Telling Tales (29 page)

‘Do you have any bread?’ I asked the little girl.

She shook her head. No bread.

Then she reached in to the pocket of her sweater, pulled out an apple and threw it over the fence. I grabbed the apple and instinctively started to run away.

‘See you tomorrow,’ I heard her call to my back.

And so began a daily meeting between the two young people. Herman did not know at first that she, too, was a Jew but that she and her family were hiding out in the farm next door to the camp pretending to be Christians. He knew only that she offered him a fix of hope, friendship and, crucially, food. When the day came for Herman to be moved on to another camp, he bade his little friend a sad farewell and they accepted the fact that they would never meet again.

The war ended with young Herman’s life intact and he was released in May 1945 from Theresienstadt, the last major camp to be liberated by the Allies. He made his way to England where he lived for four years in London while he trained to be an electrician and then in 1950 he left for the bright new world of post-war America, hoping to fulfil his dreams of success and escape the ghosts of Europe. He ended up in Coney Island, New York, and it was here that he got talking to a pretty, Polish-Jewish woman called Roma Radzicki. Inevitably, they soon began swapping stories about their experiences at the hands of the Nazis and as Roma told him how, back in the early 1940s, she used to venture out of the farm where she was hiding and toss fruit to a boy in a camp, Herman could not believe what he was hearing. He asked her what the boy looked like (‘skinny’, she said); he asked whether one day the boy had bid her farewell and told her not to come back to the fence again. He had, she said. In a moment of almost unimaginable emotional intensity, the two realized they had been reunited at last. He proposed to her there and then and she accepted.

And that was when their real life began. Madly in love and determined to make amends, as best they could, for the horrible childhoods the war had inflicted on them, they ended up in Miami, Florida where Herman worked as a TV repair technician and Roma took any job she could find that would allow her to make ends meet while raising their longed-for son, Ken.

Some time after 2001, Herman, now retired, decided the time had come to make their story into a book, an inspirational love story that might be just what a shaken America needed in the light of recent events. In the unpublished manuscript, which was leaked to American journalists in December 2008 just prior to its intended publication, he describes his overriding thought at the time of his reunion with the apple girl: ‘Impossible!’

Indeed it was.

The book was about to be published by Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin USA, when Kenneth Waltzer, a professor of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, realized that the story which Rosenblat had been putting about via Oprah Winfrey and the Jewish community in Florida, simply could not be true. He had been conducting a study of youth and childhood in concentration camps and, as luck would have it, was looking closely at the stories of the very group of boys taken from Piotrokow to Schlieben that included Rosenblat. Waltzer had been conducting interviews with many of the survivors, so as well as being fully conversant with the physical layout of the camp, he knew something of the relationships between its former inmates. Apparently there had been talk for years about Herman having made up a tall tale about how he met his wife, and neither his two older brothers, with whom he was incarcerated (and who had pledged at the beginning of the war never to leave him) nor his fellow prisoners, were too happy about it. In fact ‘ashamed’ was the word Waltzer used to describe their attitude to this most imaginative member of the group. There were also stories of ructions within and between the wider Rosenblat clan and Roma’s family, and even the couple themselves were reputed to be locked in a dispute about Herman’s claims. No one knew for sure whether Roma had been tricked too or was in cahoots with him, but there was no doubt that Rosenblat was known by those closest to him as an unrepentant fantasist.

Waltzer, as conscious as any Jew or historian of the damage done to real war stories by fake ones, approached Rosenblat’s agent, Andrea Hurst, with what he knew. He was able not only to quote a very reliable witness, Ben Helfgott, the leader of the Schlieben survivors who had journeyed with Rosenblat to England after the war (and had himself gone on to find fame as an Olympic athlete), but to show maps of the camp’s layout which proved that the apple-tossing story could not possibly be true; because aside from the fact that wandering alone along the perimeter of the camps grounds was an infraction punishable by instant death, the only place in Schlieben where anyone outside the compound could possibly approach the fence was in the spot right next to where the SS guards had their look-out point.

At first, according to Waltzer, neither agent nor publisher was interested in his claims. The promise of recouping millions from what was now planned to be a memoir, a children’s version called
Angel Girl
and a film too was hard to let go. And besides, Rosenblat was a sweet and kindly old man, clearly in love with his wife of half a century and determined to spread a little happiness in the world before his time was up. But by 28 December 2008, Berkley Books had announced that they were pulling the plug on the whole project. There would be no books and if the film company who had bought the rights to the story still thought they could get investment after the greatest love-story ever told turned out to be a fabrication, well, good luck to them.

Penguin was embarrassed. Oprah Winfrey – hot on the heels of the James Frey debacle – was incensed. And Rosenblat’s son Ken, who had known about the deception for years, was keen to distance himself entirely from the affair, telling the magazine the
New Republic
: ‘My father is a man who I don’t know. I can’t understand it. It’s not my way of thinking . . . I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I tried to just stay away from it. It was always hurtful. I just never dealt with it.’

All that remained was for Rosenblat to account for himself, and, choosing his words carefully to avoid any accusations of greed, he used the
New York Times
to address the dozens of publishers and millions of
Oprah
viewers he had duped:

To all who supported and believed in me and this story. I am sorry for all I have caused to you and every one else in the world. Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world.

