How Should Children’s Books Deal with the Holocaust?

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From The New Yorker:

As a child, I was obsessed with Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Like Anne, I wanted to grow up to be a writer; like her, I kept a diary (though less faithfully), which for a time I addressed, following her model, as Kitty; like her, I agonized over how little my mother understood me and longed to swoon in a boy’s arms. My obsession peaked at the age of eight with a visit to the Secret Annexe, in Amsterdam—the warren of rooms where the Frank family hid from the Nazis. I had imagined it countless times and had the floor plan memorized, but seeing it was a shock: it was so much smaller than I had pictured.

That may have been the moment I began to understand how great was the distance between Anne’s world and my own. As a girl from a family of survivors, coming of age in nineteen-eighties America, I felt the Holocaust as a tangible presence, simultaneously inescapable and unknowable. My grandparents, Jews from Lodz who fled east when the Nazis began their advance into Poland, had better luck than many: taken prisoner by the Soviets, they spent much of the war in a Siberian labor camp. Some of their family had already made it to Palestine, but most of those who remained behind were sent first to the Lodz ghetto and then to Auschwitz. My great-grandmother died there, but my great-aunt survived.

The enormity of the losses my relatives had suffered was palpable in the deep lines around their mouths, the tremors in their hands, the sighs they heaved every time the war years came up. Once, my great-aunt, who had Alzheimer’s disease by the time I came to know her, even grabbed my arm in search of the tattoo that she thought she would find there. But they didn’t often talk in detail about their experiences. When they did, the stories they told were confusing and full of gaps, and I’d complain at having to hear them. I was terrified of my relatives’ emotion and of the crushing responsibility it inflicted on me: the paradox of being charged with remembering something I hadn’t experienced.

Reading about the Holocaust was my way of trying to fulfill that obligation. But the gaps remained. I pored over the final pages of my edition of Anne’s diary, where the facts of what happened after the police raided the Secret Annexe were stated tersely: deportation to Westerbork, Auschwitz, and, finally, Bergen-Belsen. Searching for more, I came upon a book in which Hanneli Goslar, a childhood friend of Anne’s who was interned in another section of Bergen-Belsen, recalled having caught a glimpse of her, almost unrecognizable, through a fence. She returned a few days later with a package of food, but when she threw it over the fence another woman caught it and ran away as Anne screamed. The chatty, cheerful girl had become a person I couldn’t identify with at all: skeletal, desperate, scrabbling for food. She had gone to a place I couldn’t follow, not even in my imagination.

Those who died in the camps left no testimonies, and, when I was growing up, the idea of writing imaginative literature for children about the death camps was considered almost sacrilegious.

. . . .

Why, [Eric A.] Kimmel wondered, had no writer for children broached “the ultimate tragedy”? He concluded that it had to do with the irreconcilable tension between the subject and our assumptions about children’s literature. To write about the Holocaust realistically, in all its horror, violates the tacit promise of writing for young readers, he maintained: “not to be too violent, too accusing, too depressing.” At the same time, a story that won’t keep young readers up at night contradicts the historical reality. Kimmel continued, “To put it simply, is mass murder a subject for a children’s novel? Five years ago, we might have said no; ten years ago we certainly would have. Now, however, I think the appearance of a novel set in the center of the lowest circle is only a matter of time.”

. . . .

When the novel opens, Hannah is complaining about having to go to a Seder hosted by her survivor relatives. “I’m tired of remembering,” she says. Her grandfather Will frightens her by yelling at the TV set whenever footage of the camps comes on; once, when she used a ballpoint pen to ink a copy of his tattoo on her arm, thinking it would please him, he screamed at her in Yiddish. At the Seder, a little tipsy from the watered-down wine she has been allowed to drink, Hannah opens the apartment door to welcome the prophet Elijah—a key moment in the Seder ritual—and finds herself transported to Poland in 1942. Suddenly, she’s Chaya, the niece of Gitl and Shmuel, siblings who have taken her in after the death of her parents. At first, Hannah/Chaya thinks she’s stumbled onto a movie set or become the victim of an elaborate joke. There’s even some humor in her interactions with other shtetl girls, who are puzzled by her references to pizza and “General Hospital.” But when the guests arrive for Shmuel’s wedding to Fayge, a rabbi’s daughter from a nearby village, Nazis are waiting at the synagogue to transport them all for “resettlement.” To Hannah’s mounting frustration, no one will listen to her warnings:

“The men down there,” she cried out desperately, “they’re not wedding guests. They’re Nazis. Nazis! Do you understand? They kill people. They killed—kill—will kill Jews. . . . Six million of them! I know. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. We have to turn the wagons around. We have to run!”

