A
man whose memoir about his experience during the
Holocaust was to have been published in February has
admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday
evening his publisher canceled the release of the
book.
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Making a Mockery
of the Holocaust and its Tragic
Legacy:
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All
Smiles: Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Roma
Radzicki Rosenblat, at home in Florida.
The story of their meeting while he was in a
concentration camp during World War II has been
shown to be false.
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And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey
were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true
story.
This
time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he
first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a
Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian
farm girl, tossed apples over the camp's fence to him. He
said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the
end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple
celebrated their 50th anniversary this
year.
Ms.
Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma
Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their
romance "the single greatest love story" she had
encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday
night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat's agent that the
author had confessed that the story was fabricated,
Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning
to publish "Angel at the Fence," Mr. Rosenblat's memoir
of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of
his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr.
Rosenblat return his advance.
Harris
Salomon, who is producing a movie based on the story,
said he would go ahead with the film, but as a work of
fiction, adding that Mr. Rosenblat had agreed to donate
all earnings from the film to Holocaust survivor
charities.
Berkley's
decision came in the same year that another unit of
Penguin, Riverhead Books, was duped by Margaret Seltzer,
the author of "Love and Consequences," her fabricated
gang memoir about her life as a white girl taken into an
African-American foster home in South Central Los
Angeles. She had in fact been raised by her biological
family in a well-to-do section of the San Fernando
Valley. It also followed the revelations, nearly three
years ago, that James Frey, the Oprah Winfrey-annointed
author "A Million Little Pieces," had exaggerated details
of his memoir of drug addiction.
This
latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more
questions as to why the publishing industry has such a
poor track record of fact-checking.
In
the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the
central truth of Mr. Rosenblat's story until last week,
said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman,
president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee
Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat's editor at Berkley, returned
calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke,
director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate
beyond the company's brief statement announcing the
cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a
spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to
comment.
After
several scholars and family members attacked
Mr. Rosenblat's story in articles last week in The
New Republic, Mr. Rosenblat confessed on Saturday to Ms.
Hurst and Mr. Salomon that he had concocted the core of
his tale. Ms. Hurst said that in an emotional
telephone call with herself and Mr. Salomon, Mr.
Rosenblat said his wife had never tossed him apples over
the fence.
In a
statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote
that he had once been shot during a robbery and that
while he was recovering in the hospital, "my mother came
to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so
that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the
Holocaust."
He
said that after the incident he began to write. "I wanted
to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate,
but to love and tolerate all people," he wrote in the
statement. "I brought good feelings to a lot of people
and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make
good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw
me an apple, but I now know it is only a
dream."
According
to Ms. Hurst, who represents other inspirational writers
including Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine &
Miracles," Mr. Rosenblat first concocted his story in the
mid 1990s as an entry to a newspaper contest soliciting
the "best love stories." In 1996, he appeared on Ms.
Winfrey's show with his wife and repeated the fabricated
story. From there, it snowballed, with versions appearing
in magazines, a volume of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul"
series, and a children's book, "Angel Girl," by Laurie
Friedman, released in September by an imprint of Lerner
Publishing. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat, who now live in North
Miami Beach, appeared on CBS's "Early Show" in
October.
As
media coverage of Mr. Rosenblat's story spread, scholars
and others began to question the veracity of the romance
throughout the blogosphere, pointing out that, among
other things, the layout of the camp would have prevented
the pair from meeting at a fence.
In a
telephone interview in November, Mr. Rosenblat defended
his story against such doubts. He said that his section
of Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was not well
guarded and that he could stand between a barracks and
the six-to-eight-foot fence out of sight of guards. Roma
was able to approach him because there were woods that
would have concealed her.
In
recounting the stunning "reunion" with Ms. Radzicki 12
years later as survivors living in New York, Mr.
Rosenblat said Ms. Radzicki told him she had saved a boy
by hurling apples over a fence to him.
"Did
he have rags on his feet instead of shoes?" Mr. Rosenblat
said he asked her.
She
said yes and he told her, "That boy was
me."
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A
bound proof of "Angel at the Fence" circulated
in advance of the publication
date.
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In a telephone interview Sunday, Ms. Hurst, who sold the
book to Berkley for less than $50,000, said she always
believed the essential truth of Mr. Rosenblat's tale
until last week. "I believed the teller,"
Ms. Hurst said. "He was in so many magazines and
books and on 'Oprah.' It did not seem like it would not
be true." On Sunday, Ms. Hurst said that she was
reviewing her legal options because "I've yet to see what
kind of repercussions could come from this, and I was
lied to."
Ms.
Hurst said that Mr. Rosenblat did provide some
documentation, including a 1946 letter from a warden with
the Jewish Children's Community Committee for the Care of
Children From the Camps that said Mr. Rosenblat had
attended a technical school in London. Evidence of an
organization with that name did not appear in Internet
searches on Sunday.
Susanna
Margolis, a New York-based ghost writer who polished
Mr. Rosenblat's manuscript, said she was surprised
by his description of his first blind date with Ms.
Radzicki. "I thought that was far-fetched." she said.
"But if somebody comes to you, as an agent and a
publisher, and says, 'This is my story,' how do you check
it other than to say, 'Did this happen?'"
That
so many would get taken in by Mr. Rosenblat's inauthentic
love story seems incredible given the number of fake
memoirs that have come to light in the last few years.
The Holocaust in particular has been fertile territory
for fabricated personal histories: earlier this year,
Misha Defonseca confessed that her memoir, "Misha: A
Mémoire of the Holocaust Years," about her
childhood spent running from the Nazis and living with
wolves, was not true.
A
decade ago, a Swiss historian debunked Binjamin
Wilkomirski's 1996 memoir, "Fragments," which described
how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi
concentration camp. It turns out the book was written by
Bruno Doessekker, a Swiss man who spent the war in
relative comfort in Switzerland. Mr. Rosenblat, at least,
appears to have told the truth about being a prisoner in
the Nazi concentration camps.
The
primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple
story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at
Michigan State University. He has been working on a book
on how 904 boys --including the Nobel Peace Prize winner
Elie Wiesel-- were saved from death by an underground
rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed
hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at
Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman
Rosenblat to the camp.
When
Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr.
Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the
story couldn't possibly be true.
In
his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer
learned that the section of Schlieben where Mr. Rosenblat
was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp
and only one fence --on the south-- facing the outside
world. That fence was adjacent to the camp's SS barracks
and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy
regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the
fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was
electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden
to walk along the road that bordered the
fence.
Dr.
Waltzer also learned from online documentation that Ms.
Radzicki, her parents and two sisters were hidden as
Christians at a farm not outside Schlieben but 210 miles
away near Breslau.
Holocaust
survivors and scholars are fiercely on guard against any
fabrication of memories because they taint the truth of
the Holocaust and raise doubts about the millions who
were killed or brutalized.
"There's
no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize," said
Deborah E. Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish
and Holocaust studies at Emory University. "The facts are
horrible, and when you're teaching about horrible stuff
you just have to lay out the facts."
