A Belgian woman who authored a best-selling autobiography about a young Jewish girl who survives the Nazi regime as a fugitive whose only help comes from a pack of wolves, now admits that part of the story came from her own “interior universe.”

Monique De Wael, who published “Survivre avec les Loups” (“Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years”) under the pen name of Misha Defonseca, has come under criticism for her tale about a 4-year-old girl who travels through Europe to find her parents and is helped by a pack of wolves.

Defonseca writes in her memoir of a little Jewish girl whose parents were arrested and deported by the Nazis in 1941, with her left to be raised by relatives. She endeavors to find them, bravely traveling across Belgium, Germany and Poland, accompanied only by a friendly pack of wolves.

The author is now being criticized though that she is not in fact Jewish and that her parents were arrested as members of the resistance.

Defonseca told the French daily Le Figaro, in an interview published on Friday, that she “always felt Jewish,” Reuters reports, and that she has “always recounted to myself a life, another life, a life that cut me off from my family, a life far from the men I hated.”

“I mixed everything up,” she said of her difficulties to face the harsh reality of her existence. “There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what my interior universe was. I ask pardon of all those who feel betrayed,” she said, explaining that the friendship with the wolves was her fantasy escape.

A movie has been made based on her book, BBC reports, titled “Surviving with Wolves.” BBC quotes Belgian daily Le Soir, whom Defonseca told: “It's not actual reality, but it was my reality.

“It was my way of surviving. I seek forgiveness from those who feel betrayed, but I implore them to put themselves in the position of a little four-year-old girl who has lost everything, who has to survive.”

Defonseca may not be faced only with problems of being forgiven. Relations between her U.S. publisher, Jane Daniel, and herself, have been strained. Daniel was ordered by a court in 2005 to pay her $22 million, Reuters reports, while Defonseca claims the publisher pressured her into writing the book.