A Girl With An Apple
(This is a true story and you can find out more by Googling Herman Rosenblat. He was Bar Mitzvahed at age 75)
August 1942. Piotrkow , Poland .
The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited anxiously.
All the men, women and children of Piotrkow's Jewish ghetto
had been herded into a square.
Word had gotten around that we were being moved. My father
had only recently died from typhus, which had run rampant
through the crowded ghetto. My greatest fear was that our
family would be separated.
'Whatever you do,' Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me,
'don't tell them your age. Say you're sixteen.
'I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could pull it off. That way I might
be deemed valuable as a worker.
An SS man approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones.
He looked me up and down, and then asked my age.
'Sixteen,' I said. He directed me to the left, where my three brothers
and other healthy young men already stood.
My mother was motioned to the right with the other women, children,
sick and elderly people.
I whispered to Isidore, 'Why?'
He didn't answer.
I ran to Mama's side and said I wanted to stay with her.
'No, 'she said sternly.
'Get away. Don't be a nuisance. Go with your brothers.'
She had never spoken so harshly before. But I understood:
She was protecting me. She loved me so much that, just this once,
she pretended not to. It was the last I ever saw of her.
My brothers and I were transported in a cattle car to Germany .
We arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp one night later
and were led into a crowded barrack. The next day, we were issued
uniforms and identification numbers.
'Don't call me Herman anymore.' I said to my brothers.. 'Call me 94983.'
I was put to work in the camp's crematorium, loading the dead
into a hand-cranked elevator.
I, too, felt dead. Hardened, I had become a number.
Soon, my brothers and I were sent to Schlieben, one of Buchenwald 's
sub-camps near Berlin ..
One morning I thought I heard my mother's voice.
'Son,' she said softly but clearly, I am going to send you an angel.'
Then I woke up. Just a dream. A beautiful dream.
But in this place there could be no angels. There was only work.
And hunger. And fear.
A couple of days later, I was walking around the camp, around the
barracks, near the barbed-wire fence where the guards could not
easily see. I was alone.
On the other side of the fence, I spotted someone: a little girl with light,
almost luminous curls. She was half-hidden behind a birch tree.
I glanced around to make sure no one saw me. I called to her softly in
German. 'Do you have something to eat?'
She didn't understand.
I inched closer to the fence and repeated the question in Polish.
She stepped forward. I was thin and gaunt, with rags wrapped around
my feet, but the girl looked unafraid. In her eyes, I saw life.
She pulled an apple from her woolen jacket and threw it over the fence.
I grabbed the fruit and, as I started to run away, I heard her say faintly,
'I'll see you tomorrow.'
I returned to the same spot by the fence at the same time every day.
She was always there with something for me to eat - a hunk of bread or,
better yet, an apple.
We didn't dare speak or linger. To be caught would mean death
for us both.
I didn't know anything about her, just a kind farm girl, except that she
understood Polish. What was her name?
Why was she risking her life for me?
Hope was in such short supply, and this girl on the other side of the fence
gave me some, as nourishing in its way as the bread and apples.
Nearly seven months later, my brothers and I were crammed into a
coal car and shipped to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia .
'Don't return,' I told the girl that day. 'We're leaving.'
I turned toward the barracks and didn't look back, didn't even say
good-bye to the little girl whose name I'd never learned,
the girl with the apples.
We were in Theresienstadt for three months. The war was winding down
and Allied forces were closing in, yet my fate seemed sealed.
On May 10, 1945, I was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 AM.
In the quiet of dawn, I tried to prepare myself. So many times death
seemed ready to claim me, but somehow I'd survived. Now, it was over.
I thought of my parents. At least, I thought, we will be reunited.
But at 8 A .M. there was a commotion. I heard shouts, and saw people
running every which way through camp. I caught up with my brothers.
Russian troops had liberated the camp! The gates swung open.
Everyone was running, so I did too. Amazingly, all of my brothers
had survived;
I'm not sure how. But I knew that the girl with the apples had been the
key to my survival.
In a place where evil seemed triumphant, one person's goodness had
saved my life, had given me hope in a place where there was none.
My mother had promised to send me an angel, and the angel had come.
