Wolves as witnesses: animals and depictions of the Holocaust in Misha Defonseca’s Misha and Francesco Lotoro’s Misha e i lupi

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates animals and the Holocaust through a case study of wolves in Misha Defonseca's fraudulent Holocaust memoir Misha and Francesco Lotoro's opera Misha e i lupi – an adaptation of Defonseca's book. I demonstrate that their respective portrayals of wolves distinguish Defonseca's hoax from Lotoro's musical memorial but, simultaneously, that both versions use animals to illustrate the inhumanity of genocide. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I dub this phenomenon ‘animal witnessing,' and, given the divergences between Defonseca and Lotoro, I posit that animal witnessing takes animals as a vehicle to expound individualized understandings of the Holocaust.