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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.
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QUOTE: “Over at The New Republic blog The Plank, the magazine’s editors offer a helpful recap of *how* their reporter successfully exposed a Holocaust memoir as a hoax.”
It’s true, Gabe Sherman did a terrific reporting job exposing how that hoax memoir came to be. He deserves a Pulitzer award for that kind reportage, really, because he took material supplied to him by several sources and went even deeper and found amazing quotes from people directly involved in the backstory, inforamtion that nobody—nobody—ever knew for certain before—and certainly never said in public before.
But there is one thing you should know, Sara, and I am sure Gabe won’t mind me telling tales out of school. Gabe never heard of Herman or his cockamamie backstory before a reporter who had been investigating the matter for 2 months, based in Taiwan, go figure, called Gabe up at midnight and badgered, pestered and cajoled him for three days and nights into agreeing to take on this “assignment”.
What the TNR does not mention, not anywhere, I guess it is natural and for promotioanl reasons of their own, is that their TNR reporter had no idea about this “story” before he was contacted by me. And at first, for the first two days of my barrage of emails and phone calls, Gabe resisted, said he was busy with other things, and besides, how did i know all these things—I knew, Sara, I knew, but according to my promises to my sources deep with the investigation, I could not go public with what I knew, and that’s okay, from here in Taiwan, I did not have a platform to publish what I knew anwyays.
So I spent 8 weeks trying to find a reporter in the USA who would listen to me, and believe me, and act. Gabe, who didn’t know me from Adam, at first was skeptical of this unknown blogger in far away Taiwan calling him at all times of the day, and badgering his email box with over 5o emails of names, tips, addresses, phone numbers, the whole megillah, and at one point, Gabe—and I love the guy, he is salt of the Earth and an ace reporter and he did the perfect job, nobody else in US journalism could do what he did on this story, and I deeply respect and admire him—Gabe at one point in our phone chats told me to stop bugging him, stop calling him, stiop emailing him, and to go away.
Go away? No way. Not when I had the goods on Herman, and took it on as my self appointed mission to try to stop that book from coming out before it was published. Against the advice of those who were advising me in the ongoing investigation group.
They told me to “chill” and “give it a rest, Danny” and “we aren’t ready yet to go to the media, our reserach wont’ be ready until the end of January”—and i understood their concerns, but i knew instinctively, Ben that if the book was published, once it was out of the warehouse and into the bookstores, the damage would be done, the book would be very hard to stop, what with all the coming Oprah PR and the book tours and all the AP and Reuters stories about this lovely couple, so I acted alone, on my own heartfelt instinct, that the time to act was ASAP.
I didn’t know Gabe from Adam either. Never heard of him before. Of course, I have been out of the USA for 20 years or so, so I am not familiar with the new names in NYC and DC journalism, so I didn’t know him.
How did I find him? Good story, Sara, and glad you asked. ...[SMILE]
I was carrying out my investigation here in Taiwan of the Herman hoax case using the internet and the blogosphere as my tools, plus my hunch from the get go that the BLIND DATE part of the book was impossible, not in this Universe, but a sweet touch, but completley off the wall, so i was googling every search window I could find about earlier hoaxes.
And i found one item about a book by a child soldier nbamed Ishamel Beah, and there was a big to do about this in Slate magaizne, writteny by, are you ready?—drum roll—Gabriel Sherman!
I think YOU were quoted in that story, too, Sara. Small world, getting smaller every day.
So i emailed him in a jiffy, found his website and emailed him, and he wrote back in Internet time, “Danny, sounds interesting, Call me or I will call you.”
Well, of course, he didn’t call me. Nobody ever calls me back. Story of my life. So I called him.... the very next day, and dished. I told him everything I knew in a one hour phoen call,—My dime my time. He said “all this is very interesting, Danny, but how do you know? It’s some people’s word against Herman’s word, and who are you? Why are you so obessed with this story?”
