The Underground Conservative

A planned memoir about a love story born on opposite sides of a Nazi concentration camp has been pulled from publication because the story turned out not to be true.

NEW YORK (al-AP) – 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,” after he 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.”

It doesn’t matter what his motivation was. The story he and his wife planned to tell simply did not happen. It was false.

Hopefully we don’t have to start taking similar stories with a raised eyebrow, but with all the frauds out there, we might.

Turns out there were signals from critics — including scholars — who warned the gullible ones reacting with emotion that things didn’t add up. One of those taken by the Rosenblats’ tale was Oprah Winfrey, in addition to Hollywood.

The Rosenblats weren’t the only ones with Holocaust-related fictional tales to tell:

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.

And this isn’t the first time Winfrey has been taken by a con artist. Remember James Frey?