Reb Boruch shook his head. “There are not six million Jews in all of Poland, my child.”

“No, Rabbi, six million in Poland and Germany and Holland and France and . . .”

“My child, such a number.” He shook his head and smiled, but the corners of his mouth turned down instead of up. “And as for running—where would we run to? God is everywhere. There will always be Nazis among us.”

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

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18 thoughts on “How Should Children’s Books Deal with the Holocaust?”

  1. It is taught from a young age in many Hebrew schools and of course in Israel.

    I taught fourth grade Hebrew school for six years. While the Holocaust was not on my teaching agenda, it did come up. Some of my students were the grandchildren of survivors. They wanted to know why. Why did it happen? Why do they hate us? Why didn’t anyone stop it?

    Tough questions, all of them. One of the things I learned to do was teach the Holocaust by telling them about what “passing” meant. I said that some Jews escaped being murdered because they didn’t look Jewish and lied about their ethnicity. I told them that I would likely have passed as a non-Jew and survived. That inevitably brought the question, “Would I have passed?” So I went around the room and told each of them which may have been overlooked, and which would have gone to the camps.

    There was always a quiet time after that as the lesson was absorbed.

  2. To answer the question: thoughtfully? What are the options? You’re writing for kids, so go with “thoughtful.”

    There are plenty of books to model an approach from. I vaguely remember Lois Lowry’s “Number the Stars,” about a little Danish girl who hides a friend in her house after the Nazis occupy the country. A few years later a little girl I babysat was also moved by it.

    If going for YA, “Children of the River” is about a teenage refugee girl who’d escaped Cambodia. I was intrigued by the Cambodian customs. In college I discovered “In the Time of the Butterflies,” about young sisters who stood up against a dictator in the Dominican Republic.

    There are plenty other “issue books” for kids and teens about this/that/the other evils of the twentieth century — books kids like — so study them. I’ll bet the SCBWI has handy guidelines for writing them in age-appropriate ways.

    On the other hand, Felix’s Marvel reference, reminds me that these topics could be tackled very well in comic book form, where the stories are allegories that allow child-friendly explorations of the issues.

  3. It does seem that there is an inordinate amount of teaching about the Holocaust, even though in real terms, various Communist groups have killed more people.
    I suspect this is because of certain vested interests to continue on with the Victimhood narrative and keep the money coming.

    • There are two reasons we hear about the Nazis.

      One is that there is a certain flavor of political activist who finds it convenient for pretending that one flavor of politics, and only ever one flavor of politics, can easily slip into appalling evil.

      Secondly is that the aftermath of WWII had a really significant psychological impact on Americans, and through that generation, American culture.

      The men who fought in that war saw a lot of what the Nazis did, and saw in those actions a twisted mirror of things Americans had done. Which is why they turned against those things. It is an important part of the timing of the end of Segregation, it is an important part of why there was pushback against FDR. The Japanese were ‘rehabilitated’, so hatred of the IJA* damped out. The Italians had switched sides. The Left was successful in using lying and intimidation to exclude Communist crimes being weighed as evidence by the national culture. Which left the Nazis, illegal in Germany, no political capital, no reasons of convenience to whitewash or conceal the comprehensive records we had. It had been a long time since the Indian wars, and we were ready for someone else to hate in place of the Indians.

      *Yes, this whitewashes the IJN, and a number of other Japanese entities. I understand why Americans felt that way about Japan during the war.

