The Holocaust is personal to me. My mother and grandmother left Balti, Bessarabia, and arrived in the United States in 1917. My grandfather came before the war. Most of the family stayed in Europe. My father’s parents came in the 19th century from Lomza, Poland. Most of their family stayed in Poland.
Not one member of my family survived the war. All perished in the Holocaust.
Inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust are common and undermine its significance. Just today, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., apologized on Twitter for comparing the effort to vaccinate people to the Holocaust. An incredibly vicious comparison since vaccines save lives; no one’s family is being burned in a furnace because of getting vaccinated.
A message from the Anti-Defamation League.
Soon after the reunification of Germany, ADL organized a leadership mission to a united Germany. One of our most significant meetings was with Dr. Rita Süssmuth, then-head of the Bundestag (Germany’s House of Representatives). One member of our group asked her about teaching young Germans about the Holocaust.
Her answer is even more relevant today than it was then.
She said that one can’t talk about that horror in the same way to the young generation as speaking to their parents or grandparents. They are too far removed from the events of World War II. What is necessary, she reasoned, are creative approaches to make the history relevant and visceral.
Süssmuth’s comment comes to mind as we observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, which is also the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no doubt that more than 80 years after World War II, a variety of factors are coming together posing challenges to Holocaust memory, but all the news in this arena is not bad. It’s a good time to take stock.
The negatives are abundant. First, as is often discussed, a major instrument for educating young people — the living testimony of survivors — is diminishing rapidly as most survivors are gone. One hears over and over again that a survivor speaking about his or her experience before a classroom or school assembly has awakened the students as to what the Holocaust was all about and why they should care about it.
Second, the statistics on the lack of knowledge about even the basics of the Holocaust are concerning. A Pew survey revealed that more than 80 percent of Americans know that it was an attempt at the annihilation of Jews, but far fewer have any idea as to how Hitler came to power and how the horrors came to pass.
The Claims Conference surveyed younger Americans and found that 63 percent of millennials and Gen X-ers did not know that six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust.
And ADL’s Global 100 Survey several years ago found that only 54 percent of people worldwide had ever heard of the Holocaust and 32 percent thought it was greatly exaggerated or a myth.
Third, the meaning of the Holocaust is undermined seemingly every day by its trivialization through inappropriate analogies. In the hyper-political and polarized world we live in, exacerbated by social media, it seems that everything one doesn’t like is compared to the Nazis or the Holocaust.
And, of course, one of the most egregious comparisons — often meant to undermine the significance of Holocaust memory — is equating Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews. In other words, so the warped logic goes: The world had its Holocaust, now “the Jews have their own.”
Fourth, Holocaust denial continues to have a life of its own and has found a particular lifeline as extreme right groups look for respectability. There is no doubt that historically the association of the murder of six million Jews with Nazism and fascism has been the major obstacle for decades for such groups to gain legitimacy in political circles. Denying or at least diminishing the Holocaust can open a pathway for revival for extreme right groups who until now have been largely excluded from a role in democratic societies.
This is a powerful combination of factors. There is, however, the other side, where a good deal of progress has been made in Holocaust awareness and acknowledgement.
In the early days, it was Jews and Israelis who were the leaders in educating about the Holocaust. Israel, as a home for the largest number of survivors, invested in the matter with Yad Vashem, Yom HaShoah and the Eichmann trial. Over the last few decades, however, we have seen growing involvement of other governments and broader societies in this project. This is a good development.
So, the U.N., often seen as hostile to the Jewish people because of its many anti-Israel stances, has incorporated two important Holocaust-related elements into its programming and policies. The first is that of today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which produces annual programs, statements and recollections and keeps the attention of the international community on this genocide for one day.
The second is a resolution passed just recently which denounces Holocaust denial as against U.N. values.
Another cross-country effort, initiated by Sweden, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which, in effect, builds on the U.N. initiative to implement educational processes about the Holocaust in participating countries. Recently, its participants met in Malmo, Sweden to discuss practical ways to move forward on Holocaust education and combatting antisemitism. And, of course, many Holocaust museums have cropped up across the U.S. and Europe, the most important the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which attracts large numbers of visitors, most of whom are not Jewish.
And then there are the many efforts by non-governmental organizations, two of particular significance being the Shoah Foundation’s vital interview project of survivors and ADL’s Echoes and Reflections public school education curriculum and program on the Holocaust.
These and many others try to live up to Süssmuth’s plea for creativity in connecting young people to the Holocaust. Holocaust knowledge and awareness are clearly more important than ever because of the passage of time, the surge of antisemitism, the loss of shame about antisemitism as the Holocaust is more distant, and the rise in extremism of all kinds and the efforts to legitimize fascism.
