Love Lessons

When Oprah chose Love in the Time of Cholera by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez for her Book Club, she chose one of the greatest love stories ever written. This exploration of a 50-year affair explores the nature of love in all its forms—passion, lust, infidelity and romance.

Now get ready to read about four more amazing love stories. The first, Oprah says, "is the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air."

When he was 12, Herman Rosenblat and his family were taken from their home in Poland and sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Young Herman was forced to work shoveling bodies into a crematorium. All the while he did not know if he, too, would soon be killed.

One day two years later, Herman walked up to the barbed wire fence and saw a girl on the other side. "She says, 'What are you doing in there?'" Herman says. "I said to her, 'Can you give me something to eat?' And she took an apple out of her jacket."

The girl fed Herman an apple every day for seven months. Then one day he told her not to come back—he was being moved to another camp. "A tear came down her eyes," Herman says. "And as I turned around and went back I started to cry, too. I started to cry knowing that I might not see her again."

Herman was shipped to Czechoslovakia. Just two hours before he was scheduled to die in the gas chambers there, Russian troops liberated the camp and Herman was set free.

UPDATE: On December 27, 2008, Herman Rosenblat admitted to fictionalizing portions of his life story, including how he met his wife. Based on this admission, the publisher of his forthcoming memoir—Angel at the Fence —cancelled plans to print his book.