I wonder how many other books are out there that have been completely been made up, but no one has ever found out. Maybe Hemingway just stayed inside and watched TV all day. Maybe Kerouac just drove around his subdivision for an hour. Well, Herman Rosenblat could have been a hugely successfully memoir writer as well, but at the last minute has been unearthed as a fraud right before his book went to print.

Unlike James Frey, who made up stories to make his life sound crazy, Rosenblat fabricated a story based around the Holocaust. Uh oh, don’t want to do that. He claimed that he met his wife as a young boy stuck in a concentration camp. She was a Christian girl who snuck up to the fence and threw him apples. Their paths crossed again 12 years later at a Holocaust remembrance event, where she said she was the one who threw the apples, and he was the one who caught them. Touching.

Unfortunately it’s all bullshit.

Scholars and family members have debunked his claims, with experts saying there was no way a girl could have thrown the apples undetected. Plus the fence at that camp was electrified, so they must have been really, really careful while also not being spotted by the SS guard tower 30 feet away.

But the fake story sounded so good, it’s already being made into a movie, and even though the book release has been scrapped, the film is still going forward, although Rosenblat is donating all the money he gets to Holocaust charities. Like he’s not going to burn in hell already.

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “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.”

Ah well, I honestly would have just left well enough alone and had an inspiring story for the ages, but I guess these kinds of things must be broken down eventually.