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A lot of terrible things happened in the past and no real education about history can happen if they are excised or obscured. Yet lately we’ve seen governmental bodies trying to shield students from abhorrent actions, with the rationale that the truth could harm them.
In Tennessee, a school board decided to remove the two volume graphic novel “Maus” from its curriculum. In this powerful work, Art Spiegelman, a son of concentration camp survivors, portrayed the unfolding of the Holocaust and showed how it seriously harmed victims, survivors and their descendants.
While the board stated it wanted “to ensure such an event is never repeated,” it complained about the book’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
Since Spiegelman drew Jews as mice and Germans as cats, the little nudity in “Maus” is in drawings of animals. Curse words are included rarely. And how does the school board think the violence of the Holocaust should be depicted? Politely?
Besides the murder of 6 million Jews and the systematic killings of Roma people and trade unionists and gay people and the mentally disabled, the Nazis committed violence and atrocities with beatings, starvings and torture. Initial genocidal efforts involved mass shootings; later came mass gassings. Often those who survived lived with trauma.
Not a single “event,” the Holocaust involved extensive, systematic killings — planned by German leaders, carried out by soldiers and bureaucrats, and aided by civilians — preceded by Nazi propaganda and legal limits on the rights of Jews. Earlier persecutions, blood libels and hatred helped made the Holocaust possible.
The truth is that accurate learning about the Holocaust isn’t easy or pleasant. But it is necessary.
When I was a child, I asked my father why there were people on the beach in Coney Island with numbers tattooed on their arms. He told me they were concentration camp survivors and that the Nazis did it.
Around then, in Hebrew school I saw films of concentration camp survivors taken right as or soon after Allied troops arrived. Later I learned about General Dwight D. Eisenhower going to the Ohrdruf concentration camp a week after its liberation and ensuring images of these people and places were preserved.
I was younger than the students the Tennessee school board wants shielded. And the films I saw were far more shocking than anything in “Maus.” They didn’t show mice drawings but haggard people who had been starved and terrorized and piles of the dead.
The same wrong-headed idea that learning about history shouldn’t discomfort students is being seen in a series of state laws on teaching about race in American history.
A Moms for Liberty chapter aimed one such law toward books on the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and about a 6-year-old Black child, Ruby Bridges, who was spat on when she walked into an all-white school. The group called these “divisive stories.” Among other things, it also objected to a photo of segregated, labeled drinking fountains and to a teacher’s manual saying that Birmingham’s notorious Bull Connor (who ordered dogs and fire hoses to attack nonviolent civil rights protestors) “used his job to maintain segregation and bully blacks.”
An activist lobbying for a Florida law to outlaw teaching that could make some students uncomfortable told a reporter, “To say there were slaves is one thing, but to talk in detail about how slaves were treated, and with photos, is another.”
American chattel slavery included ships transporting African people that were, as historian Marcus Rediker put it, “floating concentration camps,” which bred disease and were responsible for close to 2 million deaths. What happened on those ships and to enslaved people in the United States was indeed horrible but obscuring the specific details of slave systems does no service to Americans.
Positive aspects of history that give us pride of course must be part of learning. But mature love, of people or countries, tries to grapple with wrongs, no matter how horrific, so that the future is better than the past.
