was seven her parents were arrested by the Nazis. And she was told they’d been deported. She was place in the care of a Catholic family. Called De Wael. It was a safe place. They gave her a new identity. Monique De Wael. The deception saved her, but she felt very alienated there.
‘I ended up in a family that didn’t love me. That’s the least you could say. They hated me there. They would call me ‘worthless’ ’.
There was a grandfather in the family that was kindly. ‘He told me, my parents were in Germany.’
‘He showed me with a compass, that Germany was in the East. So Germany didn’t seem that far.’
At that point Misha made a tremendous decision. It turned her life upside down.
She decided at the age of seven to walk to Germany, to find her parents.
So she took her compass and some supplies and started walking. Heading East.
‘I know exactly what to do. I need the basic. I need food. Something to drink. To have a light for protection. ‘
‘The first night I slept under a bridge. It was not far from home.’
‘Each time I approach a village, I see the station.’
She had to hide from the Nazis. Being alone in the forest. Having to steal food. Freezing temperatures. She had been traumatised by this.
‘Killing. I saw killing. The dead people. It was really desperate. I dreamed of seeing my parents. So I stayed deep in the woods. Away from the war.’
When she was away from the woods, she was away from people being sent to concentration camps. She was away from the horror that was happening in the cities. She was with birds and flowers. She said that was what saved her.
‘I completely gave into the wild life. I saw animals living normally. Eating just what they need. Not more than they need.’
‘With animals I didn’t need any words. We were near each other, in silence. And understood, without words.’
Jane Daniel. (The publisher). I was thinking this would make a fascinating book. I had a small publishing company. And I mean tiny. And I was looking around for new project. I was the one that said, can we take this public? Take it to another level?
I could make something big out of this. There’s a market for this story. Because it had an amazing twist.
‘I remember, I’d just been called by a farmer who saw me stealing food from his farm. I run away, full of fear. When you run away, you run very hard. Suddenly, I had the impression somebody was watching me. I turn around and see this magnificent animal. To me it was like a huge dog. The wolf seemed alone. And I needed a companion. It was a beautiful grey she-wolf. I look in my bag for something to eat. And I give a piece to the wolf, which it doesn’t take.
It takes a long time. But after a while, we would walk in parallel. I was able to see its generosity. To see the strength it had. I was able to live with it. She was like a mother to me.
Much later, it was a whole pack of wolves. I don’t know how long I was with them. They accepted and protected me.’
Jonni Soffron. The Wolf Expert. Wow, this is quite a story. Misha was very different from most people I met. She should have been an animal. Or her spirit is an animal. We talked about being accepted by the pack, but treated as a low-ranking member. And she had to exhibit low-ranking behaviour, in order to be with them.
Misha said, typically, the alpha male would eat first. The others would lay around the carcase waiting for their turn. They would leave little scraps, in close proximity to where she was, when they were finished.
‘Wolves eat 10kg, in one meal. The leftovers were more than enough for me.’
We became very good friends. She visited multiple times. She would hand-feed them the pieces of meat. I think they sensed in Misha, she was a friend, as opposed to a foe. She had such a sense of being with them. It was as if she belonged in there.
‘I had no reason to stop walking. It’s what I done every day. Day after day. Month after month. I hoped to find my parents. Figuring, if I’d survived as a child. My parents must have survived. This belief helps me continue.’
Jane Daniel, Publisher. This is a moral narrative The battle between good and evil. The innocent child and the evil Nazis. And the child survived. It had mythic qualities. It could take my little publishing company to a world-wide happening. So I asked Misha if she would be interested in publishing her stories.
‘With everything I went through, I learned to mistrust people.’
I don’t think she was very impressed with me. There was no reason she should be. The only book I’d published before was a legal-financial book. Not exactly her thing.
‘For more than 2 years I refused. But my friends and community said to me “Misha, do it” for future generations.’
‘I found myself in hell, again.’
It was a painful process, but it was as if she was compelled to tell her story. As if it was some kind of catharsis. Everyone was stepping up. All over the world we were selling the translation rights. My agent came back from California and said “Disney wants this. Period”. This was the case of a hot property.
