Herman A. Rosenblat (c. 1929 – February 5, 2015) was a Polish-born American author, known for writing a fictitious Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence,[1] purporting to tell the true story of a girl who passed him food through the barbed-wire fence at the Schlieben sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II.
[3][4] Before the hoax became public, the film rights to the book were purchased for $25 million by Harris Salomon of Atlantic Overseas Pictures.
[9] He later wrote that he lied to the Germans about his age because the Nazis used older boys for slave labor, and sent younger ones for extermination.
In July 1944, with the front lines approaching, he was deported with his three older brothers to Schlieben sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, until February 1945.
[10][11][9] He claimed in his memoir that his future wife Roma, a nine-year-old Jewish girl hiding in the town of Schlieben with her family, threw him apples and bread over the electrified, guarded fence of the camp on a daily basis throughout the seven months' period.
After being liberated from the concentration camps, Rosenblat and his brothers were brought to the UK in a group of 730 orphans to start a new life.
In November 2008 Waltzer contacted forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick and started investigating the matter.
Waltzer also discovered that Herman's future wife Roma was never in the town of Schlieben, but that she lived throughout that period in a German farm 210 miles (340 km) away, near Breslau.
On December 27 Rosenblat finally confessed the truth to the producer of his movie, Harris Solomon, and his literary agent, Andrea Hurst.
As time passed, the persons knowing about the hoax grew more uncomfortable about keeping silent about it and there was a growing consensus that the truth had to be told.
[11][20] A children's edition of the book, written by a third party, Laurie Friedman of Miami, titled Angel Girl, had been released in September 2008.
[25] On September 1, 2009, York House Press published a paperback book titled The Apple, written by Penelope Holt.
Holocaust historian Kenneth Waltzer said that it was disturbing that so few people had noticed and inquired about the obvious holes in his history over a decade.
It appears that the veracity of story was not questioned either by the book publisher or by Oprah Winfrey, and that no fact-checking was done to ensure the authenticity of the memoir prior to endorsing it soundly.
[16]: 2 [20] According to Fitzpatrick, one of Waltzer's collaborators, such hoaxes could be avoided if the publishers spent a few thousand dollars in early fact-checking with historians and genealogists, before deciding to spend huge sums of money for the story.
The war ended officially on May 8, and the entire camp had been handed over to the International Red Cross a week earlier.
Theresienstadt had no gas chambers and, as noted by Deborah Lipstadt: "Jewish prisoners were not told ahead of time that they were going to be gassed.