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.