They should've listened to the historians ...

About that fabricated (and now canceled) Holocaust memoir, by Herman Rosenblat, which David Mehegan writes about at Off the Shelf … Lesson: sometimes professors know what they are talking about.

Deborah Lipstadt called it a year ago. Here's Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory, writing on December 7, 2007: "There is a Holocaust story making the rounds on the Internet which is clearly not true." At this point, she seems to think it's just a bit of Internet flotsam: "If you get this email do NOT send it on to other people. Delete it."

Here's how she describes the central element of the "love story," which she finds preposterous on its face:

It's about an inmate of a camp [a sub-camp of Buchenwald] who connects with a young girl outside the camp. She throws him an apple everyday over the fence. He tells her one day in May 1945 that she should not throw any more apples because at 10 a.m. the next morning he has appointment to appear at the gas chamber to be killed. This story has so many shortcomings that one hardly knows where to begin.

Let me focus only on the most fundamental one: Buchenwald had no gas chambers. In May 1945 no one was still being gassed. Moreover, Jews were not told ahead of time that they were going to be gassed. The whole idea behind the gassing was surprise and deception.

Kenneth Waltzer, director of the Jewish studies program at Michigan State, who is working on his own book about the child inmates of Buchenwald and related death-camps, had doubts even earlier. By this year he was quite sure the story, which had been featured by Oprah Winfrey and turned into "Angel at the Fence," to be published in February 2009 by Berkley Books, a division of the Penguin Group, was made of whole cloth. In recent weeks he'd been peppering Penguin staff and the fabricator's agent with questions -- all of which they blew off.

The piece by Gabriel Sherman in the New Republic that ultimately killed the bogus book essentially channels Waltzer's extraordinary work. Sherman, too, was blown off by the publisher, the agent, and a filmmaker who had bought the story. (Sherman's second article, revealing how even Rosenblat's family doubted his story, better displays his own prodigious reporting skills.) It's a shame, in a way,that Waltzer didn't get to write his own devastating exposé, as he had planned to do, because he was the first to smell a rat. The publishers and agent and filmmaker simply didn't want to hear about it. (The filmmaker, Harris Salomon, evidently went further, charging Waltzer with harming Rosenblat's health, by challenging his story, and complaining to a Michigan State dean about Waltzer's research.) These people's protestations, now, that they were victims of elderly con artists are a little hard to swallow.

Lipstadt cudgels Salomon on her blog (who knew she blogged?), making precisely that point.