Relating The Holocaust by John Johnson IV
The Jewish Holocaust is a subject guaranteed to shock teens and evoke an entire gamut of emotions. This can make teachers uneasy with the idea of tackling such a difficult subject and dealing with parents who may be uncomfortable with the topic being taught to teens. Though this general uneasiness with teaching the Holocaust is understandable, its teaching is an important tool and should not be overlooked in considering means for addressing war, societal dynamics and human nature.
In her article Educating Without Overwhelming: Authorial Strategies in Children’s Holocaust Literature Sarah D. Jordan outlines her view of what an author must do in order to write a book centered around the Holocaust to be considered successful:
Within this body of literature, of course, there is great variation. There are many works of Holocaust Literature that are geared towards or intended for child readers that are judged by many to be too graphic or disturbing. However, those works which are successful (in that children read and enjoy them and that they are used in Holocaust education) are so largely because the author knowingly uses strategies that present the information in a less threatening way, educating children without overwhelming them. This means not merely omitting troubling details, but also trying to present a balanced picture, highlighting the good as well as the evil inherent in any discussion of the Holocaust. (Jordan 200)
For the most part, this statement is reasonable. However, I find one aspect of it disturbing and particularly counterproductive. As touched upon in the above quote, Jordan believes that the most disturbing details of the Holocaust should be omitted from books dealing with the Holocaust if they are to be used for teaching teenage students and younger. I disagree wholeheartedly; to give students only a portion of the known factual, historical picture is to give them an inaccurate representation of real events. When the Nazis occupied Poland they were nothing short of devastating and brutal. Incredible acts of cruelty were perpetrated by human beings upon human beings. This is an important detail of history, and to omit details that give a clear picture of this brutality is to deliberately miseducate our children and blatantly lie to them.
For a stark example of this, consider the following two sentences:
(1) Mr. Smith beat a dog to death with a stick.
(2) Mr. Smith beat a dog to death with a stick because it was mauling a toddler.
The first sentence could stand on its own and technically be true, and for all the listener knows, it is wholly true. However, if the second statement is true, then the first is a lie by omission. As children progress through their formative years, is it wise to lie to them and give an incomplete, and therefore an inaccurate representation of the truth? Consider a witness giving the message of the first sentence to a police officer; what would the consequences be? Would they be appropriate to the situation if the second sentence represents the whole truth? In order for children to grow up and learn from every success and failure of mankind they must be given all of the factual information available. To do otherwise is to take a revisionist approach to history, which cannot be afforded.
To include personal experience, when I was being trained to be a paramedic, I was told that many small children die in fires because they haven’t been taught what to do and are too young to figure it out on their own. The bodies of these children are usually found in places and positions suggesting they tried to hide in a closet. This is the same mentality displayed when an adult frightens a young child and that child covers its eyes: if I can’t see this danger it can’t see me, and if this danger can’t see me it can’t hurt me.
Unfortunately, this is not a defense against a fire or any other danger, and while the folly of this rationale is obvious to adults in the case of fire, it is sometimes adopted by teachers when dealing with a topic such as the Holocaust, a topic guaranteed to be disturbing. The critical deficiency of this rationale is it assumes that if students are protected from the terrible details of the Holocaust this somehow protects them from potential threats. It doesn’t—and if students are given an education that omits the horrific dangers of xenophobia, ethnocentricity and the ability to dehumanize, what is there to prevent our children from repeating tragedies such as this country’s treatment of blacks, Indians or any other racial, ethnic or religious group?
A well-developed article in the journal Classroom Spice gives solid reasoning for teaching the lessons and truths of the Holocaust, despite the distressing nature of its details:
…through the study of this subject students can come to realize 1) that democracy is not automatically sustained, but must be nurtured and guarded; 2) silence and indifference can undermine democracy and help perpetuate problems; and 3) the Holocaust was not an accident but the result of deliberate action and inaction.
Teachers will tell you that they confront some of the darkest aspects of human nature when they study the Holocaust, but in doing so they help students understand: 1) how the Holocaust was a watershed event in history; 2) the ramifications of racism and bigotry; 3) the implications of silence and refusal to face a problem; and 4) the use and abuse of power. (Mather 1)
In the article Holocaust Awareness and Education in the United States, Nurith Ben-Bassat summarizes very well the purpose of teaching the Holocaust to high school students by quoting one of the goals of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: to bring the story of the Holocaust to as many people as possible nationwide, “so that they may see and fear (Ben-Bassat 403).”
This is the purpose of history: remembering the past allows humankind to learn and bring about a better future. Failures to learn from World War I allowed World War II to bring unbelievable brutality and loss of life. This is exactly why the Holocaust should not be avoided in the high school classroom; it must be taught, so that our teens can grow into adults who understand the monstrosities inevitably intertwined with war, and thus be motivated to pursue effective means of diplomacy.
Every lesson we teach to our students should be presented in a way that forces them to consider the question how does (or how could) this topic apply to me?
Prior to either of the world wars, the United States had a holocaust of its own, which should also be taught in high school language arts classes as a related part of the Jewish Holocaust. There is commonly an initial reaction, at least on some level, of that’s the other side of the world, or that’s those people over there, or those people believe in (place a god or religion here) and that’s why they treated these other people so badly, etc. Associated with this reaction is usually a very naïve, and sometimes ethnocentric, view that such a thing would never be perpetrated by Americans, Christians, etc. In reality, Christians and Americans have perpetrated acts just as xenophobic, opportunistic and brutal as those perpetrated by the Nazis upon the Jews in World War II, and in just a large a scope.