Examples are the use of artifacts, photographs and testimony to encourage students to present their own questions about those events; real time questions and responses from Holocaust survivors using hours of pre-recorded video footage; and the use of local U.S. news sources during the period of Nazi rule and how events were seen from an American perspective. Holocaust awareness and acknowledgement are clearly more important today than ever.
Kenneth Jacobson, ADL
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What is the most evil thing ever done? Surely, this qualifies:
https://www.thefirstnews.com/tag/Oskar%20Singer
Curses on those who oppose teaching our young people that this is what happens when you hand over the reins to fascists.
This link is to the full article.
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/the-systematic-massacre-of-all-children-under-10-will-forever-be-a-stain-on-humanity-says-tfns-stuart-dowell-15611
In solemn memory. We must not turn away. We must not forget.
Bob, this is a chilling, terrifying article. Would any red state school board allow it to be taught?
I told my students of this. In Florida.
I think I will let some classes read this in the next couple of weeks. Red state or none.
Bless you, Roy
Don was a friend of mine. We taught together many years ago. He told me his parents made it out of Germany just ahead of the beginning of the ghetto/yellow star of David period. His grandfather was a German nationalist. He had served in World War I, receiving the Iron Cross. He was basically dragged from his native Germany swearing that Hitler was a great German and could never hate the Jews because they were good German citizens. Don did not know if he ever really understood what had happened even as it became obvious.
We must not only remember the Holocaust, we must study to try to understand how it could have happened. Even if it makes us uncomfortable.
Makes me think of the Orthodox Jews wearing MAGA hats.
“And, of course, one of the most egregious comparisons — often meant to undermine the significance of Holocaust memory — is equating Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews. In other words, so the warped logic goes: The world had its Holocaust, now “the Jews have their own.””
Actually, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is even more egregious because of the Holocaust. You would think that if anyone would understand why ethnic cleansing is wrong, it would be a Jewish nation. It’s astounding that the people who talk about Palestinian rockets and kids throwing rocks never talk about how the Israelis bomb entire apartment complexes to the ground, attack schools, hospitals, women, children, etc. Even now Israel is clearing an entire Palestinian village to put in a theme park. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/world/middleeast/park-israel-dcity.html )
The rest of the world sees the truth. Even most Israelis see the truth. The last holdouts allowing (and supporting and financing) these atrocities are American Zionists, many of whom are endtimers who think it’s necessary to get the Jews back to Israel to brink about the Rapture (although there are plenty of Democrat supporters as well mostly profiting off the political and economic advantages of the Israeli alliance. Calling out the atrocities of the state of Israel is not anti-Semitism. What’s anti-Semitic is allowing the on-going massacre of the Palestinian people trapped in the world’s largest (but rapidly shrinking) open air prison.
see my post below
Thank you for this post.
I do think that the horrors of the Holocaust are being played down — “normalized” — the way the far right often does.
The Nazis did remove Jews from their homes and herd them into places like the Warsaw ghetto. Awful conditions, many people died, with regular atrociticies committed by groups of Nazis who thought it might be fun to violently attack some vulnerable Jew. That’s arguably a more credible analogy to what the US did to Japanese Americans on the west coast.
But the real horror of the Holocaust wasn’t the herding of Jews into places like the Warsaw ghetto.
It was the intentional systematic annihilation of an entire people. Using old style technology (forcing people to dig mass graves, lining them up, and gunning them down with machine guns, row after row after row) and “new” technology like gas chambers.
The Nazis scientifically researched ways to mass murder. The gas chambers were developed after doing scientific experiments with other methods – like mobile gas vans that could drive into a community and herd people in.
The Holocaust was about EFFICIENTLY annihilating a people.
It is hard for many people to understand the scope of this. Go an eastern european town that had a thriving – sometimes even a majority – Jewish population in 1930 where there is no sign of Jewish life. It’s as if they didn’t exist. Few people in the town even know it ever did.
The displacement of peoples during war has happened many places — including in our country. Borders change, people move. The establishment of modern India and Pakistan involved much violence (and still does in Kashmir) and also much displacement of people, which continued until a more stable settlement of people occurred. Sometimes a peace – often tenuous – is brokered as in Northern Ireland.
The Holocaust was an attempt to use methods of modern technology to efficiently exterminate every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe.
And it was government policy to figure out the best and most efficient way to annihilate every Jewish man, woman and children in Europe.
A fascinating aspect of this horrific thing was that the Nazis themselves recognized how difficult it was for people to gun down defenseless people en masse. Himmler was quoted as suggesting that the einsatzgruppen, the death squads assigned the task of mass murder, were among the most glorious of their heroes, because they did this wonderful deed, despite its difficulty.
The gas chambers were apparently conceived of as a way to distance the perpetrator from the victim, something done intentionally. The result was the bureaucratic and efficient mass murder of about 11 million people.
