The Greatest Fake Love Story Every Told for a Decade

2009-01-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

by Gabriel Sherman

The New Republic

Published as "The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold"

On February 3, Berkley Books, the mass-market division of the Penguin Group, is slated to publish a Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. The author, Herman Rosenblat, who is a retired television repairman now living in Miami, recounts his experience as a teenage boy during the Holocaust at Schlieben, a sub-division of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. In the winter of 1945, Herman meets a nine-year-old girl--herself a Jew masquerading as a Christian at a nearby farm--when she shows up one day outside the camp and tosses him an apple over the barbed-wire fence. For the next seven months, the girl at the fence delivers Herman food each day, until he is suddenly transferred to another camp. Fast forward to Coney Island, 1957: Herman, now in his 20s and settled in New York, reluctantly agrees to a blind date with a young Polish immigrant named Roma Radzicki. They speak of their time during the war. Roma mentions a boy she had helped to survive in a camp. She said she fed him apples. A flash of recognition. Months later, Herman marries Roma, his angel at the fence.

Since going public with his story a decade ago, Herman appeared twice on "The Oprah Winfrey Show", who called it "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air," and has been featured on the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime Television, and CBS News. He has been the subject of newspaper articles and inspirational mass-email chains. In March, a feature film, Flower of the Fence, based on Herman's life, is scheduled to go into production with a budget of $25 million dollars. A children's book, Angel Girl, was published in September. Berkley Books' Angel at the Fence has all the makings to become a best-seller. Berkley's winter catalogue for booksellers and reviewers describes Angel at the Fence as "the true story of a Holocaust survivor whose prayers for hope and love were answered," noting that it makes "a perfect Valentine's Day gift."

The power of Herman's narrative is largely due to the fact that the incredible story actually happened. Herman himself writes of his first encounter with Roma with such disbelief. "I noticed a small girl hiding behind a tree on the other side of the fence. I could scarcely believe my eyes," an excerpt of his memoir in the Berkley catalogue reads. "Could this possibly be real?"

An increasing number of prominent Holocaust scholars say no. Though archival records show that Herman was interned in concentration camps during the war, scholars who are investigating the story believe that the central premise of his narrative--that a girl met him at the fence and that very girl became his wife--is, at the very least, an embellishment, and at worst, a wholesale fabrication. (Read the whole story)

The story turned out to be a hoax. (Read story)

Quarter Century Heist Cracked

2008-11-04T05:11:00.000-08:00

ARON HELLER

Associated Press

JERUSALEM – It took time, but Israeli police detectives have cracked one of the country's greatest crimes — the legendary heist of a priceless clock collection from a Jerusalem museum a quarter century ago.

The 1983 theft, the costliest in Israel's history, saw 106 timepieces worth millions of dollars disappear from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. Among them was a pocket watch made for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials value at more than $30 million.

Although the stolen clocks had no connection to Islamic culture, they were displayed in the museum because they had originally belonged to the father of the museum's founder.

The heist baffled police for more than two decades. But detectives now blame Naaman Diller — a notorious Israeli thief who fled to Europe and died in the United States in 2004.

Investigators got their first break two years ago, when the museum informed them it paid some $40,000 to an anonymous American woman to buy back 40 of the items, including the Marie Antoinette timepiece made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Rachel Hasson, the museum's artistic director, calls the gold and rock crystal watch "the Mona Lisa of the clock world." Also recovered were a Breguet creation from 1819 known as the "Sympathiques" and a clock shaped like a pistol from the same period. (Click for more details...)

Legendary Crimes & Mysteries

The Greatest Fake Love Story Every Told for a Decade

Quarter Century Heist Cracked