When the book was published April 1997, Mt. Ivy Press, Boston. I said, let’s see if we can get Oprah to do this. Oprah had her book club. If you were one of her books, you had a guaranteed sale of one million books. They said they were interested. So that’s a big, big deal. And we’re beginning to say, we’re heading into a monster bestseller here. (Misha, The Memoir of the Holocaust Years)
Jonni Soffron. The Wolf Expert. Jane Daniels said they (Oprah) wanted to send a crew and film Misha in the wolves. So I said , yeh. (Wolf Hollow in Ipswich). I told Misha before we went into the enclosue, “This is an adult wolf. He’s a very big boy. His name is Pedro.’
Jane Daniel, Publisher. Nobody went in but Misha. The sound man had his boom over the fence. Misha squatted down and she’s feed the wolf. Everything is going fine. The wolf is very friendly. And then the wolf decided to put its paws up on her shoulders.
Jonni Soffron. Pedro was much taller than she.
Jane Daniel. Then all of a sudden, very quickly opened his mouth and put her whole head in his mouth. Very gently. Fangs on both temples.
‘I had no fear. Nobody talk about the big bad wolf to me.’
Jane Daniel: The wolf held her head for a minute. We stopped breathing. Then just as fast as it happened, it was over. At that point, Misha appears and lets out a big howl. At this point I get goosebumps. Way back in the pen, we hear an owww coming back.
Jonni Soffron. When she howled, they immediately howled back.
Jane Daniel: There it was, you could immediately see the connection between the human and wolf. I saw it. It was amazing. A shocking moment. So they got a really lot of interesting footage. I thought this is going to make a great Oprah show. The next step was she was to go to Chicago for the studio portion.
Jonni Soffron. Things were going swimmingly well. Then I began to see some tension between Misha and Jane.
Karen Schulman (The Friend) It wasn’t very pleasant as time went on. The book wasn’t selling very well. She kept saying “I have no money. I have nothing. Jane Daniels is no good.” I felt saddened. But Misha was sitting at my table one night and said to me: “She didn’t want to go on Oprah Winfrey”. I said, gee Misha. I don’t understand that.
Pat Cunnigham. (The Neighbour). Well Misha and Maurice were having financial difficulties. Then she started selling things from her house. I felt bad, they were losing everything.
Jane Daniel: All of a sudden Misha is not co-operative. Had one objection after another. Doesn’t return phone calls. She doesn’t want to go. It’s inconvenient. She needs somebody to take care of her animals at home.
‘Jane made me so mad. So insecure. My husband said many times. “We’re a survivor. You don’t use that kind of attitude”.
Jane Daniel. Come on, it’s Oprah. You find a dog sitter or pet sitter, or whatever. You make yourself available. “No!”
‘The bad memory came back. I had a nightmare. I was very anxious.’
I tried everything. I wrote her notes: This is a million sales. “No, No, No”. I thought this is crazy. Any other author would be falling over themselves to do this. It never happened.
A year after the book came out, there’s a knock on the door. And I’m handed a big package. It’s Misha filing a lawsuit against me. Everything stopped. No other country wanted to do business with us. We had a lawsuit attached to this project.
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) The first time I met Misha, I felt very compelled by the circumstances of the case. It was clear to me that several things had been done that were improper, illegal, fraudulent.
Misha was asking for return of the copyright. And for all of the royalties which she was due for book sales.
‘Jane Daniels saw in my life a goldmine. And she took advantage of it.’
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) There was so much anger and bitterness by the time I got involved. There was not much room for negotiation.
Jane Daniels It was clear we were going to trial. It wasn’t going to settle out of court.
Middlesex Superior Court, Massachusetts, August 2001.
Jonni Soffron :The sense in the courtroom was a lot of drama. The atmosphere was pretty tense. Then, of course, the money comes up.
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) We found that Jane Daniels had set up a company in Turks Cacao so that contracts that came from overseas came directly into her account and she never paid royalties.
Jane Daniels, We had documents to show that she’d been paid. We had cancelled cheques to show that she’d been paid. So everything she was saying, we had documentation to refute.
Jonni Soffron but she could speak no falsehood. Where’s the money? Jury was very sympathetic.
Romana Hamblin, The jury was riveted. Here was a person in front of you that had survived the Holocaust. They were engaged and absolutely enthralled by this story.
Misha was a good witness.
‘Oh what I live is…because it’s my life.’
Jane Daniels: It just made me look like a monster. And I thought. This is not going well.
