Oprah-Hailed Holocaust Story Looks Like a Fraud

When James Frey briefly fooled a nation's bullshit detectors, it was partly because the story he told was so harrowing, to have questioned it would have seemed like an insult to recovering addicts everywhere.

Now just imagine that Frey wasn't a junkie but a Holocaust survivor. That's the case with Herman Rosenblat, whose new memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, could prove to be the next A Million Little Pieces, writes Gabriel Sherman in The New Republic.

In the book, Rosenblat tells of life in a concentration camp, where he survived with the help of a local girl who tossed apples to him over the fence; many later, according to his account, he met the same girl by chance in New York and they fell in love. The story, if not yet the book, already has the endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, who has put Rosenblat on her show twice (and who, of course, was a big reason for Frey's success).

The problem: Experts like Jewish studies professor Kenneth Waltzer say Rosenblat's story is, at a minimum, highly embellished:

Waltzer concluded from studying maps of Schlieben [the concentration camp] that it was impossible for either a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence; the only spot where one could access the perimeter at all was right next to the SS barracks. "The story is a made-up story," Waltzer told me by phone last week. "So far as I can discern, it didn't happen."

Penguin Group's Berkley Books is publishing Angel at the Fence in February. It was another Penguin imprint, Riverhead, that last year published Love and Consequences, a thoroughly fabricated memoir about life in a Los Angeles ghetto.