This morning's Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper which has been following the Misha hoax story pretty carefully, carries a stunning story on this ever more sordid story.

According to the article, her father, Robert DeWael, was not in the resistance but worked with Gestapo. He was responsible for denouncing a number of his fellow townspeople to them.

As a result, he became such a reviled figure that after the war the townspeople removed his name from a memorial to the town's war dead as you can see in the picture from Le Soir.

The paper reports that when it learned that Misha's name was"De Wael" they contacted a number of the the De Waels in the region. This is how they found Misha's 88-year old cousin Emma De Wael who provided the information on the father.

In her blog, Kathleen Valentine, who has been regularly blogging about this, expresses sympathy for Misha. I have a hard time doing that knowing the damage she has caused.

But the most revolting character may well be the lawyer Frisoli who seems to be licking his chops at the thought of getting the publisher's house."

Thinking of this lawyer reminds me of the famous words of another Bostonian: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

After posting the above, I discovered that David Mehegan, the Boston Globe reporter who has been assiduously covering this, had just sent me a link to his comments on the Globe blog about this. His final paragraph is worth quoting here:

While I would not be one to excuse Defonseca's lying use of the Holocaust to make money, I do suppose that if I were Benedict Arnold's daughter, I too might go to great lengths to make myself into a new person with a happy story.

There were wolves in her childhood. But they wore uniforms