From those few details I presume you were in England for your schooling? Different experience. If I remember things correctly, a lot more survivors of the Holocaust wound up in the US than in Britain, so in the US it was probably more likely a kid would have direct experience with a survivor.
Likewise, in the UK you were probably more likely to encounter someone with first-hand memories of the Blitz whereas that was very unlikely in the US.
As I recall, modern history was taught beginning in junior high. WWI, WWII Korea etc. So I voted age 12.
Elementary school history mostly covered the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, and stories about the revolutionary war. Lincoln and the Civil War got covered too. I still recall their black crepe paper silhouettes on the classroom bulletin board.
I don’t remember ever not being aware of it. I’m not sure who is voting for 14 and older since there are Dopers in a wide variety of countries, but since the U.S. was involved in the war and the Holocaust affected plenty of American families, I’m fine with under 11. I knew about slavery before then, so why not the Holocaust? My general impression - and this is very general - is that a fair number of Dopers think kids shouldn’t be exposed to anything unpleasant until they’re, I don’t know, in middle school or high school. I think that’s a very bad approach.
I sure was. Seems my experience is really atypical though in that I remember pretty much exactly when I was taught about it and found out on my own rather than absorb the knowledge via societal osmosis. Didn’t have many Jewish friends who were wont to talk about the Shoah either.
I was in the sixth grade when I read “Summer of My German Soldier”. But I don’t remember receiving much historical background from the English teacher. It would have been great if the social studies teacher had woven it into her lesson plan, but sixth grade social studies focused on ancient civilizations and whatnot.
I don’t recall when I first learned about slavery either. You’d think my parents would have sat me down and given me the Big Talk about it, but if it happened, I have no recollection. I don’t remember ever not knowing about. Just like I don’t remember ever not knowing about the Holocaust. I’m guessing when I learned about both of things things, they didn’t register emotionally.
I don’t know precisely how old I was when I first started learning about it - I did read the same book as Dendarii Dame and that had to be in elementary school. I do know that we spent the entirety of seventh grade history learning about all aspects of WWII and there wasn’t a kid in the class for whom the holocaust was a new topic instead of something we were learning more about. Most of us were 12 when the school year started.
I learned about it in 4th grade or thereabouts, so age 9. Our class was divided into reading groups, and mine was assigned to read Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. It’s not exactly set in Auschwitz but the background of the book is difficult to understand without knowing anything about the Holocaust. My memory now is vague but I don’t recall the teacher directly touching on it much, so I think my mother probably wound up explaining enough about it to me that the book made sense.
I was fascinated by Holocaust books from about 5th-7th grades and read Anne Frank’s diary and Elie Wiesel’s Night in that span. Looking back, that might have been a bit young for the latter, but my mom didn’t believe in censoring books. The only book I ever recall her telling me at the library that she’d prefer I put back and wait on was Go Ask Alice, but that I could go ahead if I really wanted to. Since she’d never done that before, I put it back.
I’m another Jewish kid that doesn’t remember ever not knowing about it.
It’s funny how many of us have mentioned the tattoos. They’re a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but as kids, I guess our little brains latched on to one of the few things that was concrete and understandable and the memory has stuck with us. I didn’t know anybody personally with a tattoo, but I did know there were people with number tattoos on their arms, and that meant that they had survived concentration camps. Tattoos and yellow patches and broken glass were things I could understand.
Does anybody remember the Judy Blume book “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself?” Sally had a relative who died. Given the amount of Judy Blume that girls of a certain age read in the '70s and '80s, I’ll bet that a lot of us learned something about the Holocaust from that book.
I’m baffled by the notion that “opt-out” would even be a possibility.
It is, sadly, for the Holocaust and a few other things, like sex education, and evolution. Some parents don’t want their wittew snowfwakes exposed to anything they may find scary, distasteful, or that they may disagree with.
Interesting, I have a slightly different perspective.
I’m not Jewish, was raised in country town Australia. I was never aware of any Jewish people in town (there may have been).
I don’t really remember when and how I became aware of it, but it was something that went along with learning about WWII at school in the 70’s. It was pretty much matter of fact, Hitler tried to wipe out the jews, concentration camps, gas ovens etc. I never heard the term “Holocaust” associated with it until much later.
So I don’t have the frame of reference that it’s something vitally important that must be passed on or that it’s somehow in dispute. It happened, it should be taught as part of teaching history of WWII.
Of course we need an opt out. Otherwise, people might start to think that bad things happen sometimes. Imagine the horror!
Yes, it’s true that Jewish children learn about the Holocaust earlier. I was born just months after the camps’ liberation, and as others have said, I don’t remember not knowing about it.
I’d say less of a specific age than either 1) when they ask about it or the topic comes up, or 2) when history / global studies starts covering that general time period.
I don’t recall for sure if I learned it specifically in school, specifically in (Christian, Methodist) Sunday school, or from other sources such as TV, books, family, etc; but I knew the basics by 4th grade, 10 years old.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know. My dad is a military history buff so we grew up with a house full of books on WW2.
I do remember dad taking us to the Australian War Memorial when I was a kid (6 or 7 maybe) to watch a special screening of the World At War episodes on the Holocaust.
I too - born in 1966 - cannot remember not knowing.
I think I had been aware of the holocaust earlier, just through discussions if WWII, but generally, at a higher level. Germans put people, including Jews, in camps, and killed them. This was in elementary school. I read a lot, and asked a lot of questions. I didn’t understand why they did it, and discussions didn’t really help. It was also just abstract to me. How does a 10 year old begin to take that knowledge and make it more real?
In 7th grade, we trooped into a big room and watched movies and still footage. It was visceral. Horrifying. I had seen dead animals. Never a dead person. Never piles of dead people. The holocaust became real to me. I didn’t have nightmares. It didn’t warp my little brain. (I grew up in central LA. I had real world concerns.) But for as much difference as it can make, I was resolved, and still am, that it should never happen again.
Compulsory. Middle school.
Geography is history. That’s why the earlier kids starting learning history, the better. Especially at a young age, it’s easy to think that the world is some kind of static thing. Geography makes a lot more sense when you realize that borders shift, empires rise and fall, people and peoples move about a whole lot, and that precious national identity that is so important to so many people in so many places only exists because your ancestors happened to blunder into a particular area X number of years ago, and most likely beat the snot out of whoever was already living there.
When I was a teacher what I found common among the black students was that they just couldnt comprehend how one group of white people could be so mean and cruel to another group of white people. You see in their world crimes tend to be white on black. They just had trouble with the concept of a person of the same racial group harming another of the same group.
Um, I think Hitler would take issue with the idea that Germans and Jews are/were the same racial group.
Of course, I’m not saying that world history isn’t covered wall to wall with examples you could show your students of people of one racial group killing and maiming people of the same group, with the Nazis themselves certainly not being slouches in that area either. Just that the Holocaust may not be exhibit no. 1 of that, at least from the perspective of the perpetrators.
(Just for the record, as far as I’m concerned, race is a fiction anyway. But that’s a debate for another day.)