Prominent Holocaust scholars are disputing the veracity of a survivor's memoir, Angel at the Fence, which is scheduled to be released by Berkley Books in February, The New Republic reported on Thursday.

Author Herman Rosenblat and Berkley have defended the accuracy of the book, but also called it work of memory and not of scholarship.

In Angel at the Fence, Rosenblat tells the story of how he met his future wife, Roma Radzicki, when he was a teenager in Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, in Nazi-controlled Germany. Radzicki, who was slightly younger, lived near the concentration camp with her family who were pretending to be Christians.

For seven months, she met Rosenblat at the barbed-wire fence, bringing him apples and bread. They lost track of each other when he was transferred to another camp, but met up again 12 years later in New York on a blind date.

They were married in 1958 and now live in Miami.

'Greatest love story'

Since going public with his story 10 years ago, Rosenblat has appeared on a number of televisions show, including two appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey called it "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air."

The Rosenblats' story was the subject of a children's book, Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, which was published earlier this year.

In March, Flower of the Fence, a feature film based on Herman's life with a budget of $25 million US, is scheduled to go into production.

The New Republic article said a number of Holocaust scholars, including Kenneth Waltzer, director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University, argue that the story could not have happened. They claim the layout of the camp would have made it impossible for Rosenblat to have approached the fence without being seen.

'Embellishment ... or ... fabrication'

They say that central premise of the story, that the girl met Rosenblat at the fence, "is, at the very least, an embellishment, and at worst, a wholesale fabrication," the magazine said.

"Some serious historians as well as other historical sleuths have done some pretty serious research on this story," Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, wrote on her blog on Dec. 15.

"There are also survivors who are very upset about this story," Lipstadt added. "They just don't believe it."

Author's 'personal' story

But Rosenblat said in a release issued Thursday through Berkley Books that this was his personal story as he remembers it. "I was a young child at the time my family was caught up in the Holocaust and I saw things through a young child's eyes. But I know and remember what I saw," he said.

Berkley, a division of Penguin Group, added that Michael Berenbaum, a leading American Holocaust expert, and former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum Research Institute, had found Rosenblat's story credible, and added that "any memoir based on the memories of a survivor is verifiable only by him or her alone."

The New Republic noted the stakes are high for Penguin. Last year, Love and Consequences, Margaret Seltzer's story of running with Los Angeles gangs published by Penguin's Riverhead division, was exposed as a fraud. It was pulled from bookstores a week after its launch.