Did you learn about the Holocaust in K-12 school?

I learned about it from books, and television programming.

No. I found out in my grandpas Sergeant Rock comic books when I was 6.

Yes, but to be forthright about it, the suburb I grew up in was 75% Jewish and 25% Catholic, and the teachers pretty much reflected the population in the suburb.

So we heard about the Holocaust in 8th grade world history and then again in 11th in a course on Moderyn European History.

@elbanditoroso Do you think if it was taught earlier than 8th grade it might have been very hard to hear about? Do you think it would have negatively affected you in any way? Psychologically, self esteem, what non Jewish kids might have thought or said. I’m very interested in how minorities feel when learning about their people having gone through horrible oppression, slavery, and genocide. I realize your family and/or community probably talked about it, or whispered about not talking about it, before you ever were taught anything in school, but learning in school has a different dynamic.

New Jersey now has mandated Holocaust curriculum in grades K-12. But it is age appropriate like learning about differences among fruits in kindergarten. I believe they should do the same with racism in the US.

I learned about the Holocaust within my family first. I don’t remember ever being taught about it in school

@janbb Differences among fruits is part of Holocaust education?

Yes. I went to school in a suburb of Boston. I’m pretty sure I learned about it in seventh grade, which is when I think we read the Diary of Anne Frank. I was born not long after the end of WWII, but I heard very little talk about it—any aspect of it—at home in my young years.

And, rather shockingly, until I was in sixth grade I thought everybody (except, you know, heathens in faraway countries) was either Catholic or Protestant. Before that, I knew a few of my classmates were Jewish, but I honestly didn’t know that was a religion. I thought it was more like a national identification: English, Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish.

My sixth-grade teacher had the two Jewish kids read Chanukah poems aloud to the class when the rest of us were reading Christmas verses. That’s how I found out. I can still remember how surprised I was.

Why didn’t it occur to my parents to tell me anything? I have no idea.

@JLeslie I knew about the Holocaust when I was 5 – my grandparents both had numbers on their arms and my grandfather had been in a concentration camp before they were able to ransom him out (1939 or so).

I don’t remember how they taught it in school; it was a long time ago. But growing up where I did, all my friends had families that had come from Europe, mostly escaping the holocaust.

I probably first heard about it on the old TV program “The 20th Century.”

I feel like I’ve always known about the Holocaust… but I also know that cannot possibly be true. It’s hard to pin down the moment I learned about it. Indiana Jones fights the Nazis, so I’m sure I was exposed at some point in elementary school to the idea of Nazis as villains, but not the Holocaust specifically. I can vividly recall a time when my good friend Jessica’s grandmother came into our (maybe 5th or 6th grade?) class and told her story of surviving the camp as a child (I don’t recall which one, but I don’t think it was Auschwitz).

I’m sure we covered it in middle school world history, and then really got into the geopolitics of WW2 in 9th grade world history. I think one of my textbooks showed a photo of shoes and it sent chills down my spine. In 9th grade we read Elie Wiesel’s “Night” (my high school would sync our history and English readings to cover contemporaneous authors). That was an amazing piece of literature—haunting.

@Jeruba Maybe your parents not telling you anything was a good sign, a nice sign, that they did not think of Jewish people or any people as different.

My great uncle wrote a letter while he was serving during WWII in Europe. In the letter he at one point used the term “German race.” I think some of the language used when you were young probably influenced your assumptions. I don’t find what you assumed regarding Jewish people shocking at all.

Here is the letter, feel no pressure to read it since it is somewhat off topic, but my great uncle wrote beautifully and his words are so meaningful as he explains what he observed while in Europe. Names are changed to the relation. His sister is my grandmother:

Dear sister, BIL, and niece:

I know that I could have written to you sooner, but I assure you that any letter that I did write would have been far from satisfactory inasmuch as we were moving so fast towards the close of this thing that we were lucky to get a rest and it is still a wonder to me that I managed to get off a letter to my wife nearly every day of this trip. Anyway, all the traveling did not go for naught for the war has been brought to a close, although I can’t say that I had too rough a time or that our unit was as prominent in the fighting as some of the others, it still is not a bad feeling to know that I did something in order to bring about the downfall of this cruel machine that has operated here for the past twelve years.