Eventually I made my way to England where I was sponsored by a
Jewish charity, put up in a hostel with other boys who had survived
the Holocaust and trained in electronics. Then I came to America ,
where my brother Sam had already moved. I served in the U. S. Army
during the Korean War, and returned to New York City after two years.
By August 1957 I'd opened my own electronics repair shop.
I was starting to settle in.
One day, my friend Sid who I knew from England called me.
'I've got a date. She's got a Polish friend. Let's double date.'
A blind date? Nah, that wasn't for me.
But Sid kept pestering me, and a few days later we headed up to the
Bronx to pick up his date and her friend Roma.
I had to admit, for a blind date this wasn't so bad. Roma was a nurse
at a Bronx hospital. She was kind and smart.. Beautiful, too,
with swirling brown curls and green, almond-shaped eyes that
sparkled with life.
The four of us drove out to Coney Island . Roma was easy to talk to,
easy to be with.
Turned out she was wary of blind dates too!
We were both just doing our friends a favor. We took a stroll on the
boardwalk, enjoying the salty Atlantic breeze, and then had dinner by
the shore. I couldn't remember having a better time.
We piled back into Sid's car, Roma and I sharing the backseat.
As European Jews who had survived the war, we were aware that much
had been left unsaid between us. She broached the subject,
'Where were you,' she asked softly, 'during the war?'
'The camps,' I said. The terrible memories still vivid, the irreparable loss..
I had tried to forget. But you can never forget.
She nodded. 'My family was hiding on a farm in Germany ,
not far from Berlin ,' she told me. 'My father knew a priest,
and he got us Aryan papers.'
I imagined how she must have suffered too, fear, a constant companion.
And yet here we were both survivors, in a new world.
'There was a camp next to the farm.' Roma continued. 'I saw a boy there
and I would throw him apples every day.'
What an amazing coincidence that she had helped some other boy.
'What did he look like? I asked.
'He was tall, skinny, and hungry. I must have seen him every day
for six months.'
My heart was racing. I couldn't believe it.
This couldn't be..
'Did he tell you one day not to come back because he was leaving Schlieben?'
Roma looked at me in amazement. 'Yes!'
'That was me!'
I was ready to burst with joy and awe, flooded with emotions.
I couldn't believe it! My angel.
'I'm not letting you go.' I said to Roma. And in the back of the car
on that blind date, I proposed to her. I didn't want to wait.
'You're crazy!' she said. But she invited me to meet her parents for
Shabbat dinner the following week.
There was so much I looked forward to learning about Roma,
but the most important things I always knew: her steadfastness,
her goodness. For many months, in the worst of circumstances,
she had come to the fence and given me hope. Now that I'd found
her again, I could never let her go.
That day, she said yes. And I kept my word. After nearly 50 years
of marriage, two children and three grandchildren, I have never let her go.
Herman Rosenblat of Miami Beach , Florida
This story is being made into a movie called The Fence.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people world-wide.
Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it
around the world.
Please send this e-mail to 10 people you know and ask them to
continue the memorial chain.
Please don't just delete it.
It will only take you a minute to pass this along. Thanks!
My answer: Dear friends,
This is a touching story that reached my desk via one of the "underground railroads of truth" that have been patched together to replace the American mainstream media, which is going through a slow, painful, very public and well-deserved death.
Since I was in the newspaper business for over 35 years and the story began with a set of instructions on how to verify its accuracy, I did what any modern reporter would do -- and never lifted a finger to check it out. But just before I was going to follow the author's request to send the post along to any contacts who might still trust my aging sources, a battered and dying truth fairy appeared on my shoulder pleading with me to give the tale a quick Google poke. Since the story struck me as vaguely reminiscent of a similar hoax and even an extensive Google research project took virtually no energy, I decided give it a shot.
It took a quarter of a second for Google to return 116,000 web posts describing how Herman Rosenblat, a well-meaning (ahem) Holocaust survivor had fabricated the most important parts of his story in order to make it, ah, better. He first admitted the scam in 2008 (a year before it was scheduled to be published), tried to resurrect it a year later and then gave it another go-around last February. All his admissions were covered by the news media pretty much on an international basis because the story had snowballed to enormous proportions, especially after international culture goddess Oprah Winfrey described it on-air as the single greatest love story she had heard during over two decades doing her show. She later issued an apology that was run as a major story by just about every newspaper in the world.
