The Holocaust as personal art

The admission by Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat that he invented the principal incident in his memoir, "Angel at the Fence," seems to be yet another example of the human mind trying to make some positive meaning, some redemptive outcome, from an episode of utter madness.

Rosenblat wrote in his book, which was due out next month, that a young girl came to the outside of the fence at Schleiben, a concentration camp that was part of the Buchenwald complex, where he was held during World War II, and tossed apples over the fence to him. After the war, he writes, he met the girl again in New York, where they had both landed as refugees, recognized her, and married her. The couple has been married for 50 years. The Rosenblats were featured guests on Oprah Winfrey's program.

After consulting several historians, Gabriel Sherman wrote in last week's New Republic magazine that the incident couldn't have happened as Rosenblat described it, since the fence could not have been approached from the outside. Speaking through his agent, Rosenblat acknowleges that he made up the camp-fence meeting, though he had in fact been confined at the camp. Berkley Books, a division of the Penguin Group, announced over the weekend that it will cancel publication of the book and ask Rosenblat to return his advance payment.

In a statement, Rosenblat said, "I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

He now knows? But he could not have acknowledged that the incident was a lie unless he had always known. It is not he who now knows, it's everyone he deceived. And let us not be naive: spreading happiness also promised to bring him fame, acclaim, and a certain amount of wealth.

You could say no harm was done here, except that the Holocaust deniers love these incidents. I received an anonymous (of course) email from one just yesterday, alluding to the gullibility of Oprah and the publisher: "They were careless in letting it run for as long as it did only because the Holocaust story is also a fraud."