Exactly. I can’t remember not knowing, but my father’s brother married into a survivor family, before I was born, and my aunt pretty much raised me. Her parents were a third set of grandparents to me-- I called them Bobbe and Zayde, and her father had a tattoo. So did her oldest sister. My aunt probably had the biggest mark of all, though, in that she had had rickets after being hidden indoors and fed an inadequate diet for so long when she was really little. It’s remarkable she lived at all. In all the photos of her as a child after she came to the US, she has braces on her legs, and sometimes crutches: people used to assume she was a polio survivor. She’s been disabled to various degrees all her life. She just had a small limp when I was a child, but she’s pretty disabled now.
Of course, I didn’t hear everything all at once. I was a teenager before I learned that her sister was repeatedly raped over years by guards and soldiers, because she was sixteen and pretty, and very goyish-looking (she had light brown hair and blue eyes); ironically, it probably saved her life, because the teenagers and young women selected for the “rape division” got better food, and showers (actual soap and water showers), so they never had the lice infestations that caused so many typhus outbreaks.
I don’t know that children ever have to hear about something like that-- or even be handed a copy of Maus– but I doubt it will come as a shock to children that people are mean to each other.
The Indianapolis Children’s Museum has an exhibit on children who were involved in pivotal moments in history, and the choices are interesting. They use Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White. Ryan White was from Indiana, and his lawsuit against his school actually was a landmark case, even though people don’t remember it as such. Ruby Bridges is fairly obvious. Anne Frank is a little unusual since she didn’t actually do anything other than record events, but the exhibit does allow a segue to teaching kids about the Holocaust. Most schools take their students of trips there at some point-- schools in Indy go about every two years, and schools around the state take kids usually once in elementary school, usually about the third or fourth grade.
Cripes, in the first grade, in the US, we are taught a very black and white version of the religious persecution of the Mayflower pilgrims (who in reality were a bunch of loons, more than likely, that England was happy to be rid of), and another black and white story of the persecution of the colonists by King George (and most six-year-olds conflate the stories, and think the pilgrims fought the Revolutionary War). It’s years before we find out that things were not as bad as we thought.
I certainly don’t see why some kind of “The chancellor of Germany in the 30s thought the best way to pull Germany out of a bad economic situation was to get rid of all the people he thought was hurting Germany, which was all the non-Germans, and all the Germans who were sick or handicapped, and any Germans who he thought were disloyal. He turned into a dictator who decided to get rid of these people by any means he could, including killing them in big camps he set up in neighboring countries he invaded. It was a terrible time, and he was at war with most of the other countries in Europe as well. Finally, he declared war on the US, and that was one country too many for him to handle. The US troops were at the head of the missions that freed the people who were still alive in these camps,” can’t be taught to pretty young children. They don’t need to be shown pictures. They don’t even need to be told who Hitler’s special victims were, unless someone asks. The Jewish kids in class already know the answer.