Oprah Winfrey duped by Holocaust book

Oprah Winfrey (pictured) has been duped again. A heartwarming Holocaust memoir, which the television presenter hailed as "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television, has been exposed as a hoax.

The book, Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived by Herman Rosenblat, tells the somewhat improbable story of how the author was befriended by a nine-year-old Jewish girl while he was in a concentration camp and how she kept him alive by throwing him apples over the camp's fence. They were later reunited on a blind date and fell in love.

But the book, which was scheduled to be published next month by Berkley Books, part of the Penguin Group (USA), has now been scrapped after Holocaust historians and journalists raised concerns over the veracity of the story. As has a £17m film, entitled The Flower of the Fence, which is due to start shooting in March.

"Berkley Books is cancelling publication of Angel at the Fence after receiving new information from Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst," said Craig Burke, the company's director of publicity. "Berkley will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work."

According to Rosenblat, the love story began in the Schlieben concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald complex, in 1945. He tells how he saw Roma Radzicky, then a child and being hidden by a German Christian family, hiding in a tree on the other side of the fence. Rosenblat writes that she became his lifeline, throwing apples and bread to him over a barbed-wire fence.

He claims he was transferred to another camp and did not see her again until the late 1950s, when a friend asked him to go on a blind date in New York. The date turned out to be Radzicky and they subsequently married.

But Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish studies programme at Michigan State University, concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence.

Winfrey fell for Rosenblat's yarn hook, line and sinker. She featured them on a Valentine's Day show in 1996 and again in November last year. On the back of the couple's appearances on Oprah they received a book deal from Berkley. The story also became a children's book, Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, which was published this year.

This is not the first time Winfrey has been duped. In 2003, she championed a memoir written by James Frey, called A Million Little Pieces. It became a bestseller, but was later exposed to be largely a fabrication.