Herman Rosenblat, Penned Fake Shoah Memoir, Dies at 85
Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor who created a scandal by writing a memoir filled with untrue details, has died.
Rosenblat died on Feb. 5 and was buried three days later in Hollywood, Fla., The Associated Press reported. He was 85.
He created an uproar with his 2008 memoir “Angel at the Fence” with the claim that he and his wife, Roma, had first met when she sneaked food to him at a Buchenwald subcamp and reconnected more than a decade later on a blind date in the United States.
Research by scholars and interviews with family members subsequently proved the story to be false, and publisher Berkley Books canceled the memoir.
Rosenblat had indeed survived a harrowing series of experiences in the concentration camps, and his wife, born Roma Radzicki, had indeed survived the war living under a false identity.
However, she had been living far away in Germany with her family. They had never met until the blind date in 1957. They were married a year later.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
