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"This was not Holocaust education but miseducation," Ken Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, said in a statement. "Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart-rending. All this shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust," Waltzer said. "All the more important then to have real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps." Among the fooled, at least the partially fooled, was Berenbaum, former director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Berenbaum had been asked to read the manuscript by film producer Harris Salomon, who still plans an adaptation of the book. Berenbaum's tentative support -- "Crazier things have happened," he told The Associated Press last fall -- was cited by the publisher as it initially defended the book. Berenbaum now says he saw factual errors, including Rosenblat's description of Theresienstadt, the camp from which he was eventually liberated, but didn't think of challenging the love story. "There's a limit to what I can verify, because I was not there," he says. "I can verify the general historical narrative, but in my research I rely upon the survivors to present the specifics of their existence with integrity. When they don't, they destroy so much and they ruin so much, and that's terrible." "I was burned," he added. "And I have to read books more skeptically because I was burned."
[Associated
Press;
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