A Love Affair Like in theMovies? Hardly.

Truth is stranger than fiction…especially when it is a complete lie. Everyone who for years believed in the “greatest love story ever” through the efforts of the television and publishing superstar Oprah Winfrey is now in shock. Oprah was one of those who catapulted Herman and Roma Rosenblat to fame.

Their story was similar to that of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” but with a happy ending. As a boy, Herman was imprisoned in the Schlieben Nazi concentration camp, a subsection of Buchenwald. There he had it really bad until something happened to return hope to him: a country girl threw apples to him over the fence.

Years later, with the war over, that boy (Herman) and that girl (Roma) met during a blind date at Coney Island in the New York City. Roma commented that during her childhood she spent time passing apples over the fence of a Nazi concentration camp to a little boy (just the kind of thing that people usually talk about on a first date). When Roma said this, Herman saw the heavens open. “Did that little boy have rags on his feet instead of shoes?” he asked her, full of emotion.

That’s how they met, and then they got married.

They’ve been together fifty years and their sensational story and their sensational story was published in several books and magazines. This coming February Penguin was to have published The Angel at the Fence; the True Story of a Love That Survived, by Herman Rosenblat, with the unforgettable cover image of an ethereal white dove flying above a barbed wire fence. And Harris Solomon had bought the rights to bring the story to the big screen.

Then, suddenly, the bomb: the story was a complete fabrication. There were neither apples nor angels over the fence. It’s true that Herman was a boy in a Nazi concentration camp, and it’s true that, as an adult, he met Roma at Coney Island and married her. All the rest is literature; and not even very good literature at that.

So said Susana Margolis, the ghost writer (that’s what they call those that help to write or directly write something under another’s name in the United States), who Herman Rosenblat had contracted to write his memoirs.

“To me some of the things he told me seemed very strange,” she reflects, “above all the part about the blind date, but what was I going to say? That he was lying?”

A Blow to the Victims

The blow has been hard for other victims and for specialists in the Holocaust who watch like lions to make sure that anything written or spoken about the Holocaust is as factual as possible. They are so vigilant because even one solitary inaccuracy gives ammunition to those who deny that the extermination of the Jews existed. “There is no need to embellish or exaggerate anything,” declared Deborah E. Lipstadt, professor at Emory University, to The New York Times yesterday. Lipstadt spoke with a certain bitterness, and it’s no wonder: with stories like this, and that of the swindler Bernard Madoff coming out, the Jewish community in North America is having a hard time cleaning out the rotten apples.

For his part, Rosenblat has defended the lie about his “apple” with this explanation: once he was shot during an attempted mugging, and while he recuperated in the hospital, his mother came to him in dreams and told him to keep the memory of his survival during the Holocaust alive. From that moment on, Herman was fascinated as much by a passion for literature as by a need to give reason for hope and good feelings. “In my dreams, I always saw Roma giving me apples over the fence, even though in reality, that never happened,” he now admits.