How much of this story of Shoah wolves is true?
Misha and the Wolves
★★★★✩
Sitting down to watch a documentary involving the Holocaust, you can be certain it’s going to be upsetting. You know you’ll be repeatedly asking yourself how could this possibly happen. And so it goes with Storyville: Misha and the Wolves, except not for the reasons you might expect. In 1997, a book was published, written by Misha Defonseca, telling the story of how when she was a seven-year-old in Belgium, her parents were suddenly deported for being Jewish, and she become a ‘hidden child’, taken in by a Catholic family. Treated badly by them and unhappy, one day she decided to trek alone through the forests to Germany to try and find her real parents. Along the way, she was adopted by a pack of wolves. It sounds pretty crazy, right? Fantastical even. A family ripped apart, human beings sent to their death, just because they were Jewish?
That’s the thing. It can be so difficult attempting to grapple with the mad reality of the Holocaust, for people to reconcile the then with the now, especially as it recedes out of living history, that it creates a dangerous space where fiction is capable of superseding non-fiction. It’s the same phenomenon that’s allowed the anodyne Boy in the Striped Pajamas to become a go-to educational text, whilst a few years later, school boards banned the complicated messy truths of Maus.
Messy truths also emerge from this story of Misha’s life, and then, spoiler alert, how it was exposed to not be her life at all. The problem is, even with the considerable cleverness of director Sam Hobkinson’s subversion of the documentary format, playing with what’s real or not as the many twists are revealed, there is little space left to explore these truths and get to grips with the whys.
Misha’s immorality is written off as delusion, caused by her own trauma in the aftermath of the Second World War, but why did it take the form of a Holocaust survivor? Her fake narrative was
first made public during a Day of Remembrance service at her shul in Massachusetts, but for how long and to what extent was she pretending to live her life as a Jew? And whilst it’s apparent who the real wolves are, those only too willing to believe and market her story to make money, do they also include her audience? As millions of books were sold, a movie adaption, art exhibitions and talks and TV interviews were consumed and all lapped up, how much did Misha’s smiling, blonde, blueeyed, charming visage contribute to the success of her fable?
As said by Holocaust historian Déborah Dwork, who called baloney even before the book was published; there’s no redemption here. It’s left to the only person that emerges unblemished, Evelyne Haendel, to reveal whatever truth remains after her amateur detective work has uncovered the lies, through the example of her own childhood as a hidden child.
No bucolic escape for her. Her history is laid out among an endless lists of names, her parents among them. She died shortly after filming.
How much did Misha’s smiling, blonde, blue-eyed, visage contribute to the success of her fable?