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War, Apples United Couple

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The Associated Press

Published: October 13, 2008

NORTH MIAMI BEACH - In the beginning, there was a boy, a girl and an apple.

He was a teenager in a concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Germany. She was a bit younger, living free in the village, her family posing as Christians. Their eyes met through a barbed-wire fence and she wondered what she could do for this handsome young man.

She was carrying apples, and decided to throw one over the fence. He caught it and ran away toward the barracks. And so it began.

They never knew one another's name, never uttered a single word, so fearful they'd be spotted by a guard. Until one day he came to the fence and told her he wouldn't be back.

Before he was shipped off to a death camp, before the girl appeared, Herman Rosenblat's life had changed forever.

His family had been forced from their home into a ghetto. His father fell ill with typhus. The man knew what was coming and summoned his youngest son. "If you ever get out of this war," Rosenblat remembers him saying, "don't carry a grudge in your heart and tolerate everybody."

Two days later, the father was dead. Rosenblat was 12.

The family was moved again, to a ghetto where he shared a room with his mother, three brothers, uncle, aunt and four cousins.

Eventually, the ghetto was dissolved. As the Poles were ushered out, two lines formed. In one was those with working papers, including Rosenblat and his brothers. In the other, everyone else, including the boys' mother.

It was the last time he would ever see her.

It was in Schlieben, Germany, that Rosenblat and the girl he later called his angel would meet. Roma Radziki worked on a nearby farm and the boy caught her eye. And bringing him food - apples, mostly, but bread, too - became part of her routine.

Rosenblat says he would secretly eat the apples and never mentioned a word of it to anyone else for fear word would spread and he'd be punished or killed.

Shortly after Rosenblat told the girl he would not see her again, the Russians rolled in on a tank and liberated Rosenblat's camp. The war was over. Radziki went to nursing school in Israel. Rosenblat went to London and learned to be an electrician.

Rosenblat eventually moved to New York. He was running a television repair shop when a friend phoned him one Sunday afternoon and said he wanted to fix him up with a girl. Rosenblat was unenthusiastic. But finally, he relented.

It went well enough. She was Polish and easygoing. Conversation flowed, and eventually talk turned to their wartime experiences. Rosenblat recited the litany of camps he had been in, and Radziki's ears perked up. She had been in Schlieben, too.

She spoke of a boy she would visit, of the apples she would bring.

And then, the words that changed their lives forever: "That was me," he said.

After 50 years of marriage, their story has inspired a children's book, "Angel Girl." And there are plans to turn it into a film, "The Flower of the Fence."

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