‘Jane was always fighting. She fought for what she wanted.’
There was a 10 day trial and it was gruelling.
JD: The Judge asks the jury, how do you find on count one?
Romana Hamblin: The jury found unanimously for Misha on all counts.
JD: I mean, ultimately they came in for a massive judgement against me.
Jonni Soffron. It was kind of mind-boggling to hear the number. I was blown away. I said, ‘are you kidding me?’
Romana Hamblin, $22.5m. It was a very large verdict.
JD: I’m an optimistic person. But that hit me like a ton of bricks.
RH: The money damages against JD was largely based on JD’s testimony. This was going to be on Oprah. There was some contract with Disney. There were thing JD testified to that really elevated the level of damages. Well beyond what would seem supportable to a book like this. So everybody paid attention. People love a big verdict.
JD. Disney had fallen through. Oprah had fallen through. There was no millions of dollars. It’s an untenable position to be in. A cruel exploited of an innocent Holocaust survivor. Your world falls apart at that point.
After the trial. This was the lowest point in my life. I ended up going into therapy and being diagnosed with PTSD. I had horrible insomnia. I was hanging on by my fingernails. My publishing company was gone. My copyright was taken away. I mean, I was destroyed at that point.
I ended up doing a post-mortem on what had happened. Looking at it piece by piece by piece. I was in my lawyer’s office going through old records and documents. I had no idea what I was going to find. I opened a bank account. And it’s in Misha’s writing. And it’s her signature card. And on there it says, date and place of birth, 5/12/37, ETERBEEK. And mother’s maiden name: DONVILLE.
All of a sudden I get a flash. She knows who she is. She knows where she was born. She knows who her mother was. This was stuff she supposedly didn’t know She lost her identity in the war. This doesn’t add up. Clearly, she know a lot more about who she was than what she had told me. What else might not be true? I had be owned by courts and lawyers. My life had been turned upside down. I wanted my life back. If I can prove she’s not who she said she is, I can overturn this judgement.
It was the dead of winter. The days were short. I was standing in my kitchen. And I thought, I have to do something.
I started recalling all the things that had happened. How I’d met her. What had happened there. What happened and how did the law suit come about? And then I thought, I’ll write a book about the case. I’ll do it as a blog. I was writing my memoir of her memoir. And maybe somebody will read it. Talk about a long shot.
The next day, I get up. I turn on my computer and there’s an email. The email says,
Sharon Sergeant. (The Genealogist)I think I may be able to help find out what’s the real story. I did a timeline of Misha from a variety of photographs. First from the book. Then from other images on the internet. So I could get a sense of her life.
JD: I wanted to know who she was. Who is this person who has just ruined my life.
Sharon Sergeant: Each photograph I tried to analyse to find out what kind of information I could squeeze out of it. The first clue was Misha claimed she was 7 years old, when she was taken in by this foster family. In the American book there was what are called polyphonic images. And the poly photos were taken at that time. And I looked at the photos and thought, No, this doesn’t look like a 7 year old. This looks like a toddler. 3-4 years old. Big bow in her hair, chubby, chubby cheeks, frilly clothes. Something’s wrong.
ERNEST and MARTHEW.
The next picture I looked at was who Misha said was her forster grandfather and grandmother. According to the narrative, he’s a rustic, farm man. I did a close-up of the hands of grandfather, which were manicured (nails). Did not look like a farm person’s hands. And he had a ring on one of his fingers. Not the kind of thing a farmer would wear.
And the little dog on grandmother’s lap, that looks like a little house dog. Not a farm dog. I thought, jeez, that’s strange.
And that’s when I started comparing the French and American books. I was looking at names and places and dates. [De Wael, grandmother and grandmother]. That was the big red flag.
JD. She called me and said, did you notice Misha’s name is different in the French from the one she used in the American book?
In the American book the name she was given by the foster parents was De Wael. The foster family gave her the name Mme Valle. Why would you have two different names?
Sharon Sergeant. There’s too many discrepancies between the name changes and the pictures and so on. Fishy, yeh. Definitely seemed fishy.
JDaniels. If her story were true and I was doubting it there was something particularly vicious about doubting somebody that is telling the truth about something that’s happened. The callousness to say I don’t believe you. And the harm you can cause. That was in my mind. On the other hand, so many discrepancies. Why would you be saying things that aren’t true? Maybe she’s so traumatised she’s just lost her grip on reality. How much did that explain, I didn’t know. I needed a lot of answers at that point.
