Herman Rosenblat

Following the invasion of Poland, the Nazis rounded up his family in 1939 along with thousands of others when the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto was set up.

His father had previously died of typhus.

Two years later, when Rosenblat was 12 years old, his mother was separated from him and put on a Holocaust train to Treblinka extermination camp during one of the ghetto liquidation actions.

About 90% of the inhabitants of the ghetto were sent to Majdanek and Treblinka death camps.

He later wrote that he lied to the Germans about his age because the Nazis used older boys for slave labor, and sent younger ones for extermination.

In July 1944, with the front lines approaching, he was deported with his three older brothers to Schlieben sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, until February 1945.

He claimed in his memoir that his future wife Roma, a nine-year-old Jewish girl hiding in the town of Schlieben with her family, threw him apples and bread over the electrified, guarded fence of the camp on a daily basis throughout the seven months' period.

Shortly before liberation he was brought to the Theresienstadt camp.

After being liberated from the concentration camps, Rosenblat and his brothers were brought to the UK in a group of 730 orphans to start a new life.

Rosenblat says he lived in London for four years, where he learned the electrical trade at the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training school.

He then moved to the United States in 1950 and was drafted into the United States Army in 1951.

After serving for two years, he says he moved to New York and opened his own TV repair shop in Brooklyn.

He met Roma Radzicki in the United States on a blind date in 1957, and married her.

He later claimed that during the date he had recognized her as the girl who threw apples to him over the fence and proposed on the spot.

In 1992 Rosenblat and his wife had run into serious financial problems after the Rosenblat family were victims of an armed robbery that left his son, Kenneth Rosenblat, in a wheelchair and left Rosenblat critically injured.

Rosenblat invented the story in the hospital while recovering.

Rosenblat stated that his mother had appeared to him at the hospital and had told him to tell his story to the world.

In 1994 Rosenblat had a tax lien placed on him by the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes dating back to 1988, which must have increased the financial pressure on him.

According to Holocaust historian Kenneth Waltzer, Rosenblat changed his own story, replacing it with the love story, and then it must have become difficult to turn back.

After he had won Oprah's contest of love stories he maintained the lie.

Rosenblat told the apple story for the first time in late 1995, and he won Oprah's contest in 1996.

Oprah Winfrey interviewed Rosenblat in two different programs, in 1996 and 2007, and she called his story "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air."

Berkley Books, an imprint of the Penguin Group, signed Rosenblat up to publish his memoir Angel at the Fence, with Andrea Hurst working as Rosenblat's literary agent.

Producer Harris Salomon, of Atlantic Overseas Pictures, made plans to adapt the story into a $25 million movie called The Flower at the Fence, and he had earlier registered a screenplay based on the story with the Library of Congress in 2003.

Jewish professor Deborah Lipstadt had already denounced the story in her personal blog in December 2007.

Other Holocaust survivors like Peter Kubicek also denounced the implausibility of the story.

Jewish-American blogger Danny Bloom started emailing several historians for help, one of them being Holocaust historian Kenneth Waltzer.

Waltzer had been interviewing survivors for a new book, and he had been told that the story was probably false.

In November 2008 Waltzer contacted forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick and started investigating the matter.

He found out that the prisoners of that concentration camp were prohibited from approaching a camp's fence on pain of death, nor was anyone allowed to approach a fence from the outside.

Such perimeter fences were electrified and watched 24/7 by armed guards stationed on guard towers, ready to shoot anyone who approached the fence from either side.

The SS barracks were near to the only fence that faced outwards, and prisoners approaching the barracks would have been executed.

The book was planned to be published in 2009 by Berkley Books, but was cancelled after it turned out that many elements of his memoir were fabricated and some were contrary to verifiable historical facts.

Rosenblat later admitted to lying on purpose with the intention of bringing joy.

Before the fabrication became public, the film rights to the book were purchased for $25 million by Harris Salomon of Atlantic Overseas Pictures.

Other fans of the story include Oprah Winfrey who has described it as the single greatest love story she heard in over 22 years of hosting her show.

The story behind Rosenblat's story is being developed as an independent feature film.

In June 2010 Atlantic Overseas Pictures and producer Harris Salomon signed a co-production agreement with Castel Film Studios, a well known studio in Central and Eastern Europe and the studio for Cold Mountain and Borat as well as 3rd-i films in London, to produce a feature film about the Herman Rosenblat affair based on an original screenplay by award-winning screenwriter Ivo Marloh entitled The Apple, scheduled for production in 2015.

Rosenblat, a Polish Jew, lived in the town of Piotrków Trybunalski before World War II.

Herman A. Rosenblat (c. 1929 – February 5, 2015) was a Polish-born American author, known for writing a fictitious Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence, purporting to tell the true story of a girl who passed him food through the barbed-wire fence at the Schlieben sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II.