Misha Defonseca, an American writer, blasted to literary stardom 12 years ago with an unusual autobiographical book, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years.
Mathilde Goffart in Surviving with the Wolves.
The bestseller, translated into 18 languages, was about a Jewish girl from Brussels who wandered through the forests of Europe, living with wolves in summer and winter, in a desperate attempt to find her deported parents.
In 2001, a Boston newspaper raised questions about its veracity, but she stuck to her story. Last year, however, she admitted that her memoir was based on fantasy, that her real name was Monique de Waal, and that she was a Catholic whose parents had been members of the Belgian resistance movement.
Vera Belmont’s French-language movie, Surviving with the Wolves – which will be screened at the Cinéfranco film festival on Sunday, April 5, at the Royal theatre at 608 College St. – is based on the book rather than on its post-publication controversy.
In light of the furor it ignited, it’s questionable why Belmont made the film. But if you treat the book, and the film, as a fable of survival against the greatest of odds, you may understand Belmont’s motives.
Still, Misha’s epic story of endurance, as portrayed in this invariably gripping film, strains credulity.
How could an eight-year-old girl survive for so long? And more to the point, how did she manage to overcome the natural hostility of the wolves she encountered on her incredible trek from Belgium to Poland?
If you can suspend your skepticism and relate to Surviving with the Wolves as an allegory, you may even appreciate this off-the-beaten-track film.
It opens in Brussels in 1943 as a Jewish family, hidden in an attic, waits to be deported by the Nazis. Misha, a precocious girl, yearns for a normal life and a smile from her worried mother. But as Misha soon discovers, sheer survival is all she can hope for in these terrible and unpredictable times.
After she and her fellow Jewish students are temporarily hidden by a teacher at school, Misha witnesses a roundup of Jews. Shortly afterward, a member of the underground scoops her up and delivers Misha to a Christian family willing to hide and protect her.
Misha is given a new identity, but she is like a fish out of water. She misses her parents and does not feel at home in her new surroundings. She feels considerably better in a farmer’s house, but when he and his wife are arrested, Misha embarks on her trip eastward.
The core of the movie turns on Misha’s journey, and what a journey it proves to be.
She steals garments from a clothes line, encounters a German patrol, grapples with an unsympathetic farmer, rows across a river in a boat and forages for worms to fend off hunger pangs.
Amid a snow storm, she stumbles, only to be found by a wolf. Rather than attacking Misha, the wolf warms to her, finding food for her and accompanying her on an improbable odyssey.
All this seems utterly implausible, until you remember that Surviving with the Wolves is a tall tale.
Just when you’re saturated with Misha’s heroic derring-do, you’re plunged headlong into more scenes in which she proves her mettle as the ultimate survivor.
The movie is held together by Mathilde Goffart, who portrays Misha in what can only be described as a brilliant performance.
The Israeli actress, Yael Abecassis, plays Misha’s mother.
Say what you will about Defonseca’s hoax, but the film from which it is adapted is quite mesmerizing.