I know that all of you people are apt to minimize the cruelties that have been going on here for so long because of the propaganda that is put out by the newspapers and I know that when I was in the states I did have a tendency to think that a lot of the things that were printed were exaggerated to a great extent by the correspondents. However, since I have been here and especially in the last week or two, I have seen things which make me realize that everything that was ever written about the atrocities of the Germans can well be believed because they have been capable of anything. I have seen thousands of people who have been inmates of the concentration camps walking or dragging themselves along the roads only in the hope that they get as far away from this place as possible. The majority of them are skeletons of human beings, and I have spoken to several of these refugees who have told me that in the camp that they were at, the average death rate was 200 per day from malnutrition. I know that about a week before the Americans came thru this particular area, more than one thousand Jewish prisoners were led out to the fields and were slaughtered. And now that the war has come to a close I have heard that one of the Generals has asked for mercy from the allies in the terms that are imposed upon the German people. That one really hands me a laugh but it is also true that whatever terms are imposed upon the Germans they will be merciful in comparison to the crimes that they have committed upon the peoples of the world because the people of any civilized nation could not possibly equal the acts of barbarism which have been committed here. I am almost positive that the German race will end up in this war stronger than any of the nations that fought against her.

Be that as it may, I am glad that I am not the one to decide what shall be done with them and my one thought now is to get home as soon as possible to rejoin my family and have some happiness in this world. The only disconcerting thing about all this is that the army is apt to have different ideas about where I will be sent and I must admit that I am under quite a strain until I find out what is to become of us. There is still the war against Japan to be fought and I am not too optimistic about the unit that I am with coming home very soon. My only hope seems to lie in some act of Congressional action which might concern married men with children or an age limit of some sort. What do you think of the possibilities in this direction?

That’s all for now so take care of yourselves.

Love,
my great uncle

I never heard about it in school, up through twelfth grade.

Even in College when I took about twenty classes with the Bornblum Judaic studies, very little was mentioned of the Holocaust.

Not until I was in seminary, which was after college, was this officially taught (early 1990s) By that time, slavery in the U.S., and the Confederacy, were considered even worse things.
And, of course, there were Holocaust deniers who disrupted the class.

I did learn about the Holocaust through my interest in Judaism and in my personal interest in the occult systems underlying Nazism, such as Theosophy, in college and in that period between college and seminary, in the early 1990s. I read two memoirs of people who survived the Holocaust when I was in seminary

@JLeslie Yes, as I said, the curriculum was age appropriate. I can’t remember how the fruit came into it since I never studied it but I believe the idea was to tie it into diversity and differences among people. I know it seems odd but it made sense when I heard about it.

If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum, here’s a link to the guide. a lot of the selections have to do with racism in general as well.

https://www.nj.gov/education/holocaust/curriculumn/materials/

@gorillapaws I also learned about it at a very young age. My family was from Eastern Europe, but they would make references to the Holocaust and I did know some people with numbers on their arms. The Q wasn’t so much about when someone first learned about the Holocaust, but more about learning it in school.

I’m extremely grateful I did not have to read Anne Frank as a young girl, some people in my school did. I guess it was up to the individual teacher.

I remember watching a movie about the Holocaust in 8th grade. It was odd watching that movie as a Jewish girl. I am very glad my school system taught it, I am just very glad it was not taught any younger than 8th grade, and honestly could have waited until high school. I also think it was great my school taught about how Hitler rose to power and that Germany was a modern country and no one would think it could happen there.

@janbb I see what you mean, but I think it causes miscommunication when people refer to exercises in treating all people equally with segregation, slavery, and the Holocaust. I am not saying you are creating the miscommunication, I am saying I hear this sort of thing often, and it is mixing two different topics in my mind, even though I realize they overlap. Segregation, slavery, and the Holocaust are history lessons in my mind. Teaching kids to be decent human beings and treat each other equally should exist even if none of that horror had happened in history.

@Yellowdog Do you think it should be taught in K-12? Is it taught now in the school system there?

You can look at the mandated curriculum I linked to and see that the NJ Department of Education considers it part of Holocaust education. Personally, I don’t have a dog in this fight.

I hate to spoil a good discussion, but many Muslims deny the holocaust so it would bring about problems to teach it in the Shelby County public schools. The Municipal school systems, such as Bartlett, Collierville Germantown, Millington, etc. teach it, as do private and religious schools.

@Yellowdog Wow. I don’t see why what Muslims believe should matter at all when it comes to this part of history. Do you think the Black Muslims in Shelby also are Holocaust Deniers? Plus, it is not all Muslims who deny the events. I think it is less than 1% of Shelby is Muslim, I remember it is similar to how many Jews are there I think.

Yes ! History class but also typing teacher and Geography teacher; both Jewish and members of the OSS during WWII !

@Tropical_Willie What grade?

In the 1950s in Junior High.