      • The reason the Holocaust looms over every other genocide before or since is because at no other time in history were so many nations complicit in the attempt to eradicate a single people from the face of the earth. That was Hitler’s ultimate goal: Eliminating every Jew in every nation. Yes, there have been other mass murders. But none of them carries that unfortunate distinction. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/what-makes-the-holocaust-unique

        Setting aside the obvious trollishness of the anonymous coward above, there has still never been anything like the Holocaust. Even as the Allies were bearing down on the camps, the death machine went on. They tried to the last moment to murder the Jews.

        Today, Jews are the only ethnic group in the world–the ONLY one–whose numbers are fewer now than they were before WWII.

        So yes, the Holocaust gets taught a lot. And although I’m sure Anon is only trolling, there are enough people out there who think like him (and post the same twaddle on many, many message boards and blogs) that I’m seriously reconsidering bringing back my political blog, where I got to know first-hand the vitriol and the hate of people who still admire the Nazis and wish they had not failed in their effort.

        Well, they did fail. We’re still here.

        • The Holocaust gets taught so it won’t go the way of the Armenian genocide, swept under the rug to curry favor with the turks. Nobody dares speak for their dead just as few are speaking for the Rohinya, the likeliest to be the next swept under the rug.

          Many still try to erase the Holocaust the world over, claiming the numbers were inflated or worse, by blaming the victims.

          As always, only certain victims matter.

        • I’m less than convinced that those reasons are why the Holocaust is so well remembered in the West.
          The actual reasons are rather more prosaic.
          1. Westerners experienced the reality of the Final Solution in a way that they did not experience the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward. No American soldier partook in the liberation of a collective farm, but many liberated concentration camps.
          2. The application of industrial methods by what was considered among the most cultured and civilized nations of the world to mass killing.
          3. The sheer breadth of the thing. The Nazis weren’t just after Jews–Roma, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, all were consigned to the fire.

  4. As to the OP question, I’d suggest a light touch.

    Such as “bad things happened to a lot of innocent people” and while most of the world has determined it must never happen again, it has happened again and will almost certainly happen again. Hopefuly not soon and not here. Now let’s go watch a light and fluffy Marvel movie. Something like INFINITY WAR.”

  5. Ah, yes, the Holocaust. How about adding children’s books about the Holodomor? The Great Leap Forward? The Killing Fields? The slaughter and slavery in Africa and Europe by the various Jihads? (The Crusades, too.)

    By the time they’re eighteen, I would be surprised if a single member of the generation turned out even close to sane.

    • Don’t forget the Armenians!

      Although since it’s not allowable to speak ill of any muslims that one hardly gets mentioned these days.

      On the other hand, the pandemics spread from the European arrival in the americas are fair game, never mind the diseases that ran the other way.

    • Why do you hate historical education? 🙂 A pre WWI German book pointed out that one of the purposes of a historical education is getting rid of excessive humanitarian notions, and I’ve certainly benefited that way*. I was a big history buff, and I’m perfectly sa…, oh wait, scratch that.

      I may have prevented my molestation as a child, because I knew enough to be wary, and did not make myself vulnerable to teachers. But quite a lot of kids would be damaged by knowing what I did. I was damaged. What the kid should be told is a difficult question, that should be answered by the parents, who know the kid best, and absolutely not by a bureaucracy.

      *See the Little House trolls, who apparently don’t realize that one of the elections last cycle was between an admitted Nazi**, someone with clear ties*** to violent white supremacism, and a Democrat running as a Republican. They probably would have thought that the guy with the R by his name was the white supremacist Nazi.

      **You probably know my exact cheat with the explanation. And the counter-argument.

      ***Ibid.

  6. “How Should Children’s Books Deal with XXX?”

    Why, yes, you could put sex in there and make just as much sense as anything else children may not be ready for. Though if they think the holocaust needs to be dumped into a ‘children’s book’ without the child first being taught that there are bad people out there who are willing to do bad things to other people to get their way, Then I think Disney’s Cinderella should have shown a few more little things from the story it was stolen from – like the cutting off of toes to better fit that slipper!

    • Yeah, my first thought when I read that headline was, “They probably shouldn’t.” Kids are not just tiny adults. Their brains aren’t fully developed. They need to experience and learn things in a certain order, in certain times, in order to become well-adjusted, emotionally healthy adults. You don’t want to delay learning certain things too late, but pushing them too early is also a big problem. Everything in its time.

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