My experience of Holocaust education

Dara Horn's critique Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? got me wondering: how did I learn about the Holocaust? (Previous summary post here.)

And I realized that I actually had encountered Holocaust education in high school in 1963. This, among many other influences, probably helped set my trajectory for the rest of my life. The powers-that-be brought in a woman who was billed, accurately, as "a local author" to speak to a small group -- probably "the current events club." (We had such a thing. Odd to remember.)

This was Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) who lived in Buffalo. Her memoir, All But My Life, is the saga of how she landed in upstate New York.

Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) was born in Bielsko, Poland, on May 8, 1924. Growing up into a middle-class Jewish family, Gerda Weissmann’s life was shattered when she was 15 years old in September 1939. German forces invaded Poland and within a month her brother Artur was taken away by the Nazis never to return. Gerda and her parents were forced into the basement of their family home as it was stripped. Then along with other Jewish residents, they were imprisoned in the Bielsko Ghetto, and some were sent into slave labor. Gerda was eventually separated from her parents, who later died in the concentration camps, while she was sent into a series of slave labor camps at Marzdorf, Landshut and Gruenberg. After barely surviving these, Gerda was forced onto a Death March ending in Volary, Czechoslovakia on May 7, 1945. (Jewish Buffalo History Center)

Ms. Klein had married Kurt Klein, an American soldier who helped liberate this contingent of slave laborers. She committed her life to educating young people about her experience of Nazi genocide and much more, writing nine books "on themes of courage, friendship and love."

Ms. Klein's talk gifted me with a burning desire to know more about the inhumanity we are capable of visiting on each other. I borrowed her book from the local library -- and followed up with additional Holocaust reading, as well as another genre much available at the time, accounts of Stalin's gulag and even the Holodomor in Ukraine. (Note, somehow neither the story of European settlers' genocidal war on native Americans nor the story of American slavery were so available in the public library.) I was a curious young person.

Holocaust education had a profound effect on me. But I need to grant that Horn's article points to conditions that made Holocaust education viable for me. I had great advantages. Jewish people were part of my world.

• Unlike so many US kids now subjected to these course units, there were Jews in my daily life. There had been Jewish kids in my classes since 5th grade. There were a significant number of Jewish kids in my private high school.

• My mother had close Jewish women friends, people she'd worked with on community projects including during World War II.

• The adults I was exposed to were Holocaust-aware, both Jews and also my Protestant co-religionists.

However I should not leave the impression that this environment was devoid of anti-Semitism. In fact, it reeked of socially accepted prejudice against Jews.

• By the time I escaped high school, I had come to recognize that the institution was probably operating with a Jewish quota: there were Jewish students ... but not too many.

• While I was in high school, the large Reform synagogue nearby suffered anti-Semitic vandalism. The attack felt incomprehensible. Classmates felt threatened. I had been taken to tour that building along with classmates, a tour very like the one we sponsored of our Episcopal church. The two didn't feel that different: both were buildings used for slightly exotic purposes that advertised the comfortable class status of their adherents.

• And that goes to the nub of how I encountered Jews in that place and time: most all the families in that school, Christian and Jewish (there was nobody more exotic that I knew of), were performing culturally what was expected from the post-WWII professional American upper middle class. For example, I don't remember anyone being raised by a single mom. The Jewish kids seemed not to want to be seen as "too Jewish." I didn't meet Jews who willingly advertised difference from Christian Americans until I got out of there. The conformist Fifties persisted well into the Sixties in Buffalo.

If overcoming Christian solipsism and anti-Semitism were that challenging for me -- with all those corrective influences -- no wonder Holocaust education is as problematic as Dara Horn portrays it.

Gerda Klein's All But My Life remains available. I'm going to re-read it and may post an update.