Holocaust game makes children weep - me too

Holocaust reality teaching - With the aim of "teaching history" a group of primary schoolchildren were left traumatised after their teacher told them they were to be taken away from their families during a bizarre Holocaust classroom 'game'.

Done by a Lanarkshire school "in order to give children an insight into the horrors faced by Jewish children" the lesson left many children some as young as eleven tearful and in hysterics.

Angry parents complained to authorities that they had not be consulted nor had any prior explanation been given to the children about the misguided exercise.

Children were told that those who were born in December to February had low IQ's and had to wear yellow hats and be sent to the library in an attempt to give the children a real feeling of the experience of Jews in wartime Europe.

This is true according to the Daily Mail which we have to assume is telling us the truth, which is sometimes difficult to believe given some stories they have reported recently. In fact one wonders whether our press might really be a great way of giving children experience of enemy propaganda as experienced by those in wartime Europe; except these days the enemy is not quite so clear-cut.

There is a lot to be said for teaching history by experience. In fact every weekend whole groups of grown up men and women in Britain dress up as Vikings, Saxons, Cavaliers, Roundheads and the Ermine Street Guard or the lost Legion of Rome, just for the joy of re-enacting history. Archaeologists regularly experiment with wattle and daub and various other ancient arts and crafts to find out how things were really done. Details are important. There have been TV programs where groups of middle-class suburbanites have been left to live as they did in the Iron Age and endure the privations of the elements and having to gather and kill one's own food. During all these periods death was the close neighbour of our ancestors. Furthermore there are few first hand accounts of everyday life. So, yes re-enactment is a useful way of experiencing history.

The worst part of the Scottish school's strange way of teaching children is that it is patronizing. It doesn't credit the kids with being able to imagine how things might have been. Experience isn't necessary for teaching about the horrors of the Holocaust.

With "joined-up" education one might have thought that increasing literacy and historical knowledge would go hand-in-hand. I can recommend many books on the Holocaust that could be read during literacy period and discussed during history classes. Ann Frank's diary is one.

Where human pain and the sheer horror of man's inhumanity to man are concerned our recorded history is full of examples and first hand accounts are bountiful and particularly those about the Holocaust can only augment our poor imagination of what it was like.

So for those strange teachers in that Lanarkshire school I recommend the following to include in your staff discussions and lesson plans:

Firstly, part of a poem by Sudeep Pagedar which crystallises the teachers' dilemma:

Holocaust
by Sudeep Pagedar

How do you
explain that term
to a ten-
year old boy
who, one day,
hears it mentioned
by some relatives?

And even if
you do manage
to make him
understand what it
actually does mean,
do you also
tell him that
because he is

A GERMAN JEW,

perhaps, some day,
he might be
included in it...?

Or should he
just not be
told, so that
he remains calm
and doesn't lose
sleep over it?

Secondly here is a poem that you should discuss with your pupils it is short so their attention will not wander and it should not tax your abilities to inspire in their imaginations those dreadful events

Holocaust
by Barbara Sonek

We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our
parents and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future. We were going to be lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.
We had dreams, then we had no hope.
We were taken away in the dead of night like cattle in cars, no air to breathe smothering, crying, starving, dying.
Separated from the world to be no more.
From the ashes, hear our plea.
This atrocity to mankind can not happen again.
Remember us, for we were the children whose dreams and lives were stolen away.


If this isn't enough for you then take them on a trip to Auschwitzt or at least hire a decent video about it.

Teachers please give your kids credit for being able to make more in their imaginations of what for anyone, even those who went through it can be only so poorly described in words. To make them live it for even fifteen minutes makes you no better than the guards who herded those Jewish children into the cattle trucks - and you are not even following orders.