So we said goodbye on the phone, I told him I would email him more damning news tip I had in my files, from top historians involved in the case, and he said, Okay, keep me informed.
I thought I had landed my fish, my big fish. The fish i needed to land the final punch somewhere in thte USa media landscape.
The top reporters at the NY Times and your own PW would not answer my emails at all at first and then eventaully the Times reporters just said , Yeah, we know about this issue, but we are mulling it over. “Mulling it over”? It will take too long to mull it over. We need to act now. Before the book is out. stop it in its tracks. PW never answered at all. Shame on PW! Fire them all! Kidding.
So I kept up my badgering campagn with dear ol’ Gabe, who must be all of 30, and here I am , all of 60, oi, and I never gave up. I knew he was the guy to do this story, to pull the rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, to lift the lid on this Pandora’s Box of fabircations by a sweet old man. I like Herman. I never had any animostiy against him. I just wanted to epose the blind date thing.
That was my sticking point. that is was got me invovled in this, when i read a newspaper aco**** from the AP on October 12 about Herman and the applkes and Roma and the blind date. Impossible, i said. I called the AP reporter in Miami who wrote the AP story and said Matt, this could not be true.
He said,”Danny, it’s what they told me. Who are we to question their story? Until a smoking gun can be found, the media cannot report what you are saying, Danny. Sorry.”
So i started looking for the smoking gun. I found many. Not on my own. I am no historian, no forensic expert, i am a nobody. Just a lone blogger with a mission. So ....I alerted the media in the USa all of October and November and early December. The entire USa media force, including PW, ignored my emails and phone calls. The Miami Herald, too. I spoke the features editor there, he said, "thanks for calling, interesting news tips: but he never acted.. Just sat on this story..
anyways, back to gushing narrative of this story: I knew by Dec, 19 , i had to find a reporter , soon, do or die moment, so i kept bugging Gabe until he finally said, “Look, Danny, you sound like a nice and sane man, but please, enough of this calling me and emailing me already...go away. leave me alone. I will make some calls, like you suggested, using your leads and contacts, and let’s see if there is a story here.”
The rest is history, cultural history of our times, sad tragic Holocaust history, too, and GAbe made it happen. The man!
So that’s the backstory of the backstory, and if you don’t beleive a word I typed, because most people never believe a word I say — I don’t know why, I am always right —.kidding -- in fact, i am often wrong -- ....ask Gabe!.
He’s on CNN and NPR and Canada TV now and it;s great. More power to him. He helped expose a very sad and tragic episode in Jewish life. And in American life and Oprah life. And in the publishing world. And in Holocaust history.
I salute his groundbreaking reportage, and consider him my brother for life! OKAY, enough of this tale told out of school.—Danny, checking in from a small village in southern Taiwan where nobody ever heard of Rosenblat and has no idea what I am doing in the Internet cafe every day, moving on to other things now......
How’s that for an interesting story,Sara, typed in a ligtning speed,, typos and all, mis-spellings and all? Posted 01/02/2009 12:11 AMReply
Interesting questions.
Everything we "know" about the Holocaust comes not from foresic evidence but from (including the Nuremberg Tribunals) "the testimonies of survivors" - like Rosenblat. (The Nuremberg Tribunals also include testimonies from Nazis, who were tortured into "confessing.")
Usually NO ONE vets these people's stories. Even the New Republic, who broke the news of this hoax, is getting a lot of angry criticism from Jews who say "How ****DARE**** you question this man?" or "Truth is subjective and complex. Who are we to say what truth really is?" (the line of every con man).
So maybe the Holocaust is a fraud (a multi-billion-dollar fraud that led to major geopolitical change), but who are we to say what is true? Just believe the "testimonies" - sob when they play the violin, and above all don't ****DARE**** to question what they feed you as they wreck more nations with Boaz, Freud, and race-mixing; disposses your people through the Federal Reserve; and rob you blind. Rosenblat is the tip of the iceberg. Posted 01/04/2009 12:58 PMReply