Yes – which is why I don’t understand the attempt to cover up what the Holocaust really was by invoking the Israeli – Palestinian conflict or the US treatment of the Japanese. Rightly criticizing when governments do bad things is important.
Minimizing what the Holocaust was — normalizing what the Holocaust was – is unnecessary and I don’t know what purpose it serves.
And I should have added that there were other ethnicities that the Nazis also seemed to want systematically annihilated from the face of the earth like the Roma people. And there others like Communists and gays and disabled folks that also were targeted for annihilation although that was different than a government policy to exterminate an entire ethnic group because they believed that ethnic group was “vermin”.
Rounding up people and forcing them into the Warsaw ghetto is not the same as clearing out that ghetto and sending every last man, woman and child to be efficiently exterminated.
The murder of defenseless children and others should not and must not be forgotten. The fact that it happened should make all people not only uncomfortable, but horrified. Sometimes discomfort is necessary for growth and understanding. We must rebuff any attempts to whitewash the past.
Diane, sometimes the world feels much smaller than it actually is. My father’s father was born in 1877 in the same town, Lomza, as two of your grandparents. He was shoemaker. He and his family faced violent antisemitism long before the Nazis came to power. He lost two of his sisters in the holocaust. My other grandfather also was from he Poland and he lost all three of his sisters during the holocaust. Thank you for your important post.
Thank you, Louis. I was in Poland in 1989, and I told those I met (teachers) that my father’s family came from Lomza. One of them sent me photographs of the Lomza Jewish cemetery. All the headstones were broken and overturned. I read about Lomza in the Jewish Encyclopedia. The entire Jewish population was murdered by the Nazis.
“In the hyper-political and polarized world we live in, exacerbated by social media, it seems that everything one doesn’t like is compared to the Nazis or the Holocaust.”
And as seen on this blog many times every week, everything or anyone that one doesn’t like is described as fascist. See earlier in this thread for examples just today.
The Holocaust refutes the principle of extreme pacifism for all but the most devout adherents. The Holocaust was ended by overwhelming force – military force – not by any appeal to reason or compassion. Perhaps the most stunning statistic I’ve read about about the Holocaust is this: in 1933 the Jewish population of Poland exceeded three million; by 1950 it was about 45,000 (source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). The Germans killed over 90% of Polish Jews.
on this blog many times every week, everything or anyone that one doesn’t like is described as fascist
An extremely important part of memory is not allowing it to happen again. When you see fascism, you call it out. No appeasement. If it quacks like a duck, . . .
The terms fascist and racist have lost most of their sting in public discourse because they are so overused. A few months ago a long essay (I can’t find it online today) recounted the use of the term fascist in American politics. Every Republican nominee for President since 1960 has been called a fascist by many prominent people on the Left. In 2012 Joe Biden effectively called Mitt Romney a racist. It’s a lazy way of reasoning that should be beneath serious people, like lazy conservatives calling all mainstream liberals socialists.
“Nazis and conservatives had authentic differences, marked by very real conservative defeats. At every crucial moment of decision, however—at each ratcheting up of anti-Jewish repression, at each new abridgment of civil liberties and infringement of legal norms, at each new aggressive move in foreign policy, at each further subordination of the economy to the needs of autarky and hasty rearmament—most German conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) swallowed their doubts about the Nazis in favor of their overriding common interests.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
Gary, I’m not lazy. Do you think book burning and censorship are valid parts of a democracy? Do you think laws banning the truthful teaching of history are democratic? Do you think that racism is a fantasy? I don’t think that Nixon or Romney or the Bushes or McCain were fascists. I think Donald Trump is a wannabe Mussolini. Mussolini was a fascist. Sorry, but you can’t censor what I think or write. I do not use words carelessly.
Why do you think Diane posted on this day about leaders calling for the banning of books that they consider an insult to “purity” or that, according to them, besmirch our “national identity”? Because that’s what fascists do. If it freaking quacks like a duck. This is the lesson that must be learned, that we cannot forget. If it quacks like a duck.
Actively engaging in book burning is fascist. Urging parents to spy on teachers and report them to the government is fascist. Is there a better word?
Exactly
Paxton, quoted by Bob Sheperd above, feels that fascist is not too strong a word to use on Trump (see his 2021 essay). He is a scholar I respect, having used his book i my Europe in the Twentieth Century class in grad school in the 80s. I do not feel qualified to argue with this scholar. Of course, anyone at the barbershop can have a two bit opinion.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It comes exactly one week after the Wannsee Conference, which was held in a suburb of Berlin in 1942. In that 90 minute meeting, the “Final Solution to the Jewish problem” was planned out. It called for obliterating 11 million Jews.
Pure and simple.
The Holocaust is a word that has lost its original evocative power, but has become a convenient default topic for school projects and a theme for the launching of some false historical analogies.
