Publisher Cancels Fabricated Holocaust Love Story
Posted December 29, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s a story that first sparked hope and stirred emotions, now it’s being called out for fraud.
Publisher Berkley Books announced this past weekend that it was cancelling Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence after the writer acknowledged he’d made up significant parts of the love story.
The romance tells of Rosenblat meeting his true love at the concentration camp of Buchenwald. He suggested Roma Radzicky snuck him apples and bread through the barbed wire fence, helping to keep him alive amid horrific conditions. The book was to have come out in February and had caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, film producers, journalists and many others.
But scholars were skeptical about the validity of Rosenblat’s claims and he finally acknowledged this past weekend, via a statement from his agent, that he didn’t meet his wife Roma in Buchenwald, but in New York on a blind date. The statement went on to say that he considered himself an advocate of love and tolerance who made up his story in order to touch more people with his message.
The book was to have come out in February.
It’s not the first Holocaust memoir with fantastical elements – an even more blatant case was Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, in which author Misha Defonseca apparently pretended she was a Jewish girl living with wolves during the war. She was actually a non-Jew living without wolves in Belgium.
There’s widespread anger and disappointment over news of Rosenblat’s fabrications – as survivors and scholars fear it will only encourage doubts about the Holocaust.
