Herman and Roma Rosenblat
Berkley Books, Publishers of “Angel at the Fence” written by Herman Rosenblat have withdrawn the book after scholars, historians and even relatives have given proof that parts of the memoir are false. Rosenblat claims to have met his future wife while imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. He made up a dazzling tale of their courtship; she was living in secret with a Christian family and for months would throw Rosenblat bread and apples over the fence at Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Their story came out in the 1990’sand the couple appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show twice where she called it the “single greatest love story… we’ve ever told on the air”.
Fraudulent memoirs have become commonplace, but ever since James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces the shock factor of a falsified memoir is gone.
However, the fact that this couple used the Holocaust as their way to touch people’s hearts is just terrible. I just can’t understand how they could go on living a lie! I find it seriously unethical and harmful to history that anyone should falsify anything about their life and print it, but to fabricate anything about the Holocaust is just wrong!
Rosenblat’s claim about his wife angered family members so much that even 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 story inspired a wealth of opportunity for the couple including a children’s book, and even a movie that is set to begin production in 2009. The movies producer, Harris Salomon says “the integrity and the beauty of the story remains as a work of fiction” and production will go on.
Berkley Books has cancelled the book and has asked that the author and his agent return all moneys given for this work of fakery.
Sounds like justice to me! Though the fictionalized story will make a decent movie what do you think about this couple using the Holocaust to make some money for themselves? It also makes you wonder how so many false “memoirs” are coming out? Are the fact-checkers doing their jobs or is it just apart of the job that false information will slip through the cracks?
December 29th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
salam
all the holocaust story is a pure lies and propaganda….the history nd the free thinkers and historian will soon correct the false history and write the real history…..it seems that the wind begin to change its directions nor the jews media machine nor the jews money can enslave the free people for ever…….
December 30th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
This hoax is a tragedy. The Rosenblats have hurt Jews all over and given support to those who deny the holocaust. I don’t understand why Atlantic Pictures is still proceeding to make a film based on a lie. I also don’t understand how Oprah could have publicized this story, especially after James Frey and given that many bloggers like Deborah Lipstadt said in 2007 that the Rosenblat’s story couldn’t be true.
There are so many other worthwhile projects based on genuine love stories from the Holocaust. My favorite is the one about Dina Gottliebova Babbitt – the beautiful young art student who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz. This painting became the reason Dina and her Mother survived Auschwitz. After the end of the war, Dina applied for an art job in Paris. Unbeknownst to Dina, her interviewer was the lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They fell in love and got married. Now that’s a romantic love story! I also admire Dina for her tremendous courage to paint the mural in the first place. Painting the mural for the children caused her to be taken to Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he made her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber.
Also, Dina’s story has been verified as true. Some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. The story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also documented.
Why wasn’t the Rosenblatt’s story checked out before it was published and picked up to have the movie made?? I would like to see true and wonderful stories like Dina’s be publicized, not these hoax tales that destroy credibility and trust.