Interview with Gerard Mordillat

In his best-seller worldwide, Misha Defonseca said how Jewish girl, she had escaped from the Gestapo in living with wolves. The autobiography was a hoax, it has just acknowledged. While Survive with the Wolves ", recently adapted to the cinema by Vera Belmont, triumph on the screens, the writer Gerard Mordillat, co-scriptwriter of the film, has agreed to answer our questions .
Gerard Mordillat. -- My position is simple: I never thought that this book tells a true story, while also confident that its author had lived something extremely traumatic, and had reinvested its own history.

What is extraordinary is that this book had a lot of readers around the world, for years. But anyone who reads realized immediately that this is an impossible story. Leaving aside some inconsistencies in the timeline, it is sufficient to mention regarding the life of this little girl with the wolves. It enters into contradiction with what we are learning all the wild stories of childhood: children do not find neither the standing nor clean, nor use of language ... I had been very surprised to read that the narrator talking like you and me upon his return camps.

BiBliObs. -- That does it not enough to put in doubt the authenticity of the story?

G. Mordillat. -- There is always a rewrite. Even among Aharon Appelfeld, it is truly a survivor of Extermination: his work was sold for fifteen years as authentic, but it's a true story romanticized. Conversely, I remember the case of Jordi Kosinski: there had been a controversy around the "colourful" bird, which had attracted the wrath of the critics, when he was presented as a novel. Here, the error was to read this book as a witness and not as a narrative.

BibliObs. -- And how do you explain that nobody was reported earlier?

G. Mordillat. -- Ah! While critics questioned what they read, the world of literature would be changed. The weight of perverse television is also something: once she submitted the story as authentic, everybody admits it is genuine. Without even reading the book. Finally, the misunderstanding was undoubtedly compounded by the fact that the text clearly rewritten by its publisher, offered an indirect access to the author.

BibliObs. -- How, then, with such doubts, have you worked on the adaptation of this book for the film Vera Belmont?
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G. Mordillat. -- Vera Belmont and I have talked a lot about all these issues arising from reading. We are particularly concerned about the timing: when Jews historically began to disappear in Belgium did not correspond with the dates given in the book. On the other hand, the episode in the Warsaw Ghetto seemed highly unlikely - we have not kept in the film. And finally, I will return, relations with the wolves, which are wild beasts, did not stand: Jean-Jacques Annaud told us how the filming of "Bear" was difficult, especially with women. The animals became furious mad when they had their rules.

Because of all these issues, we decided that the film would play on two records in the staging: the History with a big H; that of history dreamed of inner emotions. That's what makes my eyes to the success of the film: it tells the story of this little girl, but still balanced on the line between reality and the historical memory, that of someone who remembers fifty years after. Everything that is shown in the film is in this direction likely. It happened so things most incredible and most terrible during the war ...

However, Vera was obviously in good faith. She believed in it, and has loved. His film expresses the devastation of war and the wandering of a little girl. To that extent, is the story of Vera Belmont itself tells it.