What is appropriate to teach about the Holocaust, and at what age?
It is a question appropriate to the week when Israelis and others remembered the Holocaust, and when Americans and others reached a new record of one-incidence mass murder in a place concerned with education.
Google leads to lesson plans offered for students beginning in grades 4, 5, or 7 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and other sources. The material suggests that younger students would have trouble relating to large scale violence, or to events occurring in Europe. On the point of violence, the educators may be those without access to radio or television.
Israeli children begin earlier. Tamar and Mattan are only 18 months apart, and they went to nursery school together. Mattan would have been two and one-half and Tamar four when they came home one day saying that their teacher had talked about the German man who had done very bad things. This week Noa, age 5, the daughter of our niece, came home from her nursery school and asked if any members of her family had been killed.
In the same conversation about Noa, her mother reported about a psychologist who said that age nine was when children can comprehend issues as profound as war and the Holocaust. The psychologist also said it was not appropriate to talk about people being killed. "Injured" was appropriate. Also, important not to talk about children being involved.
My guess is that the psychologist had not read Grimm's tales as a child, and was not here during the summer's war in Lebanon. I am pretty sure that Noa knew something about her uncle going to the war. It is hard to believe that she has not noticed lots of soldiers carrying their guns. What connections she makes, I do not know.
Our own kids got a lesson in reality in 1991 when they carried their gas masks to first and second grade, and wore them while sitting for hours in a room sealed against gas during the 21 or so incidents when Saddam Hussein sent his missiles in our direction. Tamar had learned about the masks from her teacher, and made sure that we put them on according to instructions.
Lesson plans are likely to be a minor element in teaching Israeli kids about the Holocaust. Currently there are 250,000 survivors living here (some 4-5 percent of the Jewish population). The number of survivors is shrinking fast, due to natural causes. Yet many children still learn about the Holocaust at home from a family member with first-hand experience. Even more hear about relatives who did not survive.
On one occasion when our children sat with gas masks in a sealed room their grandfather was present. I do not recall if he talked on that occasion about his mother and brother, killed by the Germans, or if he talked about his father, who was proud to have served in the German army during World War I.
What goes through all those little heads is beyond me.
And I wonder about a lot of bigger heads. Many Americans are presumably talking about gun control in the days after Virginia Tech. They also talked about gun control after what happened years ago at the University of Texas, Columbine, the killings of Amish children in Pennsylvania, and other sad events.
When my oldest son was five, we were living in Athens, Georgia. He went to a friend's birthday party, and came home with a smile from ear to ear. His friend had received a .22 from his father, and was probably already out hunting squirrels. Stefan wanted to know when he was going to get his gun.