In preparing to read the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary, I spent some time going over the Holocaust with students. I was taken aback at how little they seemed to know about it. “A bunch of people — I think they were Jews — got killed” seemed to be the general view. They do know something about it now, but their questions revealed both how complicated and unfathomable such an act is.
Most common was, “Why did they hate Jews?” Why indeed? Many answers, none of them short and simple. I offered a few: notions of Jewish conspiracies; Jews as “Christ killers” and the old blood libel; the fact that there are a substantial number of Jews in banking (which is directly traceable to early Christians’ reluctance to engage in usury) as proof of some international Jewish conspiracy. All those explanations in turn (which is why I was silent about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
As I spoke, though, and showed pictures and short clips of survivors, it was almost eerie how closely they paid attention. Any noise brought immediate shushing, and the look of shock on everyone’s face told me that there is at least one thing they’ll remember from their time with me.
Did you show them your personal photos you took at the concentration camp in Poland?
Yes, and then when we began reading “Diary of Anne Frank” in class today, I mentioned that I’d been inside the actual annex where they hid. Cries of, “Mr. Scott, you’ve been everywhere!” went up every time I mentioned it.
My daughters told me I read them every World War II and/or concentration camp book ever published for children (amazingly, there are a number). It was as if I could, in this way, let someone else talk about it. Then, when my oldest was just a little younger than your students, she was told (as a homework assignment) to watch a movie with her mom that was a mom’s favorite. I chose Julia (about Lillian Hellman’s friendship with a Jewish woman activist who died at the hands of the Nazis). I always thought that this is the one way that I assuredly made them Polish — by giving them a fragment of what we grew up with in postwar Poland: memories of the Holocaust.