All of Rosenblat's bullshit got thrown on top of the earlier bullshit until it cast a shadow large enough to get the attention of his book publisher. And after hundreds of hours of high-level executive meetings, it was decided just to spike Rosenblat's "Angel at the Fence" and drop an attempt to save some careers by rerouting the title to the fiction section.
But, unlike once-great newspapers, this shit-stained project refused to die gracefully. Rosenblat has always insisted he made up the story for only the best reasons and money never had anything to do with it. But by now, along with almost everything else in his story, that last part is hard to believe. Before he admitted playing with the truth, the film rights to the book were purchased for $25 million. And even in the movie business, that's a lot to hide on a balance sheet, so the script made a sharp left-hand turn to avoid the pile of bullcrap and became the "story behind the story" of Rosenblat's hoax. Castel Film Studios, the largest movie studio in Eastern Europe -- producers of the hits "Borat" and "Cold Mountain" -- signed an agreement to finance the film, which was scheduled to be shot sometime this year.
So the entire affair is going down as one of the greatest literary hoaxes in history -- right up there with Clifford Irving's autobiography of Howard Hughes. But none of that stopped the journey of a thoroughly discredited 15-year old fake story from traveling through the new untruths -changing world of inter-connected new-media web sites that spread outright rumors that become confirmed true stories literally at the speed of light. If you don't believe me, I can show you a story sent to me yesterday by a good friend (he's actually a M.D., a surgeon) that supposedly proves that President Obama was actually against conducting the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden and that the entire affair was originated, planned, ordered and carried out by Leon Panetta. The attached documentation to this story read like a piece of bad fiction written by Howard Hunt with huge holes and factual errors. But I bet any hint of possible untruths never reached those on the receiving end of this electronic chain of blogs and web sites that purportedly distribute the news. It sure didn't reach the good doctor.
Incidentally, this kind of screw-up isn't new to journalism. It’s called a “scam” story in city rooms and it takes a sharp editor to spot one before it gets into print. l’ll be brief, but please consider the “Great Boomerang Trans-Atlantic Pigeon Scam.” It started with a small item in a small column in a small give-away weekly newspaper serving a small lower Manhattan neighborhood. It was in the midst of Fun City, a dark era in city history marked by soaring crime rates, crazed sweegee guys on nearly every corner and a virulent crack epidemic that left its mark on the 1970s through most of the 80s. The item quoted a local comic who had joked that there were so many empty plastic crack bottles in Central Park that city pigeons had eaten enough residue of the drug that thousands had become addicted and had been spotted acting crazy before dropping dead in record numbers. Well a “real city paper,” in this case The Post’s Page Six, had spotted the item and wrote an equally small item repeating the joke. Well, a New York-based reporter for the British press service – which is called the “Press Association” – saw the Page Six item and sent a small story to his editors in London.
Now on the European side of the Atlantic, the story took on a new life and morphed into something else when it ran in the “News of the World” -- an especially tawdry Sunday-only sister paper to the Rupert Murdoch-owned “Sun,” the biggest selling paper in Britain and the home of the topless “Page Three” girls. “The News of the World” is one of the best at “piping” weak stories into major scoops. The only problem with many of them was that they weren’t true. Anyway, the London office of the American version of the Press Association -- the “AP” or Associated Press -- then picked up the now huge pigeon story and sent it to New York, where it was sent to every media outlet in the U.S. as a huge, horrific story that probably kept thousands of tourists from checking into NYC hotels for decades. But it was all just a not-very-funny joke from the mind of a not-very-funny comic. (Well, I know – but I tried to be brief.)
The point, of course, is that the process a generation ago was the same – but it took a week. The explosion of the Apple story might have taken seconds.
No one wants to place any limits on the web (just as our Constitution prohibits ANY limits on American newspapers, sorry right-wingers and opponents of the MSM (main-stream media) while it does not prohibit licenses and other restrictions of broadcast media.
So if "What does all this mean?" is the question.
Then "Let's be careful out there, Americans." has to be the answer. |
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