NEW YORK — The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir has canceled the book, adding the name Herman Rosen blat to an increasingly long line of literary fakers and ending with a heartbreaking crash his story — embraced by Oprah Winfrey among others — of meeting his future wife at a Nazi concentration camp.
“I wanted to bring happiness to people,” Rosenblat said in a statement issued Saturday through his agent, Andrea Hurst. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”
Rosenblat’s “Angel at the Fence” had been scheduled to come out in February, but Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), withdrew the memoir following allegations by scholars, friends and family members that his tale was untrue.
“Berkley Books is canceling publication of ‘Angel at the Fence’ after receiving new information from Herman Rosenblat’s agent, Andrea Hurst,” the publisher said in a statement. “Berkley will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work.”
A couple of days earlier, Berkley had offered a qualified defense of the book, saying it was a work of memory, a story whose truth was known only to the author.
Hurst released her own statement, saying that Rosenblat had acknowledged to her “that part of his memoir was not true. He’d invented the crux of this amazing love story — about the girl at the fence who threw him an apple.”
Rosenblat, 79, a resident of the Miami area, was virtually unknown to the general public until the 1990s when he began speaking of how he came to know his wife, Roma Radzicky. According to Rosenblat and his wife, he was a prisoner at a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Nazi Germany and she a young Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian and lived nearby.
For months, they would meet on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence, where she would sneak him apples and bread. Rosenblat was then transferred to another camp and the two lost touch, until the 1950s, when they were reunited by accident — on a blind date — in New York. They soon married and earlier this year celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
The Rosenblats were interviewed twice over the years by Winfrey, who has called their romance “the single greatest love story . . . we’ve ever told on the air.” They have inspired a children’s book, and a feature film adaptation is scheduled to begin next year.
Unlike such discredited Holocaust memoirists as Misha Defonseca (“Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years”) and Benjamin Wilkomirski (“Fragments”), Rosenblat is indeed a survivor and records prove that he was at the Buchenwald camp.
“All of the story about Herman in the concentration camps and the love and survival of him and his brothers, he states is true,” Hurst, his agent, said in a statement.
