How the Holocaust happened.

etherealastraea:

Each year I teach a very large unit about the Holocaust to my students, and each year the content becomes more and more timely and relevant.

We discuss not only the history of this attrocity, but the central theme of how it happened. How sterotypes and prejudice can turn into violence. How people (and entire countries) turn a blind eye and become bystanders in an effort of self preservation. How radicals gain power by praying on economic insecurities, by othering, by using already marginalized groups as a scapegoat. How small, incrimentally enacted laws and policies stripped people’s rights and yet passed without much notice, and how all of these things built upon eachother and lead to the systematic murder of over 11 million human lives.

Even last year, my students made their own connections to our current policical and cultral climate, and to then presidential canidate Donald Trump specifically.

I encouraged them making those connections, as I always do when comparing history to current events, but I tried not to point out any of those similarities myself.

How can I do that this year? When my students ask why Jewish people didn’t just leave Germany, how can we discuss the difficult and lenghty visa process, the countries, especially our own, that denied refugees entrance, without speaking to the fact that our current administration had now enacted similar restrictive policies, and on Holocaust Rememberence Day no less?

How do I talk about Hitler silencing the media, about antisemetic violence and discrimination, about how an entire country and the rest of the world could stand by and allow these attrocities to take place, without speaking to what is currently happening in our country.

As a teacher, I need to walk a fine line. Caught between my moral and educational immperitive to teach about these things, and my own security when little Johnnie’s mom calls the principal to complain that I am comparing Trump to Hitler. How do I not speak to these parallels when we have students drawing swastikas on the buses and in the bathrooms, students “jokingly” handing out fake deportation slips to each other while a great many other students legitimatly fear that possibility.

Let me be clear, I am not trying to indoctrinate my students with my own political views. I am not trying to demonize Trump and compare him to Hitler, nor to trivialize the attrocity to the Holocaust by using it to demonstrate a political point. But I cannot in good concious fail to show the comparisons. I cannot dissuade my students from thinking critically, from connecting their classroom content to their world and their lives, from examining why we learn about this in the first place.

The mantra of Holocaust rememberence is “Never Forget”. If we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it, and repeat it we have, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bangladesh, in Kurdistan, in Iraq.

To teach of this in a sanitized, isolated way, and to ignore its relevance to today is incomplete, irresponsible, and morally and ethically incompatible with my teaching philosophy. But I cannot deny that this year especially, I am terrified of backlash, especially when I teach students whose parents are vehement Trump supporters, who already demonize teachers and rail against liberal indoctrination, who would see you fired over a bad grade. Even in writing this I worry that I have overstepped my bounds, but I simply cannot force myself and my students to be blind to what is happening, when that is the very thing that allowed these attrocities in the first place.