Neal Rubin

MSU prof spots Holocaust lie

The last place Kenneth Waltzer wanted to be was on television, a human tomato to be chucked at Oprah Winfrey and at a lying author with a tale too good to be true.

"I'm not a cultural commentator," he says, or a pundit or a showman or a guy with something to sell. He's an academic -- a teacher and researcher from Michigan State University who owns all of one suit.

There he was last week, though, putting large issues into short syllables on ABC, NBC and CNN, explaining how the supposedly true love story of a concentration camp survivor named Herman Rosenblat wasn't worth the paper it will never be printed on.

"I live in a dark place," says Waltzer, 66, a professor of history in MSU's James Madison College. "I study the Holocaust." He deals with musty records and searing accounts of inhumanity, and he's staggered by how readily people embraced a phony Hallmark moment from a place where there was simply nothing pretty.

He was a key part of an investigation that should have been done by Rosenblat's publisher, but instead wound up being conducted by a reporter from the New Republic who was pestered into action by a strikingly eccentric American expatriate in Taiwan.

While it was Winfrey's involvement that made an odd story into an enormous one, "Oprah's not the enemy," Waltzer says. He even accords some sympathy to Rosenblat and his wife, Roma, who apparently made up the story to win a Valentine's Day romance contest sponsored by a newspaper in the mid-1990s and then couldn't stop telling it.

But for heaven's sake, Waltzer says, the real story of the camps has been told in books and serious memoirs and museums for 60 years. Wasn't anyone paying attention?

The fairy tale

Basically, the Rosenblats' fairy tale goes like this:

As a 15-year-old at the Schlieben sub-camp of the notorious Buchenwald, Herman is nourished for seven months by a 9-year-old girl named Roma who tosses him an apple over the fence every day. The girl, also Jewish, is posing as a Christian and essentially hiding with her family to avoid Herman's fate. Years later, in New York, the two meet on a blind date, and soon after they marry.

Their account wound up in one of the "Chicken Soup" books, and Winfrey gushed over them on her program in 1996 and again in 2007. The story became the basis for a children's book called "Angel Girl," which has been recalled by its publisher; a proposed movie; and a heavily promoted nonfiction release from Berkley Books called "Angel at the Fence" that was being billed as "The first Holocaust love story."

In Taiwan, a former newspaper editor named Daniel Bloom read about the forthcoming book -- which has now been scrubbed -- and simply didn't buy it. He began calling and e-mailing state- side reporters, among them Gabriel Sherman of the New Republic, who dialed Waltzer at MSU.

Waltzer, who's been working on a book about children at Buchenwald, had already heard of "Angel at the Fence" and was immediately suspicious. He'd started doing what he does best, which is amass large quantities of facts. In November, he says, he called the publisher, but no one ever called back.

Then Sherman's article landed on Christmas Day, and things started blowing up.

Bad math

Oddly, one of the more eyebrow-raising parts of the story is plausible. Even in the waning days of World War II, families near Buchenwald had access to apples, harvested in the fall and stored in cellars -- "though if you multiply seven months times 30 days," Waltzer points out, "that's a hell of a lot of them."

What legitimate research shows, however, is that Herman's timeline doesn't add up, Roma's family was nowhere near the camp, and the only stretch of fence at Schlieben not bordering another camp was next to the guards' barracks. Approaching the fence was a capital offense, other survivors say, and the notion that a slave laborer could knock off work every afternoon to meet somebody is simply ludicrous.

Waltzer is still working to dig up Herman's true story, simply for the sake of posterity. Herman, a retired TV repairman now living in Miami, has kept mum, but Waltzer says he's been overwhelmed by responses from other survivors, grateful to have the saccharine story debunked.

He's also been contacted by people hoping he can double-check their own fading recollections, and by a National Guardsman in Iraq who's hoping to organize a Holocaust program for his unit.

The experience, Waltzer says, has set him to pondering the Holocaust as it's presented in culture. He's thinking he might even want to write about the topic.

But no, he says, "I don't want to go on 'Oprah' to talk about it. That's not my world."

Reach Neal Rubin at (313) 222-1874 or nrubin@detnews.com.