It certainly wasn’t covered in any depth in my grade schools, the prep school or the superlative academic high school where the academics amounted to the most concentrated assembly of scholastically competitive Jewish kids this world has yet assembled. I came across the topic in my childhood fascination with war and death.

I learned about it in 8th and 10th grade, just like @elbanditoroso. But unlike his hometown, mine only had a handful of Jewish families. The 8th grade version was mostly about the camps. The 10th grade version covered Hitler’s rise to power. Sadly, one of my classmates came from a family of self-described neo-Nazis, and he tried to disrupt the lesson in 10th grade. But he was told to sit down and shut up by our history teacher.

For jellies who are not Jewish, do you remember if you thought anything about your Jewish classmates when learning about the Holocaust? Did you wonder if their families had been put in camps or killed? Did you feel bad for them just being Jewish? Did you not really put together at the time that the history was so recent it might directly affect your classmates? Did you assume all the Jewish kids were directly affected? Maybe something else?

@stanleybmanly A male friend of mine said that he remembers not being taught about it because the boys all wanted to study wars and his history class never got to WWII. I found that interesting and unnerving all at once.

@JLeslie As with a lot of other things which matter a great deal, I stumbled across the fact of the holocaust when I was around 5, and this huge (for me) red book came into our house—Life’s Picture History of World War II. The book was a compilation of vivid photographs detailing nearly every aspect of the war, and is primarily responsible (I believe) for my ability to read. I still remember and can quote paragraphs and titles from the chapters, and if shown one of the photographs today, I will quote you the accompanying caption— and there are hundreds of them. At the time, the graphic photos of the bones and stick figure corpses were all but passed over to look at the planes, tanks, etc., but an awful lot can be said for the value in obsessive repetition.

@stanleybmanly I don’t think I’ve ever seen that book, but I do tend to avoid books like that. Books, movies, museums, and biographies about the war and the Holocaust I need to gear myself up to listen or watch something about that time and I can only do it in small doses. I almost never read about it. I can read about how Hitler was elected and the circumstances in Germany leading up to his reign, but beyond that I’m generally not wanting to put myself through it. I have trouble with any time in history that was so incredibly abusive and so much suffering.

I don’t remember the Holocaust being mentioned in classes I went to in the 50’s and 60’s but I remember a joke that went the rounds in the playground that touched on the Holocaust and would certainly be considered anti-Semitic today, though it was repeated by us without malice or any real understanding. My school was almost entirely Protestant and Catholics made up only about 4% of the population. Jews were unheard of.

I first learned about the Holocaust through television documentaries but it was only after I had children of my own that it began to feel real. It is in the written testimonies of survivors that I have found the truth of it, each word written by them for me.

@JLeslie “For jellies who are not Jewish, do you remember if you thought anything about your Jewish classmates when learning about the Holocaust?”

I don’t think I did. I was likely processing mankind’s capacity for evil and a bunch of neurons were remapping themselves. I was so young that I probably didn’t have the emotional capacity to consider how the revelations of the Holocaust may have impacted my Jewish friends and classmates nor the mental bandwidth to process the information empathetically as it was a lot for just myself to fully grasp. Even listening to the story of my friend’s grandmother, I was thinking about the grandmother, her ordeal and not how hearing that story was affecting my friend.

I learned about it in school. I don’t remember the grade, but I had already read The Diary of Anne Frank and other books by then. My mom read Night in college when I was in elementary school and I remember her talking about it and the impact it made on her. I took a class on the Holocaust in college and learned a LOT more. I didn’t have Jewish classmates (that I knew of) but had a lot of empathy, in general.

@JLeslie I don’t think I ever had a Jewish classmate.

Interesting question. I’ve been sitting here trying to remember when I learned about the Holocaust and can’t remember ever not knowing about it. My uncle was Jewish as were my cousins but I can’t remember any discussion about it. It was simply something that happened in the past perpetrated by evil people. Kind of like the Romans feeding Christians to the lions. I don’t say that to make light of it but simply to try analyze my thoughts as a kid. I could not understand why Jews would be singled out as different. To be honest, I still don’t understand why Jews would be singled out as different. I guess if you want to hate someone, one reason is as good as another. If you hate someone for their religion, you’re way past any reasonable explanation.

@Jaxk A reason can always be manufactured. Consider for instance—immigrants.

@Jaxk As a young child it was sort of like a thing in the past similar Romans, but then as I became a little older I started to realize it was not that long ago and I started to know people who had parents and grandparents who had lived in the camps or grew up with other families because their families were murdered.

