Education, Social Studies, History, Civics, Current Issues

Book Reviews on First-Hand Accounts of the European Holocaust

First-Hand Accounts of the European Holocaust

Reviews by Ari Mandel and Josh Wolk

These books are first-person testimonies from survivors of the World War II European Holocaust. Most, but not all, of the survivor stories were written by Jews. The ability of students to meet survivors will soon end, so these accounts take on even greater historical and educational significance. The reviews are ordered by publication date.

The books reviewed are:

Smoke Over Birkenau, Seweryna Szmaglewska

Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

Night, Elie Wiesel

Auschwitz, Miklos Nyiszli

I Cannot Forgive, Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic

Auschwitz and After, Charlotte Delbo

Eyewitness Auschwitz, Filip Müller

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi

Smoke Over Birkenau, Liana Millu

There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, Giuliana Tedeschi

Europa, Europa, Shlomo Perel

A Gypsy in Auschwitz, Otto Rosenberg

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein

A Lucky Child, Thomas Buergenthal

At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Amery

First One In, Last One Out, Marilyn Shimon

The Survivor, Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin

Lipstick in Auschwitz, Miriam Nick

Smoke Over Birkenau, Seweryna Szmaglewska (Holt, 1945)

Seweryna Szmaglewska was a Polish Catholic writer and journalist arrested in 1942 and imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She survived and was liberated in January 1945. Her account of the camp was published in Polish in 1945 making it one of the earliest first-hand descriptions of the extermination process to reach the public. She later testified before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal where her book was entered into the trial record as evidence. Her account focuses on daily life in the women’s section of Birkenau. She explores the routines, the hunger, the selections, and the constant visibility of death. The title of the book refers to the smoke rising continuously from the crematoria that prisoners could see from across the camp. This account shaped the historical and legal understanding of the Holocaust in the years following the war. Its use at Nuremberg gives it a significance beyond testimony alone.

Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel (Original English edition, Ziff-Davis, 1947)

Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz is a memoir by Olga Lengyel, a Jewish woman from Transylvania who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Lengyel was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 along with her parents, husband, and two young sons. Upon arrival, her children and parents were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Lengyel was assigned to the women’s section of the camp where she endured forced labor, starvation, disease, and constant terror. The title of the book refers to the crematoria at Auschwitz, whose chimneys continually released smoke from the bodies of murdered prisoners. In her memoir, Lengyel describes the daily life of female prisoners and the brutal system that governed the camp. She recounts the roles played by prisoner functionaries, including kapos, as well as the complex moral choices people faced in order to survive. The book also describes the medical experiments and mass killings carried out by the Nazis. Published shortly after the war in 1947, Five Chimneys was one of the earliest detailed accounts of Auschwitz written by a survivor. Lengyel later devoted much of her life to Holocaust education and remembrance. Her memoir remains an important testimony about the experiences of women in Nazi concentration camps.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank (Original English edition, New York: Doubleday, 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was originally published in The Netherlands in 1947 as The Annex (Het Achterhuis). Anne Frank was a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis with her family and others in Amsterdam during occupation by Nazi Germany. Anne’s diary documents life in hiding ranging from the food they ate to the interpersonal dynamics within the Annex. The diary serves as a historical document, but also a deeply personal narrative that brings to life the fears of a young person amidst the Holocaust. Anne was captured in a Nazi raid on the secret annex in August 1944 and she died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in either February or March 1945.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (Original English edition, Beacon, 1959)

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl combines memoir and psychological reflection based on the author’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who was deported to camps including Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi labor camps between 1942 and 1945. Much of his family perished in the Holocaust, including his parents and pregnant wife. In the first section of the book, Frankl describes daily life in the camps, including forced labor, starvation, disease, and the constant presence of death. He recounts how prisoners struggled to maintain hope and dignity under brutal conditions. Frankl observed that, while prisoners could not control their circumstances, they could still choose their attitude toward suffering. The second part of the book introduces Frankl’s psychological theory known as logotherapy, which argues that the primary human drive is the search for meaning in life. According to Frankl, individuals who were able to find purpose, whether through love, faith, or future goals, were often better able to endure the extreme hardships of camp life. First published in 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning became one of the most influential psychological and philosophical works of the twentieth century. It offers both a personal account of survival and a reflection on how humans can find meaning in even the most tragic of circumstances.