We need boots on the ground. In Belguim. (Brussels).
Sharon had a connection with a Belgian genealogist, who was herself a Holocaust survivor? As it turned out, she grew up in the area Misha claimed to have lived in.
Evelyne Haendel (The Holocaust Survivor) During the war, I myself was a hidden child. I went to a Catholic school. And I became a very good little Catholic girl. I have no recollection of anybody telling me what happened to my parents. I have no memory at all. I was about 40 and I went through a sort of terrible breakdown, which led me to find what happened to me, in fact. And what happened to my parents. And my family. And I started to make research.
I found out my father was deported to Auschwitz in September 1942. My mother was arrested in October in Brussels. And deported to Auschwitz. I was told they didn’t come back. So, I went by car to Auschwitz. I saw the camp. Where there was not a single soul. The chambers. The gas chambers were exploded. I found some candles we call ‘yeseh?’ still burning the rubble of the gas chambers. Before evening, I had a Star of David done in dried flowers. I just didn’t know where to put it. I couldn’t put it at the monument. So, finally, I choose the little pond. It floated there. And I think that was the time that I…Sorry…put my parents to rest. My parents. My grandmother, my cousin.
JR. Evelyne is a Holocaust survivor whose story is very much like Misha’s. So she was the perfect person to find out what was going on.
Sharon Sergeant. In the French book the foster family had a surname of Valle. In the American book the surname was De Wael.
Royal Library of Belgium. To reconcile the name changes Evelyne went through the city directories for the 1930 and 1940s.
Evelyne Haendel. I came for three days, searching for the De Wael and the Valle’s. The name Valle was not in the phone books. Valle name didn’t exist. De Wael, yes. Many, many.
Jane Daniels: Now you start to think the French book was distributed in Belgium. If something about Misha’s story wasn’t true, it would be important for her not to put her real name in that book. There would be somebody over there who would say, ‘I know the De Wael family. I know whether or not she was around or disappeared during the war’.
Sharon Sergeant, The fact that she changed the name in France and Belguim from DeWael to Ville suggest to me she’s trying to hide something.
JD: Sharon and I both looked at this and said. ‘Something’s really wrong with this story’.
So at this point, the book had been taken over by a French publisher. And it was a huge hit. I was published in 20 languages. She was speaking to school children, all over the French speaking world.
Marie-Claire Mommer. (The School teacher) In 2005, I was planning on creating a professor of psychology, a project on this young child who experienced all these adventures. The project became a huge magnificent exhibition. Then we had the idea of to try and bring her to Belgium.
We watched her get out of the train. It was a fascinating sight. She was dressed in blue, like a shining canary, with all its colours. With two, no three, big suitcases.
She came towards me all radiant and beaming. Right away, she exhibits a very dynamic character. Very welcoming. And very generous.
When Misha entered the exhibition she collapsed.
‘I was not warned of this. So when I visited the exhibition, I burst into tears. Because it touched me very deeply.’
She was so delighted to be there. But on the other hand, we saw the sadness come out. And the tears, the tears, the tears. It was very emotional.
JR: in the book, Misha says her parents were arrested by the Nazis and deported. Although she didn’t know their surname. Their names were GERUSHA and REUVEN. Evelyne? Said I have access to the Nazi records of deportation. I’ll take those records and see if I can find them. If they were deported, almost simultaneously with those names.
. When we examined the deportation list, we found they were not deported as a husband and wife.
War Victims Archive, Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel, During the war, the French/Belgian committee had made a list of hidden children. With the name of their rescuer and the name of their parents. There was a real, real, risk these archives would be taken by the Nazis. Children would be found. And killed. But it was quite clever. There were four different booklets. You needed all four to find the child. But all four of them were in different places. If any Nazi found a single booklet, they would not be able to trace the child. But, at the end of the war, with the four different booklets, there would have been a way to find whose child it was. And so I searched for Misha’s parents. No names of the parents. So, I knew there was something wrong. And in the list of hidden children, they didn’t have Misha. And they didn’t have DeWael. That is for sure. She was not mentioned.
