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Berkley Books, Publishers of “Angel at the Fence” written by Herman Rosenblat have withdrawn the book after scholars, historians and even relatives have given proof that parts of the memoir are false.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?