Night, Elie Wiesel (Original English edition, Hill and Wang, 1960)

Elie Wiesel’s Night is one of the most widely read Holocaust memoirs and recounts his experiences as a Jewish teenager during the Nazi genocide. Wiesel grew up in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania. In 1940 the village became part of Hungary and in 1944, when he was fifteen, German forces occupied Hungary and quickly began deporting Jews to concentration camps. Wiesel and his family were sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel remained with his father and endured forced labor, starvation, brutality, and constant fear of death. The memoir follows his movement from Auschwitz to the Buchenwald concentration camp as the Nazis evacuated prisoners during the final months of the war. Throughout the narrative, Wiesel describes the physical and psychological trauma of camp life, including the breakdown of moral norms among prisoners struggling to survive. The book also explores Wiesel’s crisis of faith as he witnesses immense suffering and cruelty. His relationship with his father becomes the emotional center of the story as they try to survive together in the camps. Published in 1956 in Yiddish and later translated into many languages, Night became one of the defining literary accounts of the Holocaust and is widely used in schools to teach about genocide and memory. After reading Night in its original Yiddish, I understand why the versions meant for mass consumption were heavily edited. Setting aside the length, the Yiddish version is more than 800 pages, the content, style and references are way too Jewish for a non-Jewish audience, and way too subversive and racy for the Orthodox world. I suspected few religious Jews could appreciate his yeshiva boy style, while not being scandalized at references to sex, or confronting God, or some Jews for not being “ideal victims.”

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Miklos Nyiszli (Original English edition, Crest, 1961)

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account is the memoir of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Upon arrival, Nyiszli was selected to work as a pathologist for the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele. Because of his medical training, Nyiszli was forced to assist Mengele with examinations and autopsies related to the doctor’s experiments on prisoners. This position allowed Nyiszli to witness many aspects of the camp’s operations, including medical experiments and the functioning of the crematoria. Although his role gave him slightly better living conditions than most prisoners, Nyiszli remained a prisoner under constant threat of death. His memoir describes both the horrors of the camp and the moral dilemmas he faced while being forced to participate in the Nazi system.

Nyiszli’s testimony provides a rare perspective on the camp from the viewpoint of a prisoner who worked within the medical system of the camp administration. The memoir remains an important historical source about the activities of Nazi doctors during the Holocaust.

I Cannot Forgive, Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1963)

Rudolf Vrba was a Slovakian Jew born Walter Rosenberg in 1924. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 where he worked in various parts of the camp including the section where arriving transports were processed. In April 1944, he and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler successfully escaped from Auschwitz. After their escape, Vrba and Wetzler compiled a detailed thirty-page report documenting the layout of the camp and the systematic mass murder taking place there. The Vrba-Wetzler Report was delivered to Allied governments and Jewish leaders. Vrba spent the rest of his life as a scientist and pharmacologist and died in 2006. His memoir was written with journalist Alan Bestic. I Cannot Forgive recounts Vrba’s two years inside Auschwitz and the planning and execution of the escape. This book addresses the role of bystanders and the failure of international institutions to respond. It questions the moral responsibilities of governments and organizations that received evidence of genocide and did not act.

Auschwitz and After, Charlotte Delbo (French edition, 1965. Original English Edition, Yale University Press, 1995)

Charlotte Delbo was a French writer and member of the resistance. She was arrested in 1942 and was deported to Auschwitz as part of a convoy of 230 French women. Of the 230 women only 49 survived. Delbo was later transferred to Ravensbrück before being released through a Red Cross negotiation in April 1945. She wrote her account of the camps immediately after the war but chose not to publish it until 1965, believing the story needed time after the war to be fully understood. She went on to write plays and essays and remained a committed voice against fascism until her death in 1985. Auschwitz and After is a three-part work that combines prose and poetry to recount Delbo’s experience in Birkenau. The story explores her transfer, death march, and the long years of psychological aftermath that followed liberation. The final section deals with the difficulty of returning to ordinary life and is one of the most powerful literary testaments of survivor trauma ever written. This account is significant because Delbo approached the Holocaust not only as a witness, but also as a literary artist. The book supports interdisciplinary instruction across history and literature. Her poem “O You Who Know,” (“Vous qui saviez”) challenges the reader to consider the inadequacy of what they think they understand. “O you who know / Could you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle? / While thirst makes them dim? / You who know, / Could you know that you can see your mother dead, / Without shedding a tear? / You who know, / Could you know how in the morning you crave death, / Only to fear it by evening?”

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Filip Müller (Original English edition, Stein, 1979)

Eyewitness Auschwitz is the memoir of Filip Müller, one of the very few members of the Sonderkommando who survived the Holocaust. Müller was a Slovak Jewish prisoner deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Shortly after arriving, he was forced into the Sonderkommando, a special unit of prisoners compelled to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. Members of the Sonderkommando were forced to remove bodies from the gas chambers, extract gold teeth, and burn the corpses in crematoria. Because they witnessed the mass murder of prisoners, the Nazis regularly killed Sonderkommando workers to eliminate witnesses. Müller survived this position for three years, an extremely rare occurrence. In his memoir, Müller provides one of the most detailed first-hand descriptions of how the extermination process at Auschwitz functioned. He describes the arrival of transports, the deception used to send victims into gas chambers, and the mechanics of the crematoria. The book is particularly significant because it reveals the psychological burden faced by prisoners forced to assist in the killing process. Müller’s testimony became an important historical source and was later used in trials against Nazi war criminals. His memoir remains one of the most powerful and disturbing eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi (Original English edition, Summit, 1986)

Survival in Auschwitz, also known as If This Is a Man, is a memoir by Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi about his imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Levi was arrested by Italian Fascists in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz the following year. Upon arrival, most of the people on his transport were immediately murdered, while Levi was selected for forced labor. Levi spent approximately eleven months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945. His background as a chemist eventually allowed him to work in a laboratory, which slightly improved his chances of survival. In the memoir, Levi describes the harsh realities of camp life, including starvation, disease, violence from guards, and the constant struggle among prisoners for survival. Unlike some memoirs that focus mainly on emotional responses, Levi carefully analyzes the social structure of the camp system. He explains how the Nazis created a brutal hierarchy among prisoners and how survival often depended on luck, resourcefulness, and small advantages. First published in Italy in 1947, the book is widely considered one of the most important literary testimonies of the Holocaust. Levi’s clear and analytical writing style provides readers with a detailed picture of the daily functioning of Auschwitz and the moral challenges faced by those imprisoned there.

Smoke Over Birkenau, Liana Millu (Original English edition, Jewish Publication Society, 1991)

Smoke Over Birkenau is a collection of short memoir stories written by Liana Millu, an Italian Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Millu was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 after being arrested for her involvement with the Italian resistance against Nazi occupation. Unlike many memoirs that follow a single chronological narrative, this book consists of several short accounts describing the lives of women prisoners in Birkenau. Each story focuses on a different individual and highlights the emotional struggles faced by women trying to survive in the camp. Millu writes about friendships, hopes, betrayals, and the desperate attempts by prisoners to maintain dignity in an environment designed to destroy humanity. The stories reveal how small acts of kindness or solidarity sometimes helped prisoners endure the brutal conditions of camp life. First published in Italy in 1947, the book was one of the earliest literary accounts of women’s experiences in Auschwitz. Millu’s writing combines personal memory with a reflective style that captures the emotional impact of life in the camp. The memoir remains an important contribution to Holocaust literature, particularly for its focus on the perspective of female prisoners.

There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, Giuliana Tedeschi (Random House, 1993)

Giuliana Tedeschi was an Italian Jewish woman and mother of two from Turin who was a teacher and a writer. She was deported from Italy to Auschwitz in April 1944 along with her husband and mother-in-law. Neither of them survived the Holocaust. After liberation, she returned to Italy and dedicated much of her life to Holocaust education and public testimony. Tedeschi died in 2010 at the age of 96. In her memoir, Tedeschi described the squalor, starvation, and torment of the camps and living in the shadow of the crematorium. She explored the daily struggle for survival, the solidarity formed between women prisoners, and the effort to hold onto identity and dignity inside a system built to destroy both. It is an important memoir because it describes relationships between women and solidarity as the basis for psychological survival. During her imprisonment, Tedesci’s daughters were hidden by a Catholic family. Mother and daughters were reunited after the war.

Europa, Europa, Shlomo Perel (Original English edition, Trade Paper, 1999)

Europa, Europa is the memoir of Shlomo Perel, a Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by hiding his identity and posing as a German. Perel was born in Germany in 1925 to a Jewish family. When the Nazis came to power, his family fled to Poland to escape persecution. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Perel became separated from his family and was captured by Soviet forces. Later he fell into German hands but managed to convince them that he was an ethnic German rather than a Jew. Because he spoke fluent German and knew the culture, the Nazis accepted his claim. Perel spent several years living among Germans, even attending a Hitler Youth school while hiding the fact that he was Jewish. His survival depended on constant deception and the fear that his identity might be discovered at any moment.

The memoir describes the strange and dangerous situation of a Jewish teenager living inside Nazi society while secretly belonging to the group the Nazis sought to destroy. After the war, Perel eventually emigrated to Israel. His story was later adapted into a successful film, also titled Europa, Europa, which helped bring his extraordinary survival story to a wider audience.

A Gypsy in Auschwitz, Otto Rosenberg (Original English edition, Allison and Busby, 2001)

A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the memoir of Otto Rosenberg, a member of the Roma community who survived Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. Rosenberg was born in Germany in 1927 and was targeted by the Nazi regime because the Roma were considered racially inferior under Nazi ideology. During World War II, Rosenberg was arrested and eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis had established a special section for Roma prisoners known as the “Gypsy camp.” Conditions in this camp were extremely harsh, with overcrowding, disease, and starvation common among prisoners. Rosenberg describes witnessing the destruction of the