It's the latest story that touched, and betrayed, the world."Herman Rosenblat and his wife are the most gentle, loving, beautiful people," literary agent Andrea Hurst said, anguishing over why she, and so many others, were taken by Rosenblat's story of love born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany."I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story."On Saturday, Berkley Books cancelled Rosenblat's memoir, "Angel at the Fence". Rosenblat acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. The book was supposed to come out in February.Rosenblat, 79, has been married to the former Roma Radzicky for 50 years, since meeting her on a blind date in New York. In a statement issued Saturday through his agent, he described himself as an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified his past to better spread his message."I wanted to bring happiness to people," said Rosenblat, who now lives in the Miami area. "I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."Rosenblat's believers included not only his agent and his publisher, but TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey, film producers, journalists, family members and strangers who ignored, or did not know about, the warnings from scholars that his story did not make sense.Other Holocaust memoirists have devised greater fantasies. Misha Defonseca, author of "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," pretended she was a Jewish girl who lived with wolves during the war, when she was actually a non-Jew who lived, without wolves, in Belgium.
