Search for Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence on Amazon, and you’ll come up empty-handed. Search for Margaret Seltzer, James Frey or Benjamin Wilkomirski, though, and links to their books are readily available.
Rosenblat is a Holocaust survivor who spent his childhood years in Buchenwald and other concentration camps. He and his brothers made it through the trauma of those years, and he built a quiet, ordinary life for himself—got married, became a television repairman. He began speaking of his experiences around the 1990s, and by 2008, he was ready to publish Angel at the Fence.
The emotional core of the memoir was the romance between Herman and his wife, Roma, a touching tale that Oprah Winfrey called “the single greatest love story ever”. Herman first met Roma, he wrote, “at the fence of Schlieben”; they talked through the concertina rolls of barbed wire, and she brought him apples, bread, a reminder of all the colour and nourishment that was missing from his life. She was free, living with her parents near the forced labour camp; he was a prisoner who feared death on a daily basis. Years later, they met in America, recognized each other and their love story blossomed. It was a beautiful story, as his literary agent, his editors, Oprah Winfrey, journalists and even many fellow Holocaust survivors recognized. And it was untrue.
What makes Angel at the Fence stand out in the growing swarm of fake memoirs is the nature of Rosenblat’s lie. Margaret Seltzer, author of Love and Consequences, came off as pathetic after it was revealed that her “memoir” of growing up as a half-white, half-Native American who was fostered by a Los Angeles street gang was a lie. In truth, Margaret Seltzer had a normal white suburban childhood and knew about as much of the Los Angeles gangs as you or I might about Dawood Ibrahim. James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (often referred to as A Million Little Lies) fabricated much of his tough-guy memoir of addiction, but he comes across as the quintessential raconteur so in love with a good story that he doesn’t care if any of it is true.
Benjamin Wilkomirski’s fabrications were more complex, and more troubling. Wilkomirski claimed that he was a child survivor of the Holocaust, developing this claim over the course of decades to create an alternate life for himself. The truth of his life was traumatic, in a completely different way: he was identified as Bruno Grosjean, and had spent his childhood in an orphanage known for its harsh treatment. To this day, no one really knows why Wilkomirski felt the need to construct such an elaborate lie, such a vivid and wounded second identity for himself; but he draws more compassion, and incomprehension, than most other fake memoirists.
Herman Rosenblat’s story was resoundingly repudiated by fellow survivors who’d been at the same camp: given the layout of the camps, they said, there was no possibility that Rosenblat could have got close to the fence, and there was no possibility that he could have spoken to any outsider. That specific camp was closely guarded, and no outsiders were allowed within kilometers of the perimeter.
Herman Rosenblat eventually admitted that his story was false, that he had held on to the “dream” Roma and her apples for so long that he had lost sight of what was true. Angel at the Fence has been withdrawn from the market and will probably never be seen in print. His family, who had known for years that he was making up the story of his great romance, is caught between anger and bewilderment. He has had to explain to people who trusted him—his agent and his publishers, close friends—that he was lying all along.
But the really sad thing about Rosenblat’s case is that he didn’t make up the lie in order to sell his book, even if it did become the book’s major selling point. As The New Republic dug deeper, interviewing his relatives and friends, it became clear that this was a lie he and Roma had told for many years, even decades, risking the anger of the brothers who knew it wasn’t true. No one knows how the mind really works, whether this sad scandal was Rosenblat’s way of obtaining a final confession, a final release from his lie.
What he and Roma have lost is more than their credibility: it is the shared fiction that, for whatever reasons, seems to have been the bedrock of their marriage for so many years. As a reader, I am bewildered by Rosenblat’s lie; as a human being, I can’t help but feel sorry for the man.
