At the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Ken Waltzer examines a "Häftlings-Personal-Karte," or prisoner's registration card, that was created by Buchenwald camp authorities to record basic information about each person who was imprisoned. Photo by Kristan Tetens.

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EAST LANSING, Mich. — Love blooming across the fence of a Nazi concentration camp seemed too good to be true to skeptics including Michigan State University professor Kenneth Waltzer, despite its backing by a major publisher and Oprah Winfrey.

But it wasn’t true, as author Herman Rosenblat’s publisher acknowledged Dec. 27, and Waltzer is being credited for taking the lead in debunking the much-touted story.

Waltzer, Director of Jewish Studies at MSU, led a growing chorus of critics of the purported Holocaust love affair between Rosenblat and his wife of 50 years, Roma. The story was twice featured on Winfrey’s daytime television show, turned into a children’s book and was to be the subject of a purported memoir slated for publication in February and a motion picture scheduled to start filming in March.

An article in The New Republic this month included Waltzer among those casting doubt on the story. Penguin Berkley Press has announced it will cancel publication of “Angel at the Fence” and seek return of Rosenblat’s advance payment.

The controversy once again embarrassed Winfrey and a major publisher over fiction being passed off as fact. Another Penguin affiliate earlier this year had to acknowledge that Margaret Seltzer’s “Love and Consequences” street gang memoir was a fraud. Three years ago, book booster Winfrey was embarrassed by exaggerations in James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” a purported account of his drug addiction.

“I am saddened by the whole thing,” Waltzer reacted in a published statement. “First, Herman and Roma Rosenblat are of course to be faulted for making up a Holocaust love story and seeking fame and public attention, but their lying and dissimulating are actually understandable. Less understandable is the widespread belief in their story – by the culture makers, including the publisher and movie maker and many thousands of others who have encountered it over a decade.

“Second, such belief suggests a broad illiteracy about the Holocaust and about experience in the camps – despite decades of books, serious memoirs, museums, and movies,” Waltzer said. “This shakes this historian up.”

Waltzer’s scholarship of the Holocaust is featured in an online MSU special report, “Horror and hope: Studying the Holocaust.”

The Rosenblat account, Waltzer wrote in his statement, “was not Holocaust education but miseducation. Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending. All this shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust. All the more important, then, to have real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps.”

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