Oprah is starting to make herself look a little gullible. In 1996, she had Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat on her show. Oprah said their romance was “the single greatest love story” she’d ever heard. And that’s saying something. What was so romantic about their tale? Herman is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He told Oprah that a young girl saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s fence. Twelve years later, he said, the pair were set up on a blind date and discovered that Roma was the little girl who tossed the apples. Pretty incredible, and definitely an amazing love story.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t true. While Herman is a survivor of Buchenwald, Roma never tossed him any apples. In fact she and her family were hidden at a farm 210 miles away from the camp. Herman has written his memoirs, Angel at the Fence, which were scheduled to be released in February by Penguin Group – the same publishers that fell for fake memoirists James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences. Now the book has been scrapped.

After several scholars and family members attacked Mr. Rosenblat’s story in articles last week in The New Republic, Mr. Rosenblat confessed on Saturday to [his agent, Andrea] Hurst … that he had concocted the core of his tale. Ms. Hurst said that in an emotional telephone call … Mr. Rosenblat said his wife had never tossed him apples over the fence.

In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

[From the New York Times]

What was Herman’s undoing? A professor at Michigan State University who has been working on a book about Jewish boys who were rescued from Buchenwald. He asked some of the men if the story could have happened, and all of them said no.

The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.

When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.

In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.

[From the New York Times]

Versions of Rosenblat’s story have been featured in magazines and one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. The couple have been on Oprah’s show twice, and were on CBS’s “Early Show” in October. Something like a little girl throwing apples over a fence doesn’t seem like the worst of lies, however the entire premise of Rosenblat’s story is based on it. I think any Holocaust survivor’s story would be intriguing, but obviously he felt the need for an additional twist.

What I don’t understand is why Rosenblat didn’t tell the story as fiction from the beginning. If I were to read the plot for his story on the back of a novel, I’d find it somewhat intriguing. Most novels mix truth and fiction, and there’s often a great amount of the author’s own experiences in there. It’s hard to do it after the fact – like the way James Frey’s Million Little Pieces is now marketed as partly fiction. But if Rosenblat had done that from the beginning, he could have been honest about being creative, and it wouldn’t have blown up in his face.