No one is suggesting that Rosenblat’s motivation was to do evil, but the prospect of a retirement supported by the astronomical fee a good popular memoir can net its author in the twenty-first century would seem delightful to any ageing couple, let alone one who has lived through the horror of the Holocaust and then pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to join America’s middle class. And indeed, despite the debunking of his hoax, he might still make some money out of the story, because as of January 2009 his book is slated for release by the New York publishing firm York House Press. They will, of course, be branding the book fiction and releasing it under the new name of
The Apple
, and its new selling point is that it is ‘one of the most controversial love stories of all time’. Their website confirms that a film version is indeed still in production and also carries an essay encouraging readers to think about the complex nature of authenticity and authorship in autobiographical writing and to ask themselves whether Rosenblat – a damaged war survivor – wasn’t just working through his trauma by writing the book.

All of which is indeed worth thinking about. But the real tragedy of the
Apple
debacle is that a far more moving story – the true story – may never be told. That is the story of the two older brothers who took a solemn vow never to abandon their little sibling, never to let him starve, and to lie about his age to save him from punishment even as they were risking their lives daily to do it. And of the woman – Roma’s mother – who in deciding to disguise her children as Polish Catholics and live openly under the gaze of the Nazi occupiers (near Breslau, not Schlieben) had to take the appalling decision to leave her one very dark-complexioned child, who would never be able to pass as an ethnic Pole, behind to die. It is no wonder that the families of Mr and Mrs Rosenblat find it hard to forgive the man who wasted his voice on fantasy when the reality spoke so much more poignantly of the power of love.

H
OAXES INSPIRED BY
theological debates might, to an atheist, sound slightly boring. But from the reclusive German priest who wrote the dark, reality-fairy tale
The Amber Witch
to the academic genius who could not rein in his love of practical jokes when he found himself alone in a monastic library in Morocco, these are some of the boldest and best pranks in literature. Not to mention the most influential in terms of the books people believe in now. For without the crazy schemes of a provincial Frenchman in the 1950s there would be no one who believes you can find the secret of Jesus’ bloodline in the Louvre. And without the violent acts of a disenfranchised Mormon in the 1980s, one of America’s most influential church groups would be resting far more comfortably on its Utah laurels than it is today.

T
HE EARLY LIFE
of Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold was one not even the most fanciful of German romantic novelists could have made up. Born on the lonely Baltic island of Usedom to an impecunious Lutheran pastor and his wife, his formative years were spent in the company of books, pious adults and nature – he never even saw another child of his age until he left the island to continue his education at the University of Greifswald in 1813. It was always assumed that Johannes would follow his father into the clergy, and indeed that was what the young man seemed to want for himself, but not before spreading his wings for a while in his provincial college town, where he made a name for himself as one of his year’s most enthusiastic drinkers. He also began to write poetry, and when a volume of his work was given a small print run it was, to his delight, well reviewed by Goethe himself.

However, Meinhold was an inherently religious young man and after he had got his rebellion out of the way he continued with his theological education, taking his doctorate at the age of twenty and then being posted to a series of dull institutions to further his professional practice. His first job, in 1821, was as rector of the school of Usedom, and soon after he was promoted to the role of pastor at Koserow church on the same island. He moved around the district working at different churches, but it was with Koserow that he would come to be infamously associated in years to come, because it was there that he set his most famous literary creation. In fact, he stayed there little more than a year, moving on to the isolated diocese of Krummin, where he would spend the next sixteen years performing the unchanging cycle of duties of the country pastor.

It was during this quiet time that his literary career began to preoccupy him more and more. As well as poems, he now turned his hand to prose, hoping, no doubt, that his mature talents would be recognized, as his youthful poetry had been. These were the years that the new German Romantics – Hegel, Schlegel and Heinrich Heine – were taking over from classical writers like Goethe and Schiller, and Germany was by far the most happening place on the European literary scene. It was also the time of the Napoleonic wars and most of Europe was in the grip of a revolutionary fever which resulted not only in the creation of fine poetry, prose and music but of philosophical and theological developments which were, to a conservative like Meinhold, utterly shocking.

One of the most famous revolutionary religious thinkers of the day was David Strauss and it was for him and his followers that Meinhold reserved his strongest disdain. Strauss believed that Jesus ought to be seen as a historical figure, not a divine one, and set about deconstructing the Bible to support his thesis, which he published under the title
Leben Jesu
(
Life of Jesus
). In this unprecedented book he rereads Jesus’ miracles in strictly mythical terms, ignoring both the rational explanations and the divine ones that had split Enlightenment thinkers into two groups. Strauss was a genuinely radical thinker and by the time Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) translated his work into English in 1846, he was officially the leading subversive writer on Christianity in Europe and had a wide following. He was also very young (twenty-seven when he published the
Leben
) and fiendishly handsome, which may well have inflamed Meinhold’s ire even more.

To a man like Meinhold, saying that the virgin birth was merely a silly story invented to please Messiah-hungry Jews in the aftermath of Jesus’ death (one of Strauss’ most famous theories) was the worst kind of sacrilege. He felt that people who believed this sort of thing would believe anything and were incapable of discerning what was a real historical document and what was not. And in 1839 he began to focus all his literary skills and ideological indignation on proving that this was the case.