The publication of a memoir by Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat has been canceled after the author admitted to having embellished his story. Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin, announced on December 27 that it had canceled the February publication of Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived.
The memoir, an extension of an essay that won a New York Post love story contest in 1995, was brought to fruition largely as a result of the publicity Rosenblat received from Oprah Winfrey, who invited him on her show twice to tell the story of how his future wife helped him survive the Holocaust by throwing apples over the fence of the concentration camp where he was detained as a child and how, after years of separation, the two reunited on a blind date in New York City. According to the New York Times, Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst said that she trusted Rosenblat in part because of the support he had received from Winfrey, who called his tale "the single greatest love story, in twenty-two years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air."
Rosenblat's story was also recounted by several media outlets, published in the essay anthology Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul (Health Communications, 1999), and adapted by Laurie Friedman into a children's book, Angel Girl, published in September by Lerner Publishing. Lerner has halted reprints and is offering refunds for returned copies.
A fictionalized film version of Rosenblat's story is still in the works, earnings from which Rosenblat has agreed to donate to Holocaust survivor charities, the film's producer, Harris Salomon, told the New York Times. "It’s unfortunate he told a lie," Salomon told Gabriel Sherman of the New Republic. "The man is tragically flawed, but his story had value." Salomon said that Rosenblat let him down personally and professionally and that Rosenblat owes an apology to everyone touched by his story, adding, "This is the business and the society we live in today, that allows people to lie, but also feeds off people lying and asking for forgiveness."
Rosenblat's memoir follows a string of other untrue stories of Holocaust survival. Earlier last year, Misha Defonseca confessed to having fabricated her book Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, and in 1999, Binjamin Wilkomirski's 1996 memoir of survival in a Nazi concentration camp, Fragments, was found to have been false.
Rosenblat's story was called into question by Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, who has spoken to hundreds of survivors of Buchenwald, where Rosenblat appears to have indeed been held. When asked about the apple-tossing incidents that figures so prominently in Rosenblat's story, survivors interviewed by Waltzer indicated that the exchanges could not have occurred, information supported by Waltzer's further research.
