Publication of Disputed Holocaust Memoir Canceled

The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir has canceled the book,adding the name Herman Rosenblat to an increasingly long line ofliterary fakers…

Rosenblat, 79, a resident of the Miami area, was virtually unknownto the general public until the 1990s when he began speaking of how hecame to know his wife, Roma Radzicky. According to Rosenblat and hiswife, he was a prisoner at a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Nazi Germany andshe a young Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian andlived nearby.

For months, they would meet on opposite sides of abarbed-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 their50th wedding anniversary.

The Rosenblats were interviewed twiceover the years by Winfrey, who has called their romance “the singlegreatest love story … we’ve ever told on the air.” They have inspireda children’s book and a feature film adaptation is scheduled to beginnext year.

Unlike such fake Holocaust memoirists as Misha Defonseca (“Misha: AMemoire of the Holocaust Years”) and Benjamin Wilkomirski(“Fragments”), Rosenblat is indeed a survivor and records prove that hewas at the Buchenwald camp.

But scholars doubted his story,noting that the layout of the sub-camp made such an encounter at thefence virtually unthinkable (They would have met right by an SSbarracks). A recent article in The New Republic quoted friends andfamily members who were outraged by Rosenblat, so much so that one ofhis brothers stopped speaking to him.

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2008-12-27