Herman Rosenblat was just 11 years old when German soldiers rounded up his family during a raid on a Jewish ghetto in Poland. Sent to Buchenwald, Herman was put to work in the crematorium, shovelling dead bodies into the furnace, trying to survive in a world of hunger, fear and death.
One day, walking by the fence, he saw a small girl on the other side. She smiled at him, and when he asked desperately if she had any food, she pulled an apple out of her pocket and threw it over the fence. As he ran off, afraid of being caught and shot, he heard her whisper "Come back tomorrow." For six months, they met every day. She threw him an apple or a hunk of bread. They never spoke, but the warmth of her smile and the food she gave him kept his alive and convinced him that she was an angel, sent to him by his mother.
Herman was moved to another camp, and then eventually freed by Russian troops. He moved to England and then to New York.
Fifteen years later, in 1957, Herman was set up on a blind date by a friend. Rosa charmed him from the start with her warmth and beauty. It was only towards the end of their date that Herman touched on their shared history and asked her gently how she had survived the Holocaust. Rosa explained that her family had bought forged papers to hide the fact that they were Jewish, and that they'd lived quietly on a farm next to a camp. She said that she had thrown apples over to fence to a starving young boy every day until he'd told her one day that he was being moved and not to come again. She'd always prayed that he had survived.