For example, consider the treatment of American Indians in this country. The United States waged war on Indians and forced tribe after tribe off of native lands. There were massacres in internment camps, on reservations and in tribal villages. Once the Indian wars had been decided, the government took initiatives such as building the Carlise Indian Industrial School, and dozens of others modeled upon it, in order to assimilate the children of American Indians into white American society. Captain Richard C. Pratt, founder of the school, was famous for his motto about “civilizing” Indian Children: “Kill the Indian, save the man.
Another good example for demonstrating the monster of ethnocentricity to students is an editorial published by Lyman Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as quoted by Tim Carpenter:
The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With this fall the nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs.
The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.
Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. We cannot honestly regret their extermination. (Carpenter)
Quotes such as this one serve as perfect eye-openers for students who know the innocuous and sentimental movie The Wizard of Oz. Additional eye-openers would include events such as the well-known Jack London, author of The Call of the Wild, clamoring for a “great white hope” to defeat Jack Johnson, and the Buffalo Soldiers, a black U.S. military unit, consisting largely of freed slaves, being used to attack and oppress Indians along the frontier.
In addition to learning about the nightmares of war and the dangers of xenophobia, it is equally important for teens to learn about the bravery, resourcefulness and compassion of human beings in the face of it. Studying about the Holocaust is an excellent way to do this, and our society has the opportunity to let history speak for itself—quite literally, in the case of Holocaust survivors—and the opportunity cannot be passed up, because unless we learn from the mistakes recorded in accurate representations of history, and absolutely drive the point home, we will be doomed to the same pitfalls and the same hells experienced by prior generations.
There are myriad books on the subject of the Holocaust, but I have found three books that unfold very personal stories of survivors in ways very accessible to today’s teens.
Sam Offen’s When Hope Prevails: The Personal Triumph of a Holocaust Survivor (2005) is a direct eyewitness account of events that took place from the beginning of World Ward II to decades beyond it, when Offen immigrated to the United States. Offen relates the story of his extended family, friends and neighbors as they were torn from contented lives by Nazi occupation.
The stories are given as chronological anecdotes, with precise details of how the Nazis operated and how a handful of survivors managed to outlive the war. Though the details of Nazi violence are clear, Offen focuses more on the emotional, psychological, physical and other effects of the violence rather than trying to dwell on the most shocking details of the violence itself.
The back of the book contains an extensive appendix of fully captioned pictures. Some are of Offen and his family, relatives and friends. Others are of locations important to the story, such as places where he worked or hid, and concentration camps where he had been taken, including the one where he was rescued. There are also pictures, taken once Offen had immigrated to the United States, of one of his rescuers, other survivors and commemorative events as well, including a picture of Offen standing next to a rail car formerly used to transport Jews like chattel, but now filled with six million paper clips as a memorial to those who perished under Nazi occupation. The pictures are a good touch for making the stories more real to the reader; one can read the story of a child who was executed by the Nazis and then turn to the back of the book to see exactly how young and innocent the child looked just before the invasion; or one could read about how little the Jewish prisoners were fed and then turn to pictures of what the Jews looked like after having been in a concentration camp for a while.
An even more suitable piece of literature for teaching the Holocaust to teens is Maus a Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman. A graphic novel, the story is two-fold: a comic book-style cartoonist goes about present day life trying to understand and relate to what happened to his parents in the war so that he can publish it; the second story is the retelling of the Holocaust by the author’s father, Vladek, from the start of the Nazi invasion of Poland through the events leading up to Vladek being put into Auschwitz.
Vladek’s stories are honest and blunt, and Art Spiegelman’s illustrations preserve that honesty so that the reader can see exactly what his father went through. Not having been born until after his parents were liberated, Art asks many of the same questions that would be asked by today’s teenagers trying to understand what went on and why.
Maus a Survivor’s Tale II: And Now My Troubles Began picks up the story with Vladek’s processing into Auschwitz. As the title suggests, the Nazi oppression is much more palpable and the acts of violence become increasingly more brutal. Art Spiegelman takes great care in delivering an honest portrayal of his father’s experiences. He even draws timelines of his father’s jobs and diagrams of certain buildings—including gas chambers—experienced by Vladek during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.
A key reason why Maus is an excellent classroom read is how the characters are drawn: Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs. Juicy discussions of metaphor are to be had from this, but an additional effect of drawing the characters this way instead of as humans is that it is much easier for students to read all of the most disturbing details about the Holocaust and absorb them without being completely overwhelmed. There are no details hidden from the student; they are simply presented in a manner that is more easily digestible. A good way of teaching the Holocaust would be to have students read this book and then supplement the book with actual Holocaust photos to drive the point home.
These three books are excellent selections for teaching the Holocaust, and give ample opportunities for connecting incidents to parallel incidents in American history, incidents which will wake students like a slap in the face and show them that what happened in the Holocaust was a movement began and sustained by human nature, and defeated by it as well.
Works Cited
Bem-Bassat, Nurith. "Holocaust Awareness and Education in the United States." Religious Education 95(2000): 402-423.
Carpenter, Tim. Lawrence Journal-World 09 Oct 2000 25 Jul 2006 <http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2000/oct/09/oz_author_sought/>.
Jordan, Sarah. "Educating Without Overwhelming: Authorial Strategies in Children's Holocaust Literature." Children's Literature in Education 35(2004): 199-218.
Mather, Jeanne (editor.) "Teaching About the Holocaust, Is It Right for Your Class." Classroom Spice 3(2001): 1-3.