NEW YORK (AP) -- A man who wrote a Holocaust memoir that's now been exposed as a lie says he was just trying to "bring happiness to people" with a heartwarming story. Herman Rosenblat now admits that he and his wife didn't first meet at a concentration camp where she purportedly had sneaked him apples and bread. He fooled a lot of people, including a literary agent who now says she wonders why she never questioned the story. Believers also included Oprah Winfrey, as well as film producers and others who ignored warnings from scholars that the story didn't make sense. It's another blow to the publishing industry, which has again been burned by a memoir that could have been prevented by some fact-checking. And Holocaust survivors are concerned that this made-up story will only encourage doubts about what really happened. The director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University says, "Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending." And he says people's willingness to believe the phony story makes it even more important to have "real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps."

(Copyright ©2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)