Do you remember when you learned about the Holocaust?

 Or at least began to understand how horrible it truly was?  I don’t.  It seems like information I always had.  I grew up in family with middle class values regarding education, so there were always books around.  And part of having books around is having information.  But surely there was a point when words like “Death March” and places like Birkenau and Auschwitz were new to me.

            I remember reading The Hiding Place sometime around junior high.  After that I read several Holocaust survivor accounts.  Those books stand out in my mind, but even then, there wasn’t that moment of surprise that this had happened.

            This quarter I asked one of my classes to pick from among the 12 Truman nominees a book for me to read aloud.  They chose Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz, based on the true story of Ruth and Jack Gruener.  The afterword explains that while most of the story is true, Gratz added some events to give a larger picture of the events in the Holocaust. 

            The story starts in the Krakow ghetto. It quickly goes from there to the Plaszow concentration camp where the main character, a young boy named Yanek must survive under the insane commandant Amon Goeth.   Then it is one concentration camp after another.  He labors in the Wieliczka salt mines, goes to Trzebinia, meets Mengele in Auschwitz, survives the cattle cars and the death marches. 

            Unlike The Hiding Place and some of the other accounts I remember reading, this story has very little redemption.  The only thing young Yanek has to hold on to is a will to survive.  Yesterday I read to my students about one of the death marches.  Yanek sees a boy about his age stumbling and finally decides to help him.   So far he has survived by looking out only for himself.  But he finally decides he can’t watch one more boy die needlessly.  So, he finds enough strength to support this boy along the way.  In the process Yanek loses his last scrap of bread.  When they lie down that night, he sees the boy has some bread left and is tempted to take it, but he decides to wait until morning, convinced the boy won’t last the night.  The boy wakes the next morning.  Yanek finds himself wrestling with guilt, upset that the boy survived.  He convinces himself he is owed that food.  As he reaches for it, the boy wakens and pulls hi bread away.

            “”Wait,” I said. ‘I’m the one who helped you yesterday-‘ I started to say, but without so much as a thank-you the boy staggered away to join the march.” (pg. 183)

            When I began this book with my class, I was asked multiple times “What is the Holocaust?”  My students don't come from reading families.  They don't have information lying around simply for information's sake.  Many of them had little knowledge of Hitler other than he was bad.  They had some idea that he hated and killed Jews.  But this!  This horror!  This is new to them.  And I am the one to introduce it to them.

            Sometimes as a teacher you do something that you are pretty sure they will actually remember.  Making spiced peaches after reading Holes will probably stand out in some of their minds.  I bet a lot of them will never look at a paint sample without thinking of word families.  And for many of them, when they see a movie about the Holocaust or read about it in history class, they will remember their 6^th grade Read 180 teacher reading them that Prisoner B-something or other book. 

            I don’t know how to express the silence in the room as I read this.  What it is like for this to be brand new information.  My students don’t have a very complex vocabulary.   They are the age when they are crossing over from a concrete operational stage of thought to the formal operational stage. What that means is they aren’t necessarily capable of extrapolating abstract ideas and applying it to the world around them.  And so when I finish a chapter everyday, at least one student, often a different one each day, says the same sentence:

            “This is sad.”

            Teachers impact students.  But students impact teachers.  And so I am experiencing the horror of the Holocaust anew through their eyes.  And perhaps for the rest of my life when I hear of the evils and atrocities mankind commit, I will find myself less able to try to find some kind of reason or life lesson.  I think I may remember a 6^th grade student, choking back tears stating the obvious, the only thing worth stating:

            “This is sad.”