It’s natural that as Yom HaShoah approaches, conversations turn to the Holocaust and the brutal destruction of the six million. It’s also natural that the topic doesn’t make for pleasant conversation; even inspiring stories of survival begin in the ghetto, or with starvation, or abandonment, or any number of tragic beginnings.
Ironically, as we get farther from the Holocaust, more and more material is being developed to inform people about the Holocaust. And in the last decade or so, children’s material on the subject has widely expanded. But is that a good thing?
In an essay for Tablet magazine, Marjorie Ingalls poses the question of whether kids are being overexposed to the Holocaust and, consequently, whether kids are beginning to think that the Holocaust equates the Jewish story in entirety?
When I read the headline of her piece, I automatically recoiled. If we don’t educate children about the Holocaust, if we don’t involve children in remembering the Holocaust, it will be forgotten. That’s just human nature. As experiences fade, we lose interest; we forget. I felt the same when I recently visited the 9/11 memorials in New York: If we don’t want something to be forgotten, we must commit ourselves to it being remembered.
Yet something in Ingalls’ piece resonated. I was reminded of the serious lack of Holocaust educational materials during my childhood, and the inappropriateness of the some of the material used. For example, something I will never, ever forget, are the images from the miniseries ‘Holocaust,’ which was screened to us in grade school during the ‘80s. Now any one who has seen it knows that ‘Holocaust’ is not appropriate for children. Yet it was screened, because there wasn’t anything else.
That traumatic experience, however, doesn’t make me think children shouldn’t learn about the Holocaust; but materials must be age-appropriate. So my answer to Ingalls’ question is ‘no.’ In fact I applaud the efforts to produce Holocaust material oriented for children (material that, of course, distinguishes elementary, middle and high school levels). Otherwise, educators would be relying on ‘Holocaust,’ ‘Schindler’s List,’ and other adaptations intended for adult viewing.
What’s your opinion? Are we overexposing children to the Holocaust? Or is children’s literature on the subject a positive step?
