When should the Holocaust be taught? When did you find out?

Just to define our terms, we’re talking about learning that during the Second World War there was an effort by the Nazis to murder en masse Europe’s Jews, Roma and other ‘undesirables’, not necessarily know the gruesome details about the shooting pits and sonderkommando work.

A rider question; how old were you when you first learnt/were told and how? Like many I first found out about it through the film Schindler’s List which I saw when I was about 13 (my parents would have had a shit fit if they’d known), but I didn’t really understand that it was fact based, thought it was like a horror film.

A year later they taught us about it officially in school, I remember it was ‘opt out’ if your parents wanted to and just before the lesson started (on Anne Frank, if memory serves) we were given another opportunity to back out, warned that the topic was very upsetting. It was in Religious Education class of all places.

Including a multi-option poll so you can answer what age and whether it should be opt-out like my education was. The variations on the circumstances on when you found out would take me all day to figure out so you’ll just have to tell us that yourself.

I’d say probably when the student gets into high school level world history courses. (14 or so in the U.S.) Any lessons on WWII should include the Holocaust. It should be compulsory.

I think I was probably about 10 or 11 when I started to get an inkling of what it was all about, but that wasn’t from school. I was a voracious history reader from an early age.

At home, we had a copy of the Life Magazine WW2 history. (My late father was an 8th Air Force vet & my mother worked at an air base over here.) It included a few pages of pictures of our troops discovering the camps.

We usually had a subscription to Life–which occasionally ran articles on the Holocaust. As I got older, I read Anne Frank’s diary–and “adult” historical fiction. Something about the Warsaw ghetto, for sure.

I can’t remember not knowing…

I don’t ever remember not knowing about it. My parents probably taught me as soon as I could start asking questions about my grandparents and their lives when they were young.

As Bridget Burke says I can’t remember not knowing about the Holocaust but as well as formal education it must have been something I picked up through cultural osmosis.

But for what its worth a couple of years ago I read ‘The Holocaust’ by Martin Gilbert, a veritable tome of a book. While I knew on an intellectual level what an awful thing it was it took this book for me to really feel it, so many paragraphs were basically, ‘and all six-thousand Jewish inhabitants of town X were taken out and shot’, page after page after page of this…I began to get a distinctly odd and queasy feeling and had to set the book down and go for a long walk before going back to it later.

So I don’t know when I first learned about it but I was in my early-30’s before it seemed in any way a real historical event and not something that happened back in the age of the dinosaurs and black and white television.

Jewish kids learn about it pretty young, I guess.

I don’t remember learning about it for the first time. I don’t remember learning about the Holocaust any more than I remember learning about other basic realities of life, like death or taxes.

My earliest memory of anything Holocaust-related was seeing the tattoo on my great-grandmother’s arm and, upon asking about, being told what it was. But by then I already knew what the Holocaust was; I didn’t need an explanation of what the tattoo meant. So I was young enough to not immediately recognize the identification tattoo for what it was, but had already been educated, at least somewhat, on the holocaust itself. I was also too young to have known that Nanny was a Holocaust survivor. I was eight years old at the latest, and probably closer to five or six.

Anyway, for gentile children, the Holocaust should be taught at the same time as WWII, whenever that may be, and it should of course be compulsory. The dirtiest parts of our collective history are the ones that are most critical that we learn, whether it’s Nazi treatment of Jews or American treatment of Native Americans and so on and so on.

Both of my grandfathers were veterans of WWII, and I have Jewish cousins, so I knew about it from a very young age.

Also, my mother worked in the garment district in New York. When I’d go into her workplace, I saw people with the tattoos. I asked what the “numbers” were when I was maybe 5, and got a short, age-appropriate answer.

So by the time we got to actually learning anything in depth, it wasn’t out of left field. I recall we discussed things in school at a very high level when we were in junior high, and went into more detail in high school.

I’m in my mid-40s, and the deaths of people who had seen the atrocities first-hand is worrisome. It’s easier to claim something didn’t happen once all of the survivors are gone.

There’s really no need to teach them about it before they hit middle school. I think in elementary the focus should be more on geography than history unless it’s a simple focus on children in history as part of their reading program. That said, my daughter was in third grade last year and they had to read a condensed version of the Diary of Anne Frank. I don’t think my daughter got a thing out of it except that it was the story of a very scared girl hiding from bad people. Without understanding the context I think it was pointless to even waste time on.

I chose 13 because that’s when students really start learning about world history and it’s at that age I believe they start having the capacity to understand and may take more away from the focus about social interactions and injustices. This seems to be the age when my own older daughter’s social awareness really picked up.