Marie-Claire Mommer. (The School teacher) Misha’s book had a snowball effect. Already millions of books had been sold. Thereafter we had to work to prepare the conferences. And get her to them. So we were always together. At that time, she would often come back to our home. She would eat with us. She was like a member of the family. We had dozens of events. Of course, we took her to them. She was always welcomed by the organisers. And always with a lot of friendliness and kindness. Everyone left the conferences dazzled by this character.
War Victims Archive, Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel. I was stuck, really. No findings. But no proof. So that was the point that I thought that she could have been undocumented. Some children were hidden. But not necessarily through organisations. As extraordinary as her story was, I had to keep in mind she might have been a Jewish, hidden child.
Jane Daniels. So now the stakes go up. I will feel a lot of guilt, if this story is true. I’m digging into her past. And what if it is true. How unfair to challenge her. And even if it’s mostly true, but not quite…How unfair to disrespect what she’s been through. I felt I’d been cast in a play, I didn’t audition for. I didn’t want the part. I didn’t want to be in the play. It was devouring me. This had taken over my own life. But I’ve had this judgement hanging over my head for quite a while, I’d lost the appeal. I was looking at the possibility of being completely wiped out. So it was starting to get pretty uncomfortable. But I needed to get to the truth. So when we had no Jewish records to support her story, the question is, maybe she’s not even Jewish?
Evelyne Haendel, If she’s not Jewish, then she’s most likely Catholic.
Jane Daniels. If she was Catholic, perhaps she was baptised.
Sharon Sergeant, Misha’s bank records from the trial, said she was born in 1937, her mother’s maiden name was Donneville. And she was born in Etterb. A suburb of Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel: So in Etterb, I searched for different churches.
JD. The first, the second, the third had burned to the ground. I thought, we’re probably sunk now. Because the records were probably destroyed in the fire.
Evelyne Haendel. But the office of the Presbytery was in an adjoining street.
JD. They were preserved. So Evelyne was looking date by date by date. All the children born in that parish.
Evelyne Haendel, I knew two things, her date of birth, 12th May 1937. And the mother’s name. And in that book, I found her. Monique Emesfina Josipshiux De Wael. Daughter of Roberti Floneca Ernesti and Josiphina Germane Barbashei Donil.
JD the revelation was that Misha’s father’s name was De Wael. So her real name was Monique De Wael. It wasn’t a name given to her by foster parents to hide her from the Nazis. It seems she was born Monique De Wael. She was a Catholic. She was baptised Catholic. Her father was De Wael. However, it wasn’t proof conclusive. Because in those days they used to take names of dead children and give them to Jewish children, by way of hiding them.
Sharon Sergeant. It was possible that the DeWaels had taken in a Jewish child and their own child had died.
Evelyne Haendel. I needed further proof.
[what did you do next?]
Off the record, this is a good question.
JR. Evelyne figured out, where can I find this proof?
Evelyne Haendel. She would have gone to school.
Sharon Sergeant: I tried to find the school, in the tram track she mentioned in her book.
Evelyne Haendel: And as I walked by, I had the school. The door was open. I walked in and asked if they had any someone with the name of Monique De Wael.
JR. So, we’re biting our fingernails to the point where they’re actually bleeding, waiting for this information. Either we’ve got the records or we don’t. (2/9/37). That was the final proof. Both the Baptismal certificate and her attendance in the school.
JR. I got to the phone and I picked up the phone and it was Sharon. And Sharon could hardly contain her excitement. Practically, screamed into the phone, we’ve got the records. We’ve got the records. That was the smoking gun. Now I’ve caught her in a lie. My life had been contaminated by a whole spiderweb of lies. And here it is. Exposed as a hoax. Now, I thought, the whole story she tells in the book, falls apart. At that point I knew she was not who she said she was. Not only was she not a Jewish child hiding in the forest from the Nazis. She was a Catholic child, safely enrolled in school. She wasn’t anywhere near wolves. She was playing to an audience. She knew exactly what she was doing. Now we can see this not just a little white fib. This is a massive conspiracy over 20 years to propagate what was a complete falsehood. This was not the real Misha.
Evelyne Haendel: I had many feelings. I felt angry. I felt disgusted. I just saw the fake history. The fake identity. A way to get money out of the Holocaust. Somebody stole a very painful part of my life. I felt it for myself. And for all the hidden children. The dead children. Through the Holocaust. For all the parents. For my parents. But, in fact, for all the Jewish community.
