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Anger, sadness over fabricated Holocaust story

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By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer Hillel Italie, Ap National Writer – Sun Dec 28,
1:09 pm ET

AP – In this Sept. 25, 2008 file
photo, Herman and Roma Rosenblat pose for a photo in their North Miami
Beach, …

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NEW YORK – It's the latest story that touched, and betrayed, the world.

"Herman Rosenblat and his wife are the most gentle, loving, beautiful
people," literary agent Andrea
Hurst said Sunday, anguishing over why she, and so many others, were taken by
Rosenblat's story of love born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a
concentration camp.

"I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible,
hope-filled story."

On Saturday, Berkley Books
canceled Rosenblat's memoir, "Angel at the Fence." Rosenblat acknowledged that
he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of
Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. The book was
supposed to come out in February.

Rosenblat, 79, has been married to the former Roma Radzicky for 50 years,
since meeting her on a blind date in New York. In a statement issued Saturday through his
agent, he described himself as an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified
his past to better spread his message.

"I wanted to bring happiness to people," said Rosenblat, who now lives in the
Miami area. "I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good
in this world."

Rosenblat's believers included not only his agent and his publisher, but
Oprah Winfrey, film producers,
journalists, family members and strangers who ignored, or didn't know about, the
warnings from scholars that his story didn't make sense.

Other Holocaust memoirists
have devised greater fantasies. Misha Defonseca, author of "Misha: A Memoire of
the Holocaust Years," pretended she was a Jewish girl who lived with wolves
during the war, when she was actually a non-Jew who lived, without wolves, in
Belgium.

Historical records prove Rosenblat was indeed at Buchenwald and other
camps.

"How sad that he felt he had to embellish a life of surviving the Holocaust and of being married for half
a century," said Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum.

The damage is broad. Publishing, the most trusting of industries, has again
been burned by a memoir that fact-checking might have prevented. Berkley is an
imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which in March pulled Margaret B. Jones' "Love
and Consequences" after the author acknowledged she had invented her story of
gang life in Los Angeles.
Winfrey fell, as she did with James
Frey, for a narrative of suffering and redemption better suited for
television than for history.

The damage is deep. Scholars and other skeptics as well as fellow survivors
fear that Rosenblat's fabrications will only encourage doubts about the
Holocaust.

"I am very worried because many of us speak to thousands of student each
year," says Sidney Finkel, a longtime friend of Rosenblat's and a fellow
survivor. "We go before audiences. We tell them a story and now some people will
question what I experienced."

"This was not Holocaust education but miseducation," Ken Waltzer, director of
Jewish Studies at Michigan State
University, said in a statement.

"Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending. All this
shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the
difficult knowledge of the Holocaust," Waltzer said. "All the more important
then to have real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps."

Among the fooled, at least the partially fooled, was Berenbaum, former
director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. Berenbaum had been asked to read the manuscript by film producer
Harris Salomon, who still
plans an adaptation of the book.

Berenbaum's tentative support — "Crazier things have happened," he told The
Associated Press last fall — was cited by the publisher as it initially defended
the book. Berenbaum now says he saw factual errors, including Rosenblat's
description of Theresienstadt, the camp from which he was eventually liberated,
but didn't think of challenging the love story.

"There's a limit to what I can verify, because I was not there," he says. "I
can verify the general historical narrative, but in my research I rely upon the
survivors to present the specifics of their existence with integrity. When they
don't, they destroy so much and they ruin so much, and that's terrible."

"I was burned," he added. "And I have to read books more skeptically because
I was burned."

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