I picked 12 but really meant “8th grade” (12/13) mainly because that’s when I learned about it and that’s when my son recently learned about it. It seems like a good age being able to discuss it with some understanding of its scope and the atrocity of it all.

When my son told me they had learned something about it, I lent him my copies of Maus & Maus II which I figured told the personal story of it as well as anything he might read/see at that age.

I was home schooled(Those where dark times) and to be honest I can’t remember when I learned about it, but it was rather young(Somewhere between 6 and 8) as I played a large amount of Medal of Honor: Frontline and subsequently ended up researching WWII and all the Holocaust information that came with said research. So far I’ve felt no ill effects(Besides a love of video games), I think the video games probably did more lasting psychological damage than the documentaries and books.

I learned about it from the TV miniseries Holocaust, which was unbelievably grim and realistic for primetime network TV at the time. I was 11 or so.

This, exactly. Our cable guide came with a little brochure about the Holocaust with details I really wasn’t ready for. My parents watched the miniseries but I left the room when it was on.

Almost exactly this. It’s simply part my family history on both my father’s and my mother’s side.

Definitely younger than 11. Although I’m nonpracticing, being Jewish means I had grandparents, great aunts and uncles, etc, who’d been through it, and even at a young age it was more “real” to me because of the family connection than other historical events. I remember first reading Anne Frank at around 7, but not really understanding its significance. I re-read it every year or two, and by 11 or 12 I got the full horror of it.

There’s absolutely no question as to whether it should be compulsory. By seeing what humans are capable of, we scare ourselves into at least a slightly brighter future. More than Hitler or the Nazis or the gas chambers, the most terrifying thing about the Holocaust is the sheer mass of ordinary citizens who weren’t directly affected by Hitler’s policies and turned a blind eye to what was happening around them. The primary thing kids should take from learning about the Holocaust is the overwhelming importance of being active in your community.

I knew there were such things as concentration camps were they starved people when I was a little boy because the man who ran the local deli was a survivor complete with numbered tattoo. Very nice man. I learned from my reading about WWII in middle school on my own time exactly what that was. In the eighth grade it was officially taught, complete with films of the liberation of concentration camps. In general, it was known by students before then as about a fifth of the students were Jewish and about a tenth were observant. I knew that some of our close relatives were Jewish at a very young age while visiting their houses for Christmas parties (hey, some Jews love Christmas) as they had out menorahs, dreadle and whatnot instead of Christmas trees. My Dad never went to church and was always an atheist, which I knew from a very young age, but I was brought up Presbyterian. I figured out Dad was actually a Jewish atheist just about the time of high school for me. That grandma’s name was Esther wasn’t a clue before then, I just never thought about it and Dad never talks about religion in front of the kids.

My father was a WW2 veteran. We had books about the war (including The First Book of World War Two, which was intended specifically for children) around the house before I learned to read.

In my town, they did not teach much history before middle school, but the elementary school library had a lot of books on extra-curricular stuff, so if you wanted to learn about other stuff (history, evolution, etc.), you could learn about it on your own.

When they do get around to teaching 20th Century history, WW2 and the Holocaust should definitely be part of it.

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.

I learned about it in 5th or 6th grade. It was definitely covered in elementary school social studies. I don’t know if that’s a result of growing up in a very strongly Jewish state (I didn’t know until after I left Maryland that not everyone gets Yom Kippur as a school holiday).

I think that was about the right time to start learning about it, and I do think it should be a mandatory part of the curriculum when discussing 20th century history, European history, and the history of racism.

I don’t remember when I learned about this, it seems like I’ve always known it. I had a lot of Jewish friends when I was a child, maybe the knowledge came to me that way. I don’t remember the topic ever being covered in school, but it was something that (I thought) everyone just knew. For the record, I grew up in the 50’s so it was still pretty recent history.

I took my kids to the Holocaust Museum in DC when they were 11 and 14. It’s part of my history, so it is part of theirs. My son (11) was very quiet and I think shocked by what he saw, my daughter was able to process things a little better. I think it was important for both of them to learn about it. We discuss history and geography a lot as it is an interest of mine, so it may have come up in conversations even earlier, but the visit to the Museum brought it all together.

I learned of the details from family, of whom many are history buffs, and my uncle, who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He had a Nazi flag that he procured from a car that had crashed into a ditch - he explained how he got it and what he was doing there - I was maybe 7 or 8 - and this lead me to start exploring to satisfy my curiosity.

I think it should be taught starting 6th grade, and should be compulsory.