ENGLISH / HISTORY
The destruction of each
Jew in the Holocaust was
to cost just one pfennig.
Gareth Calway discusses
the challenge of helping
students to even begin
to comprehend the Nazi
atrocities
Grasping
ITLER WAS very bad news for
H
the planet. But any history teacher
knows what an ally he can be in
retaining a class’s attention. The
information is all too graphic,
the war crimes all too epic, the
the horror of
genocide all too gory. Many a
student’s experience of world history has indeed been
over-preoccupied with the 11 years of the “thousand
year” Third Reich.
And in a world that seeks to protect children, the
details of the Holocaust still fill our classrooms with
tales of torture and sadism. The teacher is often caught
between the requirement to tell the terrible truth and a
the Holocaust
worry about giving them nightmares, and a shock to
their core values. Could human beings really do that
to each other? Yes, they could and did. And could they
still? Yes, I’m afraid so. dehumanised the Africans and indirectly the slavers. There are documents showing these calculations. The laws began to escalate. The requirement to wear
It is not the millions of people it killed that sets the But dehumanisation was not the aim. The aim was to How was the price kept so low? By the Jews themselves a yellow star, to get police permission to go out, the ban
Holocaust apart. There have been evil regimes that make money. participating – their possessions, clothes and homes from use of phones, the ban from public transport, or
killed more, including Stalin’s. But Stalin’s murders, If you read the deliberations of the Jamaican confiscated, their hair and the gold fillings in their teeth, using hairdressers, and the requirement to give up their
like Christian crusades, were done in the name of an parliament of 1792, you find the planters arguing their skin once dead (for lampshades and soap). This warm or “spare” clothing, radios, typewriters, bicycles
ideal that itself protests against them (the Nazi ideal and against abolition without a thought for anything except was all discussed and recorded with a Nazi grin, just convey the situation all too well to teenagers.
the hideous evil were the same thing). profit and financial survival. This indifference to human like the “jokes” in the camps about hygiene and “work It is the kind of bullying nasty children themselves
Over hundreds of years, the Atlantic Slave Trade suffering, and its racist assumption that a Black African making free”. would dream up. By July 17, 1942, the bullying is
murdered 24 million Black Africans, merely as a by- can and should be worked to death like an animal, is The hatred and fear of slave traders for their “cargo” clearly developing from nasty to vicious: blind or deaf
product. Four or five times that number were uprooted sickening. But the Holocaust went even further. and the way they were kept in filth and misery on ship Jews can no longer wear armbands to identify their
from their homes and sent on a death-voyage to the living The final solution to “the Jewish problem” – the and then beaten and worked to death if they survived condition in traffic. An essential element in Friedrich
hell of the American plantations. The 24 million count is murder of an entire race – was not done for profit. Indeed, is the real-life horror story of the age that made our is that it is a German story, told by Friedrich’s friend,
just those who perished en route, at sea, or before they it was actually costed. Genocide cost the German state own, and it went on for centuries. And yet even this a non-racist German increasingly powerless in the face
had completed their “seasoning”. The numbers are larger and that state was willing to pay. The poison gas contract seems almost casual and incidental in comparison to the of this bully.
than the Holocaust, and it is much harder to tell White was put out to tender and rival firms (and types of gas) concentrated Nazi malice, the sniggering at genocide, The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas continues this
British school children about this because – unlike the competed for it. Zyclon B won, because it killed far that went on between 1933 and 1945. At what point do vexed perspective. The child innocent Bruno, who
Holocaust – Britain as a whole was not innocent of or more at a lower cost. The destruction of each Jew was we enter hell here? sees his smiling winking father’s face distorted into
(the abolitionists apart) opposing the evil. to cost one pfennig. The cost of uprooting Jews from Germany was highly industrialised and progressive the inhuman commandant before his very eyes (and
The Holocaust is more difficult to accept and tell their homes and jobs, transporting them to death camps, – ahead even of Britain in providing the first pension we see it though them) is a reminder of that other great
children about for another reason. Slavery reduced running those camps, gassing their occupants, and schemes and national insurance for its workers. sufferer of the Holocaust: the innocent German (like
human beings to the level of cargo – it directly burying their bodies in mass graves – a penny each. Germany had, until 1933, the most liberal record in Bruno’s mother, Rommel, the white rose Germans, the
regard to Jews in Europe. failed assassinators of Hitler) who almost disappeared
Many German Jews had descended from those from history – and certainly from books, war films
Union address: NUT
fleeing Russia for a kinder reception. They were and war comics – for a generation or two. A subtler
also profoundly integrated into German society at all victim than the Jews, certainly, but a victim we need to
levels – Einstein was a professor at Berlin University, educate children about. The moral fable of The Boy In
A good school for every child
as was Freud in Vienna, and there were many high the Striped Pyjamas is that its innocent and appealing
ranking Jewish officers in the First World War, German hero goes to the gas chambers too.
Christine Blower
falls below 30 per cent are failing can only fuel the
impression that standards are not rising.
‘
Rather than teaching the Holocaust, in all its
calls for a common
The report from Research and Information
on State Education claims that parents are still
Munchian horror, we should use its details to teach
unclear about the workings of the school admissions
admissions policy
system.
