| Notes: Director: Vera Belmont; Based on a book by Misha Defonseca, published in 1997, the French version of which was named Survivre avec les loups. Presumed to be an autobiographical story, it was adapted into a French film by the same name in 2007 and is known in the USA as Surviving with Wolves. Defonseca relates a story of herself that as a six-year-old girl, in 1942 Belgium, she is separated from her Jewish parents by the Germans who deported them to a labour camp. She herself was handed over to German foster family. She escapes from them into the woods, and determined to track down her parents who she was told, were taken east, manages to walk across Germany, Poland, and reaching Ukraine with the aid of a compass and sheltered by a pack of wolves she befriended. She did all that, and returned to Belgium in 1945, upon learning that the was over. Back home she was told by her foster father that her family died in a concentration camp. Many years later, after moving with her husband to the United States in 1988, she one day told her congregation at the synagogue in the small Massachusetts town where she lived, about her harrowing childhood saga. With their encouragement, and the prompting of a local publisher she eventually wrote and published her story. The end of this story, however, is quite unpleasant, as the whole tale proved to be one a big hoax from beginning to end. For more details see the separate entry, Misha and the Wolves. |
