“Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

– Dwight David Eisenhower

It has been 79 years since Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army. And so much time has passed that those who carry the living memory of what happened are passing into the arms of history. The survivors are now elderly at best, even if they were children. It is now left to the adults among us to teach the lessons of what happened during the Holocaust.

And may I say, we are doing a crap job of it.

20% of Americans aged 18-29 now think that the Holocaust is just a myth

Something has gone horribly wrong with our universities pic.twitter.com/AcxLqHVfro

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 22, 2024

It seems that this is a consistent theme that has been building for years. The younger generations are not being taught history in a way that make an impression, or makes it real to them. I am finding this disconnect from actual history and historical events part of a larger pattern overall among Gen Z – one that I am trying to combat within my own Gen Z/Gen Alpha children. How do you teach history when you don’t have a personal connection to it? Even the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have dealt with that question. One way some of them have created a connection is by re-creating the tattoo that a family member once had.

The impact the Holocaust has had through the generations runs deep. Quite how we remember the past and its legacy varies hugely. (Rony) Cohen is one of a small but growing number of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who have replicated the Auschwitz death camp tattoo on their own body.

Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the only camp where numbers were tattooed on those inmates not selected for immediate death. In replacing the person’s name, this number has become the visual symbol of the crimes of the Nazis.

Cohen draws meaning from her tattoo in that it signifies her grandmother’s history and her own identity as a descendant of Holocaust survivors. To her mind, replicating this number was a means of taking her grandmother, as a person, and her legacy forward. As a gesture and an indelible mark she carries with her, she says:

The number is my grandma. It’s my past, my roots, my story. It’s who I am.

But how do you teach the Holocaust to the younger generations today? Well first, consider what YOU yourself know about the Holocaust. If all you can do is say “I watched Schindler’s List, and read The Diary of Anne Frank in high school,” then how on earth are you prepared to pass on knowledge that you don’t have a grip on yourself?

When it comes to children, it really does depend on the age and maturity of the child involved. Public schools have largely kept Holocaust history and education to middle school/junior high ages and above, acknowledging that even older elementary school students probably aren’t ready for the gravity of the topic. Again, this is all dependent on the child involved. For younger children in that age group, the Newbery Award winning book Number the Stars can be an easier introduction to the topic, as it focuses on the Nazi occupation of Denmark and the effort to help Jews escape to Sweden.

Once kids are older, there are a lot of differing materials that can be used. I’m going to highlight one TV show episode, one TV miniseries, and one miniseries episode, but there are many other options out there that may be fictional, or heavily fictionalized, but can help bring the reality of the Holocaust to light.

The TV show episode that I would recommend for teenagers and adults alike is the classic Twilight Zone episode, Deaths-Head Revisited, which was written by the master himself, Rod Serling. In this episode, a former SS officer returns to Dachau to relive his sadism, and is confronted by the ghosts of the past. This episode aired on November 10, 1961, when the horrors of the Holocaust were very much within living memory. Rod Serling’s ending narration puts a powerful punch to the audience as he wraps up the story:

All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.

The TV miniseries that I would recommend is Anne Frank: The Whole Story, which originally aired in May 2001. The three-hour miniseries starred Ben Kingsley as Otto Frank, and is a gripping show because it doesn’t just show what we generally see in productions about Anne Frank and her family – it follows them to Auschwitz and beyond. Unlike the diary, which stops when Anne and her family and the rest of the residents of the “Secret Annexe” are arrested, the miniseries takes what we know from eyewitnesses and fills in what happened next. And it is brutal and horrible and sad. I had to find this miniseries on DVD at my local library, but copies are available through Amazon. It is worth watching after reading the diary, because the contrast between the happy, optimistic Anne Frank that we read about, and the very broken and despairing young woman that died at Bergen-Belsen that is portrayed here, is tragic and contains far more realism than we would like to think about.

The single miniseries episode that I recommend is from one of the best World War II miniseries available – Band of Brothers. Episode 9, titled “Why We Fight,” shows Easy Company discovering a subcamp of Dachau (the Kaufering I subcamp outside of Landsberg) and reacting in horror to what they find there. The episode does not shy away from the brutality of what happened, and while the entire miniseries is worth watching, this episode stands out for portraying the reality of the Holocaust.

I will also recommend the thriving history community that exists on YouTube. Many documentaries exist on that platform, but there are several good travelogue videos that can show what many of the concentration camps or extermination camps look like today, and their various states of preservation. This one from the channel “The History Underground” is particularly gripping.

Now, all of these shows and videos can be watched without ever leaving your own home. However, museums and memorials can be found all over the United States, without going to Washington D.C. or Europe or Israel. Obviously, the best way to learn history is to go where it happened. When that isn’t possible, you have to make the best effort you can, both for self-education and for educating the younger generation.

This is the first International Holocaust Rememberance Day since the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Ever since then, we have seen with our own eyes the grotesque and vile anti-Semitism that has found free expression in streets all over the world, and on college campuses. We are currently living through an ugly moment in history, one that is stripping away any illusions as to how the Nazis convinced the German population to simply look the other way as they systematically deported and murdered millions of people. “Never again” is now, again. Except now, Israel is being slandered as the aggressor for fighting back. And the younger generations are woefully uneducated about history, because history began with THEM, and they have not bothered to learn anything beyond “their truth” and decide on who is oppressed and who is the oppressor.

If you are in a position to help educate “young skulls full of mush,” as the late great Rush Limbaugh used to say, I encourage you to do so. Holocaust denalism is on the rise, as we can see in that survey. The only cure is reality, by applying history, repeatedly.

Featured image: The image from the cover of “A History of the Holocaust” by Yehuda Bauer, cropped, public domain