Random offensive statement time

[bzarcher]

So I was looking around campus in the midst of running around to deal with a) Mail server failure, b) Router failure, and c) copier failure.

Saw a poster for another series of holocaust talks, and how some people were shaking their heads and talking about getting 'too much' holocaust.

And that lead me to a somewhat chilling thought: Is it possible that people have put so much effort into the 'never again' school of thought that future generations have been totally desensitized to what the holocaust was and represents? That so much has been hammered home that people...just don't care?

Do educators perhaps need to back off a bit? Should the holocaust history be carefully husbanded in public education for times when it will give the most shock value, and make the greatest impression?

Or are my fears baseless, and we should continue a pervasive method of teaching it? (I started getting holocaust history + pictures in, I believe, 5th grade. Every year following, it came up. When did you guys start being exposed?)

Comments

[dasubergeek.livejournal.com]

I just had a long discussion with my wife about this topic. We saw poster advertising Yom Hashoah talks and remembrances (it's in April, they were just old posters).

When I was a kid, the hadachim l'shoah, the Holocaust survivors, were everywhere. I grew up in a place where Jews were so numerous that public schools closed for the High Holidays.

Every Jew I knew had a parent, or a grandparent, or an aunt, or an uncle, who fled Europe during the war.

Most people hear things like, "She never could throw anything away, she lived through the Depression." We always heard things like, "You should be grateful for what you have, your grandfather fled from Poland with six dollars in his pocket," or, "If only my father, alav hasholem¹, were here to see you accepted to college!"

It was so real to us. I sat in friends' homes and heard stories of friends and family disappearing, never to be heard from again, of people hiding in haystacks and barns and digging pits in the ground to avoid detection.

The word "shoah" is not a word that can be uttered without some kind of emotional surge. The names Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Mittelbau, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, etc., cause chills to run up my spine. I had a chance to visit Auschwitz on a weekend trip while I was in Switzerland and I couldn't do it. Too many people in my family and my friends' families died in the showers.

But nowadays, kids aren't that close. So many of the survivors have died, so many kids are one more generation removed from that horror. They don't hear it firsthand now, they hear it as what happened to their grandparents' parents. And so they aren't as sensitive to it.


¹ Alav hasholem, fem. Aleha hasholem: May his soul rest in peace, cf. It. buon'anima.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

My grand-aunt still shows her grand and great-grandchildren the tatoo on her arm. Shows it to all the kids in the family she can see. Every year she gets weaker, and the skin more and more like parchment, and I realize she won't be here much longer.

But I also think you (and I, to a lesser extent), got the better education, because we saw it, touched it, and had it explained to us by those deepest affected, not some bored blonde talking in front of a classroom. I think the problem isn't even that kids aren't close, it's that the teaching has gotten mechanical rather than emotional.

[degraine.livejournal.com]

Cut 'n' pasted from Lateline's archive, 17/5.

'Alec Campbell's death last night ended the last tangible connection to a battle on a distant shore 87 years ago.'

(His granddaughter, Jo Hardy) 'I can remember saying to him, "How amazing that you're the last Gallipoli veteran", and he said just like that, "It's not amazing at all, it's entirely logical - I was one of the youngest"'

I don't think it's really mattered to Australia that we had so few (and now, none) direct links to Gallipoli. It's graven onto our collective subconscious.
Some other things, however, are not...