Oprah Winfrey hailed it as "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - a heart-rending tale of the Holocaust. I turned out to be a hoax.
It was the account of a teenage boy and nine-year-old girl separated by the fences of a Nazi concentration camp in wartime Germany. The boy - a young Jew called Herman Rosenblat - was kept alive thanks to the food thrown to him by his young friend, Roma Radzicky.

He survived the war but was split from her, only to be reunited in an incredible chance on a blind date more than a decade later.

The book, Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived, was due for publication next month, and a film based on it was due to go into production in March.

That was until this weekend when Berkley Books, part of Penguin Group (USA), announced it was cancelling the project after Holocaust historians and journalists raised serious concerns over the veracity of the story.

"Berkley Books is canceling 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."

Rosenblat's story upset other Holocaust survivors, according to
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at
Emory University.

Lipstadt said the survivors didn't believe the tale
either. She expressed concern that the revelation might be exploited by holocaust deniers.

In 2006, U.S. author James Frey admitted he had fabricated key parts of his drug and alcohol memoir "A Million Little Pieces," the top selling non-fiction book in the United States in 2005.

In February, Misha Defonseca admitted most of her bestselling autobiography, which told of a young Jewish girl saved by wolves while hiding from the Nazis in wartime Europe, was made up. The next month, Margaret B. Jones' purported memoir about growing up as a young half-Cherokee girl in gang-ridden Los Angeles also was discovered to be fiction..

The most infamous hoax is the 1965 novel The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński which describes the world as seen by a young boy, "considered a Gypsy or Jewish stray," who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland) during World War II. Scholars even raised questions about the book's authorship.

No one is denying Rosenblat is a Holocaust survivor, only his account of how Radzicky helped keep him alive. According to Rosenblat, his love story began in the Schlieben concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald complex, in 1945.

He tells how he saw Radzicky, then a child, hiding in a tree on the other side of the fence. Also Jewish, she was pretending to be a Christian and lived in the area. Rosenblat writes that she became his lifeline, throwing apples and bread to him over a barbed-wire fence.

He said 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. They married and are still together.

The Rosenblats appear not to have mentioned their story until the 1990s. He entered a newspaper Valentine's Day competition for the most the most romantic story and won.

Oprah featured them on a Valentine's Day show in 1996 and again in November last year. The book deal was completed a month later. The story also became a children's book, Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, published this year.

But this month the Washington-based New Republic magazine quoted Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish studies programme at Michigan State University, who said that survivors of the camp could not recall anyone mentioning the incident about throwing apples.

While he conceded that there was a slim chance that Rosenblat could have concealed this from fellow prisoners, he concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence. "The story is a made-up story," Waltzer said. "So far as I can discern, it didn't happen."

After the article in New Republic, Berkley on Thursday offered a partial defense, saying it was a work of memory, the truth of which was known only to the author. It quoted Rosenblat saying: "This is my personal story as I remember it." But by Saturday it had decided to cancel.

Rosenblat, 79, a former television repair man, who lives near Miami with his wife, said in a statement: "I wanted to bring happiness to people. I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Harris Salomon, who had been due to make the film, told New Republic he felt let down by Rosenblat.