‘If you read a lot of Holocaust literature, all survivor stories are miraculous,” says Jane Daniel, publisher of yet another Holocaust memoir that turns out to be phony, Misha Defonseca’sMisha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. As of the “e” at the end of “mémoire” wasn’t tip-off enough, Defonseca claimed that a pack of Ukrainian wolves sheltered and protected her from Nazis. That’s absurd; everybody knows Ukrainian wolves are anti-Semitic. Then again, Defonseca, née — maybe — Monique De Wael, turns out to be a Belgian Catholic, so maybe it is true. Her claims of “Jewishness” and wolfiness are, she now says, “not actual reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”

Good enough for Europe, where the book was a bestseller, Disney, and Oprah! The story first came out last spring, but it’s in the news again today because Defonseca’s publisher, Daniel, is appealing a verdict ordering her to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer $32 million for failing to properly publicize the wolf-girl’s tale. Wow! My publisher refuses to take out an ad for my book in the New York Times, too — can I sue for millions? Did I mention I’m Melungeon, raised by possums? That’s my reality, and I’m sticking to it.

My actual reality is that I’m Jewish, and I used to work at an outfit called the Yiddish Book Center, where about once a week I received an unpublished Holocaust memoir in the mail. One old man who drove from Baltimore to the Massachusetts headquarters of the Yiddish Book Center to hand-deliver a memoir he’d written called I Remember Woodstock. Actually, he didn’t — the title was a ploy, he explained, to get the kids to read the real story. Which was a blunt, awful, unsensational account of his experience of the concentration camps. Nothing miraculous, no close encounters with Mengele, no redemptive moral, no triumph of the human spirit — just a slow, grinding story of brutishness and hunger. The kids would never go for it. Neither would Oprah.

Defonseca’s a faker and her publisher really does sound like a snake, but they’re not the only guilty parties. The public’s desire for melodrama rather than history, for redemption rather than reality, is what drew forth Defonseca’s Mémoire, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s phonyFragments, and even Elie Wiesel’s Night, a rewrite of his much longer, more complicated, and more painful first draft, af yidish, Un di velt hot geshvign (“And the world remained silent”). Such sentimental sugar-coating inevitably provides ammunition for far nastier deceivers, such as David Duke, who writes of the wolf-girl affair:

The reluctance of 99 percent of the fifth estate to ask legitimate questions about this ridiculous story is one more indication that the Holocaust has transcended history and become a type of religious belief, complete with saints, devils and miracles.If such a widespread story could go unchallenged by the media, how can we expect the media to challenge inconsistencies of more well written propanganda [sic] in academic garb?

In fact, the media rarely gives serious academic scholarship on the Holocaust — subject to real peer review and the highest standards of evidence — a second glance. That’s too bad, because in most of that scholarship, the Holocaust doesn’t transcend history, it is history. Duke’s just as wrong about media and religion. The Holocaust hasn’t become “a type of religious belief”; the relentless pursuit of redemption narratives has, from the wolf-girl to Jessica Lynch to Ashley Smith, who survived being taken hostage by a bank robber by reading him Rick Warren’sPurpose Driven Life — and, it was later revealed, sharing her meth with him. That’s not miraculous, it’s just survival, but it’s a better story than Defonseca’s — or Oprah’s, or Warren’s, or Disney’s — too-tidy fictions.

–Jeff Sharlet