Teaching about the Holocaust: The Next Generation

Over Chanukah, I took my nine-and-a-half year old daughter to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. She has always (though, considering she’s only nine and a half, “always” is a relative term) been very interested in the Shoah, constantly reading books and asking questions.

 

When she expressed interest in visiting Yad Vashem, I decided Chanukah vacation was the perfect time to do it: She was home, while her younger brothers would be elsewhere for the morning. (Yad Vashem does not allow children under 10 in the museum, even prohibiting babies in carriers or strollers. When we got to the museum, we had to lie and say that my daughter was 10. Yes, I lied to get into a Holocaust museum. A first.)

 

I warned her before we entered that she would see some things that were very sad, even scary, and that she could ask me anything she wanted. Her personality falls on the more intellectual side, and she is naturally inquisitive; I knew she would handle the more difficult parts with questions rather than tears.

 

As we walked through, she did indeed ask a thousand questions, asking me to explain the pictures, why this and what’s that. But it was in one of the more ordinary rooms that a comment she made caused me to think hard about how we teach the Holocaust to our children. We were in a room that had been restored to look like a living room from a German house prior to the war. It contained original chairs, cabinets, shelves, and even toys that someone had managed to salvage.

 

My daughter’s reaction: “So they saved a lot of stuff!”

 

Ummm, I tried to explain, yes, they did manage to salvage a few items, but there were literally thousands, millions of homes and properties destroyed. Millions. This room represents such a tiny fraction of what had been lost. She had a similar reaction when we went into the next room and saw a box containing the silver crowns that are used to adorn Torah scrolls. “Wow, they got back so many of them!” Yes, I explained again, some we managed to get back—they had been hidden, left alone or smuggled out. But although these were saved, more than1,000 synagogues were burned on Kristallnacht alone.

 

I stepped back and thought about all of my daughter’s interactions with the history of the Holocaust:

 

A survivor comes to speak to the class on Yom Hashoah. And that person, no matter how horrific their tale, is just that—a survivor. In the end, they got out, whether by luck or ingenuity or good timing, or all of the above. In the end, they were okay. And kids cling to that piece of the story. They want to. They have to.

 

We emphasize the heroic aspects of the Holocaust. In fact, Yom Hashoah’s full name is “Yom Hazikaron LaShoah v’Lagevurah.” Gevurah is Hebrew for strength, heroism. We commemorate the Holocaust not on the day of liberation or the end of the war, but near the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We teach about the Partisans and the “chassidei umot ha’olam”—righteous gentiles who placed their own lives on the line to save Jews.

 

When you add all this (Uprisings! Survival! Partisans! Heroic non-Jews!) to the final outcome of the war (The Nazis lost! Hitler’s dead!) you end up with a strange conclusion. As my husband pointed out, “So … she thinks we won!”

 

In the museum, I wanted to shout at her, “No! No, it was not okay! It was horrific and evil and what we lost we will never get back.” We can never recover from the extermination of six million.

 

So this is my question—how should we talk about the Shoah to our children? We don’t want to traumatize them. We want to protect them. But have we over-emphasized the uprisings, survivors and salvaged Torah crowns at the expense of the more grisly truth? When we don’t talk about the medical experiments, the gas chambers, the Einsatzgruppen (German forces tasked with carrying out mass murders of Jews and others)—are we protecting our children or doing a disservice to them?

 

We do want to give our children hope. We want them to know that there were people fighting till the end, that there was a tiny glimmer of hope and decency even during our darkest time. And yet, they should also understand that it is not a story with a happy ending.

 

What is the balance between the “shoah” and the “gevurah?”

 

How do we grownups teach the Shoah to the next generations?