It showed a number of schools were flouting the
the humanity its monstrousness could not overcome
in every local authority, in
admissions rules and asking parents for additional
information, including marital status, occupation,
which both teachers and
and even children’s hobbies. including of course Anne Frank’s father. How did hell Again, it is the little details that do it. You can
This should not happen – it is essential that happen there? certainly chill classes with gas chamber stories. But it
parents can have faith
the school admissions system should work for the As the recent Anne Frank serial shows, the devil is is the shock of the German soldier suddenly yelli
’
ng at
benefit of all children and parents. in the detail. And it is this detail that perhaps allows us the Jewish ex-doctor, now an exhausted house servant,
The idea of choice and diversity are not unifying to teach the Holocaust most effectively to teenagers. to do something for the boy that conveys all you need
SCHOOLS ADMISSIONS have been under the concepts. They do not carry with them the idea Anne Frank is above all a normal teenager – raging at to know about dehumanisation.
spotlight recently with two reports coming out in the of a collective purpose to ensure all young people the deprivations and repressions that any teenager does, The doctor is a caring and skilled man – the mother
same week as parents and children were informed succeed. On the contrary, they present a picture of though with the added factor (thanks to the Nazis) that realises and appreciates this with a kind of growing
of whether or not they had secured the secondary a system where access to high quality education it is all happening in a kind of terrifying Big Brother horror – and Bruno’s incomprehension at why this
school of their choice. is a random process predicated on children having house with her parents. grown-up is toiling as a servant is the “innocence”
A survey in The Guardian newspaper indicated parents with the time and the knowledge to make Anne’s text is a bildungsroman, with Anne gradually of a greater wisdom than the adult who knows why.
that there was dissatisfaction about children having considered and informed choices at the expense of learning to grow up as any teenager has to. We are still He is a Jew. But unless Bruno (like his sister) is
a fair chance of getting into a good school. While those who are more disadvantaged. in a culture we can recognise. Then, dreadfully, at the taught to see this monstrousness as true, he will never
this should not be taken lightly, it does need to be At the core of the education system must be a end, the context distorts Anne’s account into another understand it.
put into perspective. common admissions policy in each local authority kind of text. It is the wrong ending. We fall through the Hitler was a shrewd educationalist. He understood
The whole concept of choice is largely an urban which applies to all schools and which parents and floor and into a horror tale, where the wolf runs off with that the child is father to the man and that if you
problem where there appears to be a number of teachers believe to be fair. Little Red Riding Hood. programme children early enough, they can be moulded
schools from which to choose from. For great We have long campaigned for a good local It can never make sense. But this terrible ending to an evil vision that grown-ups find unthinkable. The
swathes of the country there is only one secondary school for every child. This would help children will make more sense to a teenager first drawn in by Boy In the Striped Pyjamas works the other way. It
school for a given area. No choice is therefore from poorer families gain access to a good and fully the detail of Anne’s bike being confiscated, a boyfriend celebrates a naivety that, unless hideously exploited and
required. integrated school. being banned, or her room having to be shared and her twisted by adults, has a natural faith in its elders.
The school admissions code is a good one, It is far better to aim for a system whereby all privacy invaded. I am not sure it is possible for anyone Teaching the Holocaust confronts us with both ends
but even the code can’t be a substitute for parents parents have confidence that they can send their (even an adult) to “make sense” of the big picture – the of the spectrum and, however dreadful, gives us the
trusting schools. Opinion polls which show that children to a local school within which there is a rich Holocaust – and remain sane. But we cannot deny it opportunity to affirm some of the very best of human
parents believe standards in schools are getting and diverse range of provision. (there are those who want us to), so we have got to tell nature (through some of its finest children’s texts) against
worse paint not only an untrue picture, but are also Education is the greatest gift we can give our our children somehow. the very worst. Rather than teaching the Holocaust, in all
an indictment of the government’s inability to give children and that has to mean all children. If every The classic children’s novel of the Holocaust, its Munchian horror, we should use its details to teach the
the good news to parents that standards are high and child really does matter, we need a system of school Freidrich, is quietly effectively in doing so. Its chronology humanity its monstrousness could not overcome. SecEd
improving. transfer which will work for the greatest good of of laws, decrees and regulations between 1933 and 1945
The government has largely itself to blame for every child. just states the facts and lets them speak for themselves • Gareth Calway is a consultant with the National
undermining the trust and confidence of parents, (the last passed on April 21, 1943, marks the escalation Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). He
particularly those from more affluent backgrounds. • Christine Blower is the acting general of the mass exterminations: tragically, as we see with is currently writing a children’s novel on the Atlantic
Recent assertions by government that secondary secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Visit Anne, large-scale deportation began as early as October Slave Trade and will be running Teaching the Holocaust
schools whose floor target of five A* to C GCSEs www.teachers.org.uk 1941, but it was just as the Allies began to win the war workshops at the NATE conference, which takes place
that the Jews started to die in huge numbers). from April 4 to 6 in Leicestershire. Visit www.nate.org.uk
12 SecEd • March 12 2009
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