As an organization dedicated to remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust, The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants is saddened and distressed by the memoir scandal involving Holocaust survivors who suffered through the horrors of the camps and in hiding. By embellishing their stories with a manufactured romance, they have demeaned and dishonored all survivors and their memories, weakened their voice of moral authority—and provided fodder for Holocaust deniers. This act breaches the trust of those they left behind.

We urge those survivors who are writing their memoirs to cleave to the truth. These stories are not adventure stories written for the benefit of publishers and movie makers. They are promises kept to those who were left behind and urged those who survived to tell the story.

Tell the story, by all means, but tell it truthfully.

Dec 30, 2008 20:49 | Updated Dec 30, 2008 21:20

By ADAM WERNER

They can be found all across Israel, in schools for handicapped children, senior citizens’ homes or shelters for abused women. Every year, 600 to 1,000 German volunteers arrive seeking ways to bridge the history of Nazi Germany with the future.

The German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung cannot be translated simply into any other language, but its essence leads many German youth to Israel. It describes a process of coming to terms with the past. This process encompasses the confrontation of the past and poses the question of how to move forward.

Some recent high school graduates arrive via the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a German organization that mobilizes volunteers in countries affected by World War II. The group was established in 1958 by the Evangelical Church in Germany, to atone for the past and to encourage younger generations to stand up to racism.

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How TNR Exposed A New Oprah-Endorsed Memoir As A Hoax

Last week, TNR published an article by Gabriel Sherman, whose original reporting revealed that a new Oprah-touted Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was a hoax. Based on interviews with top scholars, Sherman concluded that Herman Rosenblat likely fabricated his story of having been saved in a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp by a girl who threw apples to him over the fence. (According to Rosenblat’s story, he later met her in New York on a blind date and married her.) The publishing company stopped responding to Sherman when he questioned the book’s fact-checking process. Rosenblat’s agent refused to comment for the original article, but Harris Salamon, the producer of a new movie based on Rosenblat’s story, vociferously defended the story’s veracity to Sherman. (TNR’s Noam Scheiber criticized “Rosenblat’s shameless defenders” who “invoke the fabricator’s moral authority as a survivor to defend the apparent lies or embellishments.”)

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In 2006, this website posted a story submitted by a member from a publication called Guidepost. It was about a Holocaust survivor couple that proved to be “embellished.” Like many, many others, we were misled. The posts referring to this story have been removed to prevent further distortions. We regret the error.

False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled
By MOTOKO RICH and JOSEPH BERGER
Published: December 28, 2008

Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, at home in Florida. The story of their meeting while he was in a concentration camp during World War II has been shown to be false.

A bound proof of “Angel at the Fence” circulated in advance of the publication date.

And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.

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and here:
MSU prof pokes holes in love story
Holocaust tale proves to be an exaggeration

Kenneth Waltzer was swamped Monday with calls from ABC, CNN and other media outlets.
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Waltzer – director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University – was a key member of a team that disproved a romantic Holocaust memoir hyped on “Oprah” and set for publication in February.

New York-based Publisher Berkley Books, a division of Penguin Group, canceled Herman Rosenblat’s “Angel at the Fence,” on Saturday. A feature film still is planned.

Waltzer said Rosenblat ignored two compelling stories – his own tale of being in the camp with his three brothers, and his wife’s journey into hiding – to make up a saccharin love story.

“What I have a real problem with is a memoir that makes truth claims,” Waltzer said. “There’s nothing right about the story at all. It’s a fable.”

Okemos author Lev Raphael, son of Holocaust survivors, explores his parents’ experiences and his own travels in Germany in the upcoming memoir “My Germany.” He said Rosenblat’s editors and publisher were likely too quick to jump on what they saw as a heartwarming Holocaust tale.

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Books of The Times
A Wartime Tale That Had to Be Told

By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: December 25, 2008
Thomas Keneally’s novel “Schindler’s List” came into being because the author, then 46, needed a new briefcase.

First Chapter: ‘Searching for Schindler’ (November 2, 2008) It was 1981, and Mr. Keneally walked into a small luggage shop on a side street in Beverly Hills. The man who sold him a new case (black, calfskin) learned Mr. Keneally was a writer. “I know a wonderful story,” the man, a Holocaust survivor named Leopold Page (né Pfefferberg), told him, “a story of humanity man to man.” Would Mr. Keneally want to write it?

That kind of line — “I know a great story” — is one writers hear daily. “But I had never heard the words,” Mr. Keneally declares in his appealing if slight new memoir, “come from the lips of a soul so vivid, so picaresquely Eastern European, so endowed with baritone and basso subtleties of voice and inflection, so engorged with life, as Leopold Page/Pfefferberg.”

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