I was born in ‘68 so in the 70’s Jewish families often were still swearing to never buy a German product. We were wary that the Germans started two major wars, why not do it again. We still talked about Germans like they really did believe they were better, and that they were very regimented and easily led to follow a leader. These were the stereotypes I heard. Mind you I had German friends in America and never once was that a problem and never did my family have one negative thing to say about German-Americans.

My family was from Eastern Europe and antisemitism there was very bad there also. So, it was multiple countries we feared for lack of freedom and lack of safety, but in America we felt overall safe and grateful, but with this nagging feeling the rise of another Hitler or a Holocaust could happen again anywhere and we knew there were pockets of antisemitic people here in the US.

What’s so different about the Jews is the hateful keep coming after us. We are such a small group of people it’s ridiculous! I think now we are 16 million in the world. Florida has a larger population. About 6 million Jews in the US, so like a metropolitan city worth of people. Tiny number in the scheme of things.

That you don’t understand why Jews are singled out is a very nice thing. I take that only in a positive way.

My history texts in high school ended at 1940; WWII would have required either cutting something out of the curriculum, or adding a couple more weeks to the school year.

But we were exposed to the Holocaust (which wasn’t called the Holocaust yet) through literature: Diary of Anne Frank, Mila 18, and Exodus ( the Leon Uris version, not the biblical book).

It was like a feature of history that we didnt often study in school, but it was often mentioned and referenced. I came up around the time Schindlers List came out, and understanding the holocaust was becoming a part of the Zeitgeist. I never heard about denialism until late high school, and even then I only interpreted it as contrarianism, not an actual held belief.

@stanleybmanly – I’m not sure how to or if I should respond to your comment. If you are equating the Holocaust to illegal immigration, that’s a bridge too far for me. Sorry you’ll have to find someone else to argue that point.

Now that I think back on it, I don’t know that I was specifically taught about it until I took AP European History my senior year of high school. When I think about what history was taught from 3rd to 11th grade, it was a lot of U.S. history (3rd/5th/8th/11th), California history (4th), ancient history (6th), medieval and Renaissance history (7th), Western civ ancient-early 20th century (10th) and contemporary political issues (9th). I must’ve learned about it somewhere because I remember talking about it in middle and high school but I don’t think it was covered in detail until my senior year elective.

@Jaxk I’m talking about scapegoating. “They’re coming here to take your job and molest your grandchildren”. Where do you suppose Trump learned that sort of stuff?

I went to school in the 60s and 70s and do not recall ever being taught about the Holocaust. There were no Jewish children that I know of that attended my elementary, junior high or High School. However, I knew about the Holocaust from a fairly early age due to watching old World War II movies and my father, who fought in World War II. He actually ended up in a German prison camp and was released when the war ended.

When I was in junior high my mother took me to see a local play about Anne Frank. I then read the book. It’s kind of interesting that my maiden name is Jewish but there are no relatives or ancestors that I know of that ever practiced the Jewish faith.

You asked how it affected me. Even as a child, I’ve always been horrified and sickened that people could do something like this to other people.

I was only taught that Jesus was a Jew growing up in church and how Israel was the center of the religious world we must protect at all costs.

In secular education it was likely in junior high I learned about the Holocaust in glossed over terms.

When Schindler’s List came out in 1994, and I was devastated after watching it and afterwards educated myself, as I no longer trusted what I knew from school to be the truth.

That’s also when I read about the Japanese concentration camps here in America and how we took all their property and personal items due to Pearl Harbor and the war.

@KNOWITALL Oh, that is another interesting point about the Japanese camps in America. I learned about those in school too.

@Yellowdog That’s fascinating. I hadn’t been aware of the link between Nazism and Theosophy. Back in my pre-atheist days 40 years ago I used to study Theosophy with a Theosophical master. Although original writings by Blavatsky and the other Theosophical writers talk about the rounds and the races, the concept of the 7 races was always metaphorical as stages of monadic evolution. Actual race color (or religion) never came into it.

However, it does appear that Hitler and Nazism did pervert the original meaning and then use the most evolved race as the Aryan race. https://www.ilawjournals.com/the-secret-doctrine-helena-blavatsky-she-taught-hitler/

Personally, round about college, I realized that it was all complete bullshit and I abandoned Theosophy. Although I still have some of the books because they were given to me by my teacher, now long dead.

I learned about it through family members and reading Encyclopedias as a kid. It was not covered in school to any degree.

Having family in the military was how the topic came up. My stumbling on it when I was about 7 years old while reading the World Book Letter “H” from front to back was where my first realization of this.