Furious family members are horrified that a Holocaust survivor concocted a story that the girl who became his wife saved him from starvation by tossing apples and bread over a concentration-camp fence.
Ken Rosenblat, the son of Holocaust hoaxer Herman Rosenblat, said he knew of the lie “for many years” but couldn’t stop his 79-year-old dad from spreading it.
“It was always hurtful,” he said.
And Jutta Rosenblat, 85, Herman’s sister-in-law, said her late husband, Sam, knew about the hoax and was so angry he refused to talk to his brother as he lay dying two years ago.
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“He knew the truth and it ate him up,” Jutta told The Post.
In “Angel at the Fence,” a memoir to have been published in February, Herman Rosenblat said he met his wife, Roma, at Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, when she tossed him apples and bread over the fence.
After the war, he claimed, he met the girl again on a blind date in the Big Apple and they got married. The blind date was real, but the concentration camp story was questioned.
Rosenblat’s account, which Oprah Winfrey hailed as “the single greatest love story in 22 years,” was challenged by Holocaust scholars and family members in articles in The New Republic.
And on Saturday, Berkley Books canceled publication of the memoir, saying Rosenblat had admitted fabricating the part about the apples.
“I just wanted to bring happiness to people,” the retired TV repairman said.
His son, Ken, told the magazine’s Web site he is still stunned by the lie.
“My father is a man who I don’t know. I can’t understand it. It’s not my way of thinking,” he said.
“I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I tried to just stay away from it,” said the son.
Jutta Rosenblat said she was stunned when she opened Sunday’s Post and learned that the hoax was out in the open.
“We feel very bad that it was exposed,” she said
Asked why she thought her brother-in-law had made up the tale, she said simply, “For money.”
Additional reporting by Brigitte Williams-James