JR. At the point we got the records, the book was a huge bestseller, all over Europe. And the book had just came out. And the movie was called. ‘Surviving with Wolves’.
It had Premiered in Paris, ‘Based on a true story’. And here we’re holding these documents. So we said, let’s go with this. Let’s put it on my blog. And email somebody over in Belgium.
The next morning it had broken, front page of all the newspapers. We had fired a truth bomb. It had landed. The whole fake thing blew up.
Jonni Soffron, I went home. Put her name on my computer. And there it was. And it felt like my blood just drained from my body. You know, how can this possibly be? I was angry. I was sad. I was hurt. I felt betrayed. I felt used. She became that close to me that when we had a litter of pubs born, we named one, Misha. It was just heart-breaking. Absolutely heart-breaking. We were duped. Just like the rest of you.
Karen Schulman. That fact that she lied, made me cry. Misha played on sympathy. That’s how she became a wonderful storyteller. Sympathy. That’s how Misha was able to fool people. Sympathy.
Pat Cunnigham: I burst into tears. I felt so taken advantage of and lied to. The lies and bitterness came out. Some of my neighbours did give her quite large sums of money. We’re talking $25000, $30 000. To help her save the house. She’d go to the Rabbis and ask for donations from the temple. The entire community. The neighbours than knew her. Nobody talked to, that I know of. Everybody felt betrayed. Yeh…
Marie-Claire Mommer. There was a kind of anger that rose up in me, which never left me. The students that took part in the project. The day I entered the class there was a state of revolt. You have to imagine a pack in revolt. Rants. Tears. Cries. They were standing up on the benches. I was no longer in control. And I usually contained my students very well. I contacted Misha straight away. I wanted to be honest and authentic with her. But she said, ‘Don’t worry, it must be the doing of the publisher in America.’
Jane Daniels. And then came the next twist in the story. It couldn’t have got more bizarre. I said to myself I could never make up this plot, if I did, they would say, this is preposterous. This would not happen.
Marc Metdepinnigen (The Journalist) Every journalist dreams of a scoop. The question for me was if the story was false, what is the real story? What I did was simply go through the Brussel’s phone book, where there are approximately 400 De Waels. So I started going through them. One after the other. And at the forty-third or forty-forth, I stumbled across a woman Emma De Wael. My meeting with Emma, Misha’s aunt was extraordinary.
Marc Metdepinnigen :She didn’t go in search of her parents?
Emma De Wael: Good god, no. Her grandfather and grandmother
Marc Metdepinnigen. She told me her niece had always been delusional. That she would create imaginary worlds for herself.
Emma De Wael: I went and fetched her regularly with the number 56 tram to Anderlecht and brought her to Schaerbeek. In the evenings I took her back to Uncle Ernest.
Marc Metdepinnigen, Emma De Wael told the truth about what happens during war. What happened to Robert, Misha Defonseca’s father.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael worked at Schaerbeek Town Hall. He was really very patriotic. And very engaged with his role as a reserve officer.
Marc Metdepinnigen, I met Jean-Philippe Tondeur by chance. But he had a lot of documentation on Misha Defonseca’s father. So I went to consult Robert De Wael’s file.
On 10th May, 1940. Germans invade Belgium. They crush the Belgian army during an 18 day campaign. The king surrenders. And Belgium is occupied. Robert De Wael joins the Resistance. And begins to recruit resistance fighters. As a resistance fighter, Robert DeWael was involved in gathering weapons. Activating intelligence networks. And transmitting intelligence to the Belgian government which had gone to London.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael wasn’t very discrete about his activities for the resistance.
Emma De Wael, he had a loose tongue, because he was proud of what he was doing. Because I knew he had secret documents. He even showed them to us at home. My father told him to be careful. That he was becoming careless. He risked address.
Marc Metdepinnigen. He was denounced by a Nazi collaborator. And was quickly arrested. Robert DeWael, his wife and 41 resistance fighters were arrested. And are deported to Germany. And sent to Bruweiler prison in Cologne. The Cologne prison had a very harsh regime. He’s interrogated by the Gestapo.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael starts to scream. He cracks. He made a deal in the Cologne prison. This deal involved him handing over the names of his fellow resistance fighters in exchange for his wife being protected. And to once again see his daughter, Misha.
