Angel at the Fence
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| Author | Herman Rosenblat |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Holocaust memoir, love story |
| Publisher | Berkley Books |
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Publication date
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To be determined (originally February 3, 2009) |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 304 pp (first edition) |
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Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, written by Herman Rosenblat, was a fictitious Holocaust memoir purporting to tell the true story of the author's reunion with, and marriage to a girl, who had passed him food through the barbed-wire fence when he was imprisoned at the Schlieben subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II. The book was scheduled for publication by Berkley Books in February 2009; its publication was canceled on December 27, 2008 when it was discovered that the book's central events were untrue.
Prior to being exposed as a fabrication, the film rights to the book were purchased for $25 million by Harris Salomon of Atlantic Overseas Pictures. Other fans of the story include Oprah Winfrey who described it as the single greatest love story she had heard in 22 years of doing her show. In June 2010, Atlantic Overseas Pictures and producer Harris Salomon signed a co-production agreement with Castel Film Studios, the largest film studio in Central and Eastern Europe and the studio for Cold Mountain and Borat, to produce a feature film on the Herman Rosenblat affair, based on an original screenplay by Ivo Marloh, to be shot in 2011.
Fabricated by Rosenblat, the story states that, beginning in the Winter of 1944, a nine-year-old Jewish girl posing as a Christian from a local farm, met him at the electrified perimeter fence of the Schlieben concentration camp and tossed him an apple over the fence. She continued passing him food for seven months until he was transferred to another camp. According to Rosenblat, they met in 1957 on a at Coney Island, New York, and, while relating their personal histories, discovered their shared past. Shortly afterwards, they married.
Several Holocaust scholars including Deborah Lipstadt raised questions about “the central premise of his narrative — that a girl met him at the fence and that very girl became his wife,” and suggested that that premise "is, at the very least, an embellishment, and at worst, a wholesale fabrication." According to an article published in the New Republic, Professor Kenneth Waltzer, director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University, stated that maps of Schlieben indicate that neither prisoners nor civilians could have approached the perimeter fence as one could only obtain access immediately next to the SS barracks. Waltzer also determined that Mr. Rosenblat's wife and her family were hidden as Christians at a farm near Breslau, 210 miles away from Schlieben. A number of researchers, including forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick, as well as several Holocaust survivors, worked with Waltzer in uncovering the deception and bringing it to the attention of reporters. Friends and family members also raised questions about the truth of statements in the book.
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