Just a quick background if you’re not familiar – a Tennessee school board recently banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel. It is about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. It was called “The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” by The Wall Street Journal and “The first masterpiece in comic book history” by The New Yorker. Writer, illustrator, game designer, and Nazi-puncher Gwen C. Katz tweeted about exactly why banning this story, among others like it, is so insidious. She calls it “pajamification”. It’s a very concerning trend of replacing literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives. In the end this leads to the destruction and recreation of history. So like Gwen says, “Read Maus, read Night, read Twelve Years a Slave. Give them to your children and then discuss with them about what they read.”
Source: Gwen C. Katz
For an additional look at how few survived, get the MetaMaus book. It includes family trees from before the war and after, showing how many branches were butchered.
I feel like making you feel weird and gross is part of the point of any account of our history that we don’t want repeated. If you dislike reading it then one would hope that you would try to prevent it happening again.
See also the way the Trail of Tears is being glossed over, and the atrocities that literally *inspired* hitler, forgotten…
I once got my hands on a copy of Fox’s Book of Martyrs, a hagiography (Christian account of the lives of their religion’s ‘saints’) that described in exquisite detail the means of martyrdom of as many known martyred Christians as the author could learn of.
If I had to put a word to the experience of reading it, I would probably have to go with ‘harrowing’. But even that word, I feel, falls well short. The records of the horrors humans have perpetrated on other humans in the name of faith went beyond horror, into a place so terrible that it became physically impossible for me to continue reading. And that was in less than a single chapter.
And yet, that horror made a powerful impression on me. Suffice to say, it was not a nice impression. Because the impression wasn’t just about the horrors of the martyrdoms described, but also the seeming ghoulish delight of the person who had recorded them. In retrospect, I understand where their delight came from – their twisted view of reality led them to believe that they were describing great acts of heroism that accorded the victims a place in Paradise. Of course, that wasn’t true at all. What they were really describing in excruciating detail was humanity’s inhumanity to their fellows across literal centuries, all in the name of an idea.
This was a powerful and ultimately valuable lesson. It showed me that the Holocaust, in which I possessed a strong education (having read The Diary of Anne Frank at age 12 and been heavily schooled in the history of the Holocaust throughout early high school), was nothing new. It was simply the worst of humanity writ large, like someone trying to play out Fox’s account all at once and every single day, because their big, bright and shiny ideas told them to. It taught me that this kind of ideological extermination of the other was a problem of the ages – and that it became all too easy to be left wondering how people could be so cruel, if we allowed ourselves a significant enough ignorance of history to believe the current example/s of it inexplicable.
It’s never inexplicable – and every teenager needs to absolutely know it, and absolutely know how society gets there and what the warning signs are. They also need to know what it feels like from the inside, so that they can understand why it’s so terrible – how fully it represents the perversion of even the least idea of humanity and decency. Because they need to know that if they choose to head down that road, then the monster will rapidly become the person they see in the mirror. Because on every street corner, you’ll hear people shouting the comforting words that start the ball of hatred rolling – words that describe and demonise the ‘other’, and describe an idealistic vision of how the world could be without the ‘other’ messing it up.
Books like Maus are harrowing – and that’s a damn good thing, in this instance. They should not be silenced. They should give your children nightmares, and make them sick to their stomachs, and make them feel despair and disgust at human malfeasance. Because until they face those feelings and embrace those events as a true record of history, they’re never going to emotionally connect with their horror. And that will leave them vulnerable to their repetition, as either victims or perpetrators.
To quote Tolkien: “I will not say, Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” Your kids need these tears. They need to face the truth of those events as told by those who suffered under them, and they need to understand their horror. Because those tears will be their ticket to stopping such tears from being wept en masse years from now, in the next Holocaust.