There’s no shades of gray about the Holocaust. No flip side. Folks like me just can’t, in the words of Taylor Swift, “shake it off”.
Why not?
Because of locales like Treblinka, where 1 million Jews were murdered in one year, the ghettos where infant Jewish children were held by their ankles and their brains smashed against concrete walls, and open pits in Eastern Europe into which Jews tumbled after being shot and often buried while still alive.
Such events are scarcely even in the periphery of curriculum anymore, except occasionally as part of a larger differentiated picture.
One-third of the globe’s Jewish population was slaughtered. I’m a trifle touchy about even inadvertent scoffing at history’s most brutal crime and unforgiving of its most damning incrimination of the human condition and nature.
Crimes against Jews has increased exponentially recently (even in Brooklyn) and polls show that a majority of the general population is clueless and shamelessly unmoved.
The Holocaust is rapidly slipping into obscurity as the collective memory of the world is eclipsed by calculated ignorance or politically-coded contempt for its victims and their posterity.
There have even been a few disconcerting rumblings even in Congress. Geopolitical controversies sometimes mask anti-Jewishness.
The Holocaust must be unapologetically taught. There is no balanced perspective. It had nothing to do with harsh economic conditions or the Versailles Treaty. The Jews were its particular victims, though lessons to be learned from it are humanity-specific.
We cannot boycott the truth or divest history of its bitter reality. We should apply the word “sanction” to mean support, not punishment of the posterity of the Holocaust martyrs.
“Never again!” must not become “Almost never again!”
Well said!
Sad to see that an idiotic Tennessee school board has pulled Art Spiegelman’s Maus—which I read about 39 years ago—from an 8th grade curriculum, reportedly because of rough language and nudity.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/tennessee-school-board-removes-maus/index.html
On a brighter side, I’m told that Spiegelman is a graduate of the NYC High School of Art and Design, and that he’s coming into the school to talk to the students soon this semester.
30 years ago, that is. Every decade counts, for sure.
McMinn county that is. Just north of Dayton, home of the 1925 Scopes trial. At least the Scopes trial was not really a serious attempt to prevent teaching of evolution. I am not so sure what this present book banning is for unless it is for votes.
Writer Neil Gaiman:
“There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day is personal for me, to. This column may interest some of you:
It Can Happen Here | Washington Monthly
This is a video of the wonderful kids of the PS 22 children’s chorus singing for a Holocaust survivor. It is well-worth watching to the very end, because after these incredible young students sing, some of them talk to the survivor, who speaks honestly about the Holocaust and the horrors. Learning about that – hearing that – one can see the empathy on those students’ faces. The truth can be upsetting but covering it up is much worse. Germany understood that teaching the truth was important. But this is the kind of information the right wing wants to “protect” their white children from learning, not because it is harmful to those children — it isn’t – but because it is harmful to the right wing’s invoking white supremacist ideas to advance their political agenda.
NYCPSP, you forgot to add the link to the video.
Oh, my apologies, I see it on my screen so I didn’t realize it didn’t post. I will try it again now. Thank you for letting me know.
If this link above isn’t working, it’s probably because it’s from Facebook. I just realized I could post a youtube link:
Sorry, also trying to post a youtube link but the post has disappeared
If you google “PS22 and A World of Peace” it will also show up if my links aren’t posting
As someone who grew up in a German-Canadian household this was “uncomfortable” for me to read. But fortunately governor Youngkin is forbidding my teachers from educating us about it….
Diane, My mother’s family is also from Lomza. She and several of her siblings came to the US right after WW1. Her parents and several other siblings remained behind but made it to Palestine in 1938. One aunt of mine refused to leave. She, her husband and two children died in the Holocaust.
I’m a loyal reader of your blog – a long time teacher, school director and teacher educator. I also lived in Houston for 13 years. We have that in common too.
When I was in elementary school, decades ago, our school had an assembly and invited Robert Clary (known for his role as Corporal LeBeau in Hogan’s Heroes) to come and speak about his experience during the Holocaust. I just remember him coming across as self-effacing, with a great sense of humor. After nearly 50 years, that personal interaction was one of the most powerful memories I’ve had of elementary school. Makes sense why we are seeing banned books and curriculum. Fascism then and now. The parallels are striking.
My father didn’t often speak of his four years of active duty in the European theatre. But when he did, it weighed a ton.
He was part of the force that liberated Dachau and was one of the soldiers who opened the main gates.
What he witnessed there changed his life. Plans of a career as a concert pianist gave way to decades of public service as a lawyer. Public service. He wanted to help people.
When he heard about the Holocaust deniers, he asked me to relate his experience, whenever I felt it necessary. So that it would never be forgotten. And repeated.
Prayers for your family and so many more, Diane. My wife’s family lost many in those years, as well.