When and how do you discuss the Holocaust with kids?

[nevergoogle]

DS1 is 8 and loves history, "especially the stuff that actually happened" he says.
This term he is learning about WWII at school and he's really enjoying the subject. He has complained that the teacher doesn't seem to know much and keeps talking about sweetie rations.
We went to the book shop and I found myself vetting any of the WWII books for any graphic images of the holocaust, which is sensible I think, although it got me feeling like I was enforcing some sort of holocaust denial.
So when and how do you broach this subject?

I remember being about 10 when I discovered some graphic photographs in a history book and I remember finding it very shocking so I don't know if this was too early, or just not the right way to learn about it.

For me, it's such an important part of human history so needs to be discussed at some point, but when?

Or the names by which they call themselves. It's their rejection of do to others as you would have others do to you which is important not their names.

The Holocaust is a massive part of western history learnandsay

Massive in what sense? As many died in Stalin's famines. Where's that on the curriculum?

Learnandsay, you can't not teach the holocaust, you would the leave quite a big chunk of WWII out. It also explains how Israel functions today, why the Germans still have some kind of collective guilt three generations later, why we still have trials of people involved in something which happened 70 years ago.

Yes, there are more if these kind even today and children need to learn that just because one guy is now dead there are still people who kill others because of their beliefs. Don't forget, the holocaust wasn't just about Jews, you had Jehovas witnesses, gypsies, gays, people with other political opinions as well being transported.

I Remember, I was not even 13 when we sat through sound recordings of large Nazi gatherings and tried to understand why people blindly followed one person's sick ideas and how a whole nation could be manipulated.

And anti-semitism was quite big in the UK as well in the early Thirties.

What noramum said. And because WW2 and the nazi's happenend here. We still have bomb damage in our cities and dig up unexploded bombs. We had the kindertransport arrive in our cities. We have Holocaust survivors living in our cities, and their families.
You seem remarkably opposed learnandsay. Why?
Of course Russian history is important (I'm a huge history buff and would also include the Japanese atrocities but there's limited room) but the Holocaust is very immediate to western Europe and that is where we live. And even today we still have fucknuggets doing seig heil salutes on our streets. We dont tend to deal with people advocating communism and gulags.

There is so much to learn from history and one doesn't have to go into detail to explain the basics. I told DS(8) that this man was a dictator who killed lots of Jewish people just because they were Jewish. He knows about wars, we watch the news sometimes and he asks questions, although I brush over some things.

DC to understand, slowly, why some thinking is so very wrong and what the consequenses can be if it gets out of hand, e.g. DD (4) told me some time ago that she didn't want to play with certain DC because they are black! She rarely sees black people but we have to try and make her understand that they are just like her, only with black skin.

The Japanese also have a sense of guilt and a state organised pacifism. Both West Germany and Japan were colonised by the Americans and indoctrinated in the arts of guilt and remorse as high culture.

There is supposedly a doctrine following from the holocaust that genocide is no longer practicable in today's world because the so called International Community will step in and prevent it from happening and bring those responsible to justice. But if you saw Bill Clinton and Sc State Albright doing everything they possibly could to avoid calling the Rwandan massacres genocide (because of what that word obligates) you'd know that in fact "crimes against humanity" is just more hypocritical Western bull crap. It's crimes which are convenient which interest us in the West.

There are lots of important topics in Western history and within those topics there are lots of significant details. Children don't need to be taught all of them.

The flu pandemic of 1918 and the two great plagues each killed more people in Europe than those who died in the holocaust. But the death toll of the holocaust combined with all other victims of the war do indeed make Hitler and his cronies one of Europe's greatest disasters.

Learn&Say, you got me laughing. The Americans def. did no colonise West Germany. Don't forget, you had three powers in Western .germany, I grew up where the Brits were and I lived where the US were for a couple of years. We had very little to do with them, they all lived in their own little world and while the government had to please them they had to please all of them.

The guilt we have comes from what was designed from all four powers after the war, study the Postsdamer Conference and how the German constitution came together. If you ever read this there is much more tolerance in it than the US is ever capable of doing.

