Mr Rosenblat, 79, a retired television repairman living in Miami, said that he met his future wife while he was a teenage boy in Schlieben, a sub-division of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
The nine-year-old girl, he said, tossed him an apple. The two met again by chance when Mr Rosenblat agreed to a blind date with a Polish immigrant named Roma Radzicki in Coney Island in 1957, and recognised her. They married soon afterwards.
Holocaust scholars doubted the story, and it was exposed by the New Republic magazine. Ben Helfgott, a former Schlieben inmate, told the magazine that Mr Rosenblat's story was “simply an invention”. Mr Rosenblat joins the swelling ranks of discredited memorists. “I wanted to bring happiness to people,” he said. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”
I love it when bullshit stories like this are discredited. I had this fable sent to me as a proof that there were miracles in this world. "What are the odds?" the person who sent it to me said. There is a reason I am so cynical, because that is how the world works. As for Rosenblat's excuse that he lied to "bring happiness to people..."
I guess that is what the kids are calling opportunism these days. There I go again with my cynicism.
1 comment:
This hoax is a tragedy. The Rosenblats have hurt Jews all over and given support to those who deny the holocaust. I don't understand why Atlantic Pictures is still proceeding to make a film based on a lie. I also don't understand how Oprah could have publicized this story, especially after James Frey and given that many bloggers like Deborah Lipstadt said in 2007 that the Rosenblat's story couldn't be true.
There are so many other worthwhile projects based on genuine love stories from the Holocaust. My favorite is the one about Dina Gottliebova Babbitt - the beautiful young art student who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children's barracks at Auschwitz. This painting became the reason Dina and her Mother survived Auschwitz. After the end of the war, Dina applied for an art job in Paris. Unbeknownst to Dina, her interviewer was the lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They fell in love and got married. Now that's a romantic love story! I also admire Dina for her tremendous courage to paint the mural in the first place. Painting the mural for the children caused her to be taken to Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he made her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber.
Also, Dina's story has been verified as true. Some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. The story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children's barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also documented.
Why wasn't the Rosenblatt's story checked out before it was published and picked up to have the movie made?? I would like to see true and wonderful stories like Dina's be publicized, not these hoax tales that destroy credibility and trust.
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