In 1942, after betraying his fellow officers, as the Germans demanded of him. Robert De Wael got one last opportunity to see his daughter. And that would be the end for Robert De Wael. He would later be deported. Robert and his wife Germaine would die in the camps.
Emma De Wael. We called her the traitor’s daughter. Because it was said that her father sided with the Germans.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) The Municipal would prescribe a plaque with the resistance fighters who died during the war. Robert De Wael, whose name was listed last, was later erased.
Marc Metdepinnigen, on 28th February 2008, when things became very clear, we published Robert De Wael’s whole story. The betrayal. The falseness of the story. Misha Defonseca’s account. And in the hours that followed a statement was issued. This was Misha Defonseca’s statement:
‘They called me the “Traitor’s daughter” because my father was suspected of having spoken under torture. This book, this story, is mine. It is not the actual reality, but it was my reality. My way of surviving. I ask forgiveness. All I ever wanted was to exorcise my suffering.’
‘I felt so rejected. But I could not explain it to myself. Neither to my grandmother of my grandfather. I am not the girl I thought, but there are times I hesitate. I say to myself, “Did I or did I not, experience it?” I have to think.’
‘Particularly, with animals, I can still see myself, rolling on the ground with wolves.’
‘Have you seen my lovely picture with wolves? They will always be my wolves. I will be at their side. Even if I know the truth now. I am at their side. I got into a bubble. A world of my own. And this world of mine was filled with animals. Animals that defended me against humans.
Candy O’Terre. The Radio Host. Listening back to this intro the first words in this were ‘sometimes a story is so astonishing, it’s unbelievable. That’s very astonishing. Those were the first words. Then it turns out, it’s not true.’
I believed her. I didn’t see anything in those eyes that made me think she wasn’t telling me the truth. All I was doing was looking for more truth to confirm what I already believed. In hindsight, it’s chilling. But for me, at that moment, I was so respectful of someone’s experience of what we think of as citizens of the world will recognise was the darkest time of the history of the world. Far be it from me to question her.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) When it comes to questioning Holocaust survivors, one brings a great deal of diffidence to those claims. But the danger of believing everything puts history and the historical reality of genuine survivors at risk.
In December 1996, I got a letter and a manuscript from Jane Daniel. That manuscript was Misha (a memoir) during the Holocaust. I called Jane Daniel to explain why this narrative just didn’t work. I said to her, I would not publish this book. I have thought over the years why Jane Daniels decided to go forward with publication. She clearly hoped that the manuscript was true. But she clearly worried, it was not. I think it was greed that powered her, this narrative. For Misha and Jane Daniels. And then, as those sales’ figures rose, more and more people accepted the memoir as real. As true.
JD: I admit it. I created this monster. I created this monster with enormous sympathy as a character. Somebody that had suffered terribly. Somebody that deserved respect. In fact. Awe. And nobody wants to admit they were tricked. And I admit it, I was tricked by her. I believed her. Everybody was seduced. The American jurisprudence system. The judges. The juries. We were all seduced by this story.
Evelyne Haendel: It’s human to believe. Creditability is something else. It’s your need to question things or not that will help you discern what’s true and what’s not.
Marie-Claire Mommer: I have enough distance to take a more analytical look at Misha’s character. Misha created a world for herself. A world of her own belief. Misha sought refuge in fantasy and with time she slowly becomes a character in her own story.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) I think we would like to believe that Misha Defonseca believed. That she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I think we would like to believe that we were not so naïve. That we believed it, because she believed it. And we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose. Because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose. We were so naïve. It was all a fabrication.
Evelyne Haendel: I feel about her today, (shrug) mixed emotions. I think she was a protagonist in the story but she was not alone. There were other people that helped to make this biography be a bestseller. Just talking about her right now, the search and the years that went by- some pity, ah, some repulsion, maybe it’s too hard a word, but I’m feeling some understanding. As a child it must have been very difficult for her after the war. The fact her father was called a traitor. A collaborator. She is both the victim and the villain. She’s both. She is both in the story.
The real Misha Defonseca still lives in Massachusetts with her husband and animals.
She chose not to be interviewed for this film.
The financial penalty against Jane Daniels was partially overturned.
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