Certainly there are more topics in our history than portait in any curriculum. If you go in any bookshop in themUK you could think history is just War of the Roses to Elisabeth I and then that the WWII has to be won over and over again. It is a shame and there could be more done. But some areas can't be taken out. history is taught to teach us that humans can't learn from previous mistakes and how these mistakes shape the current view of a nation.

Surely the ongoing importance of the Holocaust is not just about numbers - yes, Stalin killed similar, the Japanese were capable of atrocities, Rwanda, Kurdish cleansing by Saddam: the list goes on. BUT the Holocaust is pretty unique in scale and organisation and scope.
The Spanish Flu and Black Death is an entirely different thing altogether and I don't see what they have to do with this.

And I don't think it is unfortunate for young children to find out about what the Human Animal is capable of doing to its own kind; I only regret that there is cause for them to learn of such.
Having said all that, I have to confess being of a very 'glass half full' kind of disposition, I am a pessimist wrt whether humanity ever learns from its mistakes.

I am Dutch and born in 1970 so I grew up knowing about the war and Holocaust, to an extent that I really got fed up with yet another WWII movie on tv around this time of the year (remembrance eve and liberation day). But it wasn't until secondary school that I really learned and understood the realities/impact of the holocaust. I still remember the personal stories from prisoners of war and camp survivors who came to our school.

DS (11) has covered the war at school and we have talked about it lots more at home so he has a good basic understanding which is appropriate of his age. I just follow his lead and take it from there. I do think it is important that he will learn what happened.

Well, if the new history curriculum gets adopted, they won't be learning about WWII at all until near the end of KS 3...

Personally I think the aim of learning from our mistakes is a lost cause. Because as we learned not only from wilful failure to act on Rwanda but also wilful failure to act on Darfur

it costs in terms of political support, war financing, and dead/injured soldiers to intervene in genocides.

So what are we actually teaching our children? Yes, genocide is bad. But if you personally are going to have to pay in coins and blood to prevent a genocide, then you're better off (in reality) letting the genocide occur and later trying to persuade an audience that there was nothing that you could have done about it. (That's where we are today.)

Better of maybe, but still morally wrong IMO.
I'd rather teach and have that teaching be in vain, than just resign to it.

Well, some of us have said that we tell our children about the holocaust because it is part of our family reality and they will hear about it, sure as eggs is eggs, if we don't get there first with an age-appropriate explanation.

Same argument gets played out here about when you should tell children about homosexuality. In my family, it is our reality; we can't not talk about it.

And that means that other children will be talking about this stuff in the playground too, so it makes sense to get to your child first. We can argue all day about collective memory and the Holocaust industry (and I'd be happy to) but bottom line is that our society is obsessed with WW2, so it's fairly pointless asking why should we address that and not the Irish potato famine.

I do think one can obsess about it a bit as well. We talk about what we come across and there are many ways to stumble across wwII, e.g. in museums and TV films and memorials. It is one of the things we sometimes talk about and may explore a bit further, one amongst many and I will always water down any horrible stuff for them. We watched the film Zulu a while ago and talked about it. Lots of killing, it just doesn't seem so real and horrible in a movie like that or Westerns.

Talking about the Holocaust fine, but most importantly do we need to remember and teach how this could come about in the first place, e.g. the early 1930s in Europe.

Especially, in a time when our economy is on its knees and a right-wing party is doing very well in local elections and one of their main policies are to clamp down on immigration.

It's a digression, but the fact that we don't talk about the Potato Famine is an example of History being written by the winners, isn't it? It was the English/British, (Whitehall) which insisted on Irish grain being exported during the famine and not remaining to feed the people as the Irish called for at the time, which contributed to the death toll and displacement. But surprise, surprise, you don't get that in our history books.

I wonder why.

But surprise, surprise, you don't get that in our history books.

Perhaps it has something to do with history being 'dumbed down' and taught in 'topics' rather than chronologically. We certainly learned about the Irish Famine at GCE 'O' level in my 1960's grammar school.

As to 'not in our history books', are you just referring to 'popular history' or school history text books? May be you're not looking at the right history books. I have on my bookshelves one or two books specifically about the Famine plus some primary sources and histories of the 19th century which cover it in some detail. And it isn't even my particular area of interest.

It's a general complaint about the way our school history is edited to show Britain in its best light. I'd have loved to have heard about the power of cannon used in the final battle of the 100yr War at Castillon, (a French victory) instead or as well as Agincourt and Crecy our two English victories. Knowing that much of the effect of the Irish famine could have been prevented if the fledgeling Victorian civil service hadn't been so pig headed would have been useful. Much was made in my history of the abolition of slavery (the part that makes Britain look good.) (Well, not if one studies all of it.) But nobody thought of mentioning that it was an Elizabethan privateer who established the Triangular Trade in the first place!

So, slavery was a world wide institution in which the English participated as enthusiastically as many other countries. While we might feel shame at our participation in it the fact is that we were among the first to attempt to stop it. Does this mean that we shouldn't have some pride in this and teach it as a positive aspect of our history?

I find it a perplexing topic as my maternal grandmother was a product of slavery while all my other forebears belonged to the nation which enslaved her ancestors. Do I feel anger at what happened to them or shame that threequarters of my family went along with it? I can't view history as a constant process of national self flagellation...

From the BBC news website, on the subject of anti-Semitism www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22413301

Hungary must have some strange laws.

good grief

History always reflects the views of the "recorder" which is why children are taught to look at different sources and compare accounts rather than blindly accept.

Shakespeare's account of Richard III may have been quite different if the Yorkists had won

Mrs, I agree. Tudor propaganda is something modern politician could take as a pn example how to smear your predecessors.

My family is German Jewish and my father came over on the Kindertransport; various family members were not so lucky.

I very strongly disagree with LearnandSay that the Holocaust should not be singled out for attention - as PacificDogswood correctly states upthread, "the Holocaust is pretty unique in scale and organisation and scope". In addition, it is usually used to highlight (a) other examples of genocide eg Rwanda - eg on Holocaust Memorial Day and (b) to learn lessons from the past so that we don't just view it as the action of a few (or a few million) madmen, that could never be repeated or prevented, but instead understand it as something that happened because normal, rational but unquestioning people who were afraid or wanted an easy life went along with it (as well as some psychos, probably). It's about how all of us should strive to stand up for what is right even if it is not popular or easy, and protect the weak or defenceless. It's about bullying on a grand, national level, and what happens when this is allowed to get out of hand. It is and will remain relevant to all of us.

Re the OP, though, I would not feel the need to do more than a very gently intro to the fact that lots of Jews were killed by a bad German at primary school. My parents took me to Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem holocaust museum, when I was 11, and I was far too young (and sensitive). I have never forgotten it - in a haunted kind of way - and would not recommend graphic images like that for children of any age - strictly adults only. My own perspective on the Holocaust has been influenced by my father's amazingly upbeat and positive approach to his past - he knows and I know that he only survived because of a family of good Germans who risked their own lives to save him and his father on Kristallnacht - he had a few days in an attic too. Rather than focus on the flawed individuals who allowed it to happen, he focuses on the good individuals who defeated Nazism. It is that perspective that I want to pass on to my dcs - the amazing bravery and courage and effort of so many to defeat the evils of Nazism.

By the way, I find it astonishing that on the day the British headlines are full of the trial of a Neo-Nazi cell in Germany, that LearnandSay can attempt to claim that Nazis no longer exist and the Holocaust is no longer relevant. We have the rise of Far-Right parties all over Europe - Golden Dawn in Greece, the one in Hungary mentioned above, and some distinctly racist overtones in politics in many other countries, not least the UK. I see no reason to relax vigilance.

This does not, of curse, mean that other events in history are not also important - my eldest dc, aged 13, has read books about the Irish potato famine and slavery, for example - but I will not yet let her read anything too graphic about the Holocaust. She will study it at school next year - I hope it is not too disturbing (in particular having to be the token Jew, and being sympathetically stared at every time Jews are mentioned - rather wearing I should imagine...).