Oprah-Endorsed Holocaust Memoir Attacked as Fake

Experts say author's Buchenwald love story couldn't have happened
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 24, 2008 2:28 AM CST

The Oprah-hyped author of an amazing memoir of love and Holocaust survival is being labeled the latest publishing fake by some researchers, the New Republic reports. Herman Rosenblat tells a poignant story of how a young girl saved him when he was a child prisoner at Buchenwald by giving him food over the fence daily. He married that same girl years later after a blind date. But now Holocaust experts say his tale would have been impossible.

Neither Rosenblat nor the girl would have been allowed anywhere near the fence, according to experts, and Rosenblat's fellow survivors say he never mentioned the girl. The president of a studio soon to start filming a movie based on the story is fiercely defensive of Rosenblat, although he acknowledges the story may have been embellished. Critics say that while Rosenblat's wartime suffering is not in doubt, adding a kitschy love story sanitizes the horrors of the Holocaust. (More memoir stories.)

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