Holocaust survivor's love story exposed as a fraud

[TriWooOx]

A Holocaust survivor's acclaimed memoir about meeting his future wife across the wire fence of a concentration camp has been exposed as a fraud.

Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence has been withdrawn by its publisher, Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin, following allegations by scholars, relatives and fellow survivors about its veracity.

Those taken in by the hoax include the producers of a forthcoming feature film adaptation and the television host Oprah Winfrey, who had hailed the tale as the "single greatest love story... we've ever told on the air".

In a statement issued at the weekend through his agent, Rosenblat, 79, said: "I wanted to bring happiness to people. I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Although records confirm that Rosenblat, a retired television repairman now living in Miami, was a child prisoner in several Nazi concentration camps, critics questioned his account of how he was befriended by a Jewish girl – living in secret with a Christian family – who, for months, threw him apples and bread over the fence at a sub-camp of Buchenwald.

Years later, Rosenblat claimed he met a young Polish immigrant, Roma Radzicky, on a blind date in New York and she turned out to be the same girl. They married in 1958 and have been together ever since.

But historians pointed out that it would have been physically impossible for prisoners to make contact with outsiders at the Schlieben camp, except for a spot right beside an SS barracks.

Berkley Books said it was cancelling the book "after receiving new information" from the author's agent, adding that it "will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work".

The statement came only a few days after the publisher had tried to defend the book, arguing unconvincingly that it was a work of memory not of scholarship.

Rosenblat only started to tell his love story in the 1990s. Lying in hospital after being shot by a burglar, he was visited by his dead mother in a vision and urged to break his silence, he said.

The story earned the couple two appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show, and inspired a children's book and a feature film adaptation which is scheduled to begin production next March.

Harris Salomon, its producer, said the film – retitled The Flower of the Fence – would still go ahead, claiming that the "the integrity and the beauty of the story remains as a work of fiction".

Unlike other discredited Holocaust memoirists such as Misha Defonseca ("Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years") and Benjamin Wilkomirski ("Fragments"), Rosenblat's concentration camp credentials are not disputed.

However, his claims about the girl so angered his family that one of his brothers stopped speaking to him.

"The way he lied for years and years was utterly reprehensible," said Sidney Finkel, a friend and fellow camp inmate. "On the other hand, I feel sorry for him, because at a very early age he experienced the Holocaust and never had a chance to grow up in a normal home. Maybe this explains why he did what he did."

The controversy has renewed criticism of publishers' track record on fact-checking.

Penguin has had to break ties with two authors already this year – Margaret B Jones admitted she invented her story of befriending gang members in south central Los Angeles while Cassie Edwards was accused of lifting numerous passages from other sources.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... fraud.html