To have complained to school for showing Schindler's List to yr 9's

[jjazz]

Just that really. Dont know which parts they showed but DD was awake at 11.15 last night -upset as the scenes were still in her head. She is sensitive but not over emotional imo. she was 13 at end of August so is a 'young' year nine although the film is a 15 so none of the group would have been that age.

the most shocking bit for me were the little girl in the red coat. and then seeing this coat in a pile of corpses.

There was no film when I was 14. Instead, we read the book.

It didn't dampen my love of history. It increased it. It made me angry, because I knew already that that history was already being repeated, and it has been, I was 14 in 1985.

From then on, my interest, particularly in European history, was sharpened. And I went on to learn, of similar 'mini-Holocausts', all across Europe, for the thousand years preceding the the one in the 40s, about how Christianity forbade loaning money for interest and working with certain materials or in certain areas, so these tasks were left to Jewish people, who were always made to live in separate communities. It made me understand why Jewish people behaved as they did when the Holocaust first started, this one was far from the first time.

And I'm glad. I wasn't mature at all. My father didn't get upset because I was. Instead he told me the story of his own parents, and the war they went through, and what happened to them.

Everytime I thought about how upset I was, I think about the tens of thousands to whom it actually happened. This was their life, their families' lives.

But by then I was going to high school with people who were asylum seekers, fleeing from atrocities that were so horrible, and I'll never shelter my children from the realities of death and war, they are real life for children all over the world, and we must care. Well, I can't, anyway, their sister died when they were 6 and 3.

'Six million of those singular tragedies is almost beyond comprehension.'

Many, many of them children themselves, or teenage children.

This continues to happen to children and teens in other places now. In Rwanda, in Bosnia-Herzogovina, in the Sudan.

We Need To Talk About the Holocaust.

Lest we forget.

I totally agree with Expat.
I am also Italian. Italy, a country that was Nazi Germany's first ally. A country that has also been a victim, as our Jewish citizens were deported after 1943. A country were the nazis exterminated entire villages to scare off the partisans.

I don't think the debate is 'lest we forget'. No one is arguing for that on this thread, surely.

It is whether viewing some thing is simply too traumatic to watch for some children or even adults. I feel bad I won't watch films about the Rwandan genocide, but I can't, it makes me feel physically sick and I can't change it or do anything about it.

You can talk about the Holocaust without watching SL aged 13, as the generations of us before this film did. I think I have a measure of the horror of the Rwandan genocide without watching films showing graphically what happened.

Watching real-life horror stories can be very traumatic, and not in a good helpful remembering the dead type of way. That's why people who were really there often suffer from PTSD.

Well it's a 15, so it's complicated....however I would allow my y6 10 year old to watch this....but then we have openly discussed all sorts of harsh realities of life so she is equipped...

I agree with all of Mumsyblouses posts. She says what I try to say but much more eloquently

You can't compare watching SL to the real truma of having lived through the real thing!

For centuries literature and the arts have been there to depict events or themes that upsets us, and actually help us to make sense of them and open our minds to empathy and compassion, imo.

I'd happily let my DS 13 watch this movie. In fact I'm going to make a point to do so.

It does not matter what we would all do personally. This was a 15 film shown to 13 year olds by a school - which is wrong which ever way you look at it.

As said, no-one want's to ignore the holocaust. Don't think the schools are wrong to show it but not sure at which age, the parents should be informed though and asked permission.

Actually I think I did see it when I was about that age (I have just googled it and I was 14) Our school actually took us to the cinema to see it in full, as they thought it was important.

It was shocking, I cried (but pretended I didn't). I didn't see it as any different to reading the grapes of wrath, which was a set text the following year.

Truly shocking things happen, I think 13 is plenty old enough to have to start dealing with it.

As a teacher I would never show Schindler's list nor the boy in the striped pyjamas in school.

In Schhindler's list the man who runs the camp is shown as mad and unstable. In the bitsp the wife of the head of a camp doesn't even know that the Jewish people are being murdered!! These two messages perpetuate a myth that the average person in Germany 'did not know' or that those who were in the Nazi party must have been mad/abnormal people.
No. If there is a message I will teach students about the Holocaust, it's that ordinary, average people did horrific things and allowed horrific things to happen.and we must never forget that, and always stand against persecution and discrimination of any kind.

I'm not laying blame on anybody. But many people think that Germans did not know anything about the fact that Jews were being murdered.

They voted him in. That's another of my messages. Use your vote and keep fascists out.

But OP has said "parts" not the whole film. The girl probably hasn't see the worst bits, just excerpts.

The Book Thief would make good accompanying reading.

To be honest, I am also not 100% convinced that a secondary school should ask parents permission to show material that they deem suitable for the average pupil and enriching the curriculum.

I am in 2 minds about this.

These two messages perpetuate a myth that the average person in Germany 'did not know' or that those who were in the Nazi party must have been mad/abnormal people.

it is not a myth that many germans didn't know what was going on. they were told -and believed, how couldn't they- that the missing people were brought to work camps (which is true many cases) and that disabled children (and adults) were brought to special hospitals. they were certainly not aware of the gas chambers and many people (my grandparents included) were genuinely shocked when they found out after the end of the war.

it is largely a myth. They knew about the murder of disabled people, not intitally when the programme was launched but it was criticised openly in sermons from the pulpits at one stage. This is a well-known fact and at that point, the programme was halted. Unfortunately, by then the "work" was pretty much completed. At this point at least it would have been common knowledge among adults. IMO it is not that people did not know (at the latest by 1943) what kind of a state they lived in but that they were either profitting from it themselves or too scared to do anything about it, perhaps a mixture of the two. That quite a few people did try to fight the state in some way be it by helping Jewish UBoote to survive in hiding, spreading pamphlets, getting information across to the allied forces, etc indicates that knowledge was not absent but to me fear of being caught was overwheliming. And of course a lot of people believed all the propoganda and genuinely supported the racial politics and idea of aggrandizement, taking over territories to the east and creating large German run farming enterprises with Slavic slave labour as a means to financing the whole system. Nazi "beliefs" were drummed into everyone at every possible turn. Look at the BdM and HJ kids, by the end of the war, how many of them genuinely doubted what they had been told of their racial superiority and the danger posed to them by "the Jew"?

It is reasonable to assume that not everyone knew every detail of the gas chambers or had even heard about them. There is a speech by Himmler to SS in Posen which you can probably hear on youtube with subtitles where he openly discusses the genocide on the Jews and says that this work they have done will have to stay a secret. It is a creepy speech but he is speaking openly to his henchmen saying that no one knows just how hard their job has been who has not had to stand by piles of corpses the way they have and that this work will have to be kept secret for all time. That indicates that they neither wanted the German populace at a whole to be well-informed nor did they expect total support for what they did. It was well documented perhaps for future generations to know about.

However, Germans did know about the mass shootings and generally the murder of the Jews, since this involved not just the SS but also the regular German army (Wehrmacht). They knew as well quite a bit about the mistreatment of the Slavs in occupied territory. Keeping in mind that they had slave labour from these countries living right amongst them, often as home help or farm labourers and factory workers. They were right there in their midst in all their misery for everyone to see. Soldiers came back from the East and talked about what they saw and also what they did in terms of mass murder and it was no secret. I taught English to groups of old people in Germany for a time and they told me straight out that yes, of course they knew, everyone knew but that I didn't understand how scary a place it was. They'd say American and British films about Nazi Germany never show it as scary as it really was.

Perhaps some people closed their ears to it, it was not broadcast on the local news and you could avoid knowing a lot if you put your mind to it but people were not thick, they could hardly have missed what was going on. People listened in to the BBC in secret once the war took a turn against Germany. Soldiers came back on leave from occupied Poland, from Russia, from the Baltic states. Concentration camps were not just outside of the country, they were within Germany proper too. For an adult to have genuinely known none of this is just not credible in my eyes.

*You can't compare watching SL to the real truma of having lived through the real thing!

For centuries literature and the arts have been there to depict events or themes that upsets us, and actually help us to make sense of them and open our minds to empathy and compassion, imo.*

Franca I agree with you, I was trying to point out to people who keep saying 'it happened in history, therefore we should show it to children' that in fact, there is a good reason not to show any person some of the things that happened in history as they are too traumatic, and that there are degrees of representation. There's a deal of difference, for example, at looking a stylized representation of the Crucifixion, and watching the Passion's more gory scenes repeatedly, or indeed watching real people die in executions as used to be common not that long ago.

I also agree that the power is in the story and in the case of SL, that's what draws us in. But it is also what makes it traumatic. As an adult, I can choose if I want to watch a film about the Holocaust, knowing the type of material it will be about (as I read Time's Arrow recently by Martin Amis which is on this topic). I can handle my distress in private without others watching if I choose. If you are in a class, surrounded by other children, and your teacher says now we are watching SL, however well prepared, it is a more difficult situation if you find it deeply traumatic.

Perhaps I am projecting. I saw a horror film with my friends aged 13 and it traumatises me to this day. I just wasn't mentally prepared for it, but was too terrified to get up and leave, I couldn't believe everyone else was laughing and joking. That's why I always try to let my children see difficult things if they want to watch them, but with the door there if they want to remove themselves. And, I still think being surrounded by your peers (some of whom may be laughing as a way of coping/already desensitized/not really giving a shit) is not always the best way to view the really grim stuff of life.

I have to say though ZZZ that I have recently read a book about the killing of disabled children and adults and it appears that no, lots of people weren't aware of what actually happened to disabled and mentally ill people once they were forced to leave their families.
Families received news about the death of their relatives months after it happened.

I was 12 or 13 when it came out and my parents took me to see it. They pretty much kept me from seeing any other film (like Dirty Dancing, etc.) until I was 17 so I expect they thought the subject matter was something we should all take seriously and talk about.

Yes, it was traumatising but it made a deep impression on me. I expect if they'll be discussing the film responsibly in school the children will get out of it much more than even I did.

I see your point Mumsy, I do.

We all have different experiences and ways of dealing with our feelings. It never occurred to me to feel ashamed to get caught being moved by a movie.

I don't mind being moved by a movie in public, as in wiping away a stray tear. When I saw SL I cried openly for an hour or two. I was with a good friend and we cried together, sobbed at the inhumanity of man. Would I have wanted to express my emotions in that way in front of some of the teenagers who went to my school, no, not really, nor my colleagues at work. I'm not ashamed, but I wouldn't be able to properly express myself in those other situations mainly because there were loads of dickheads in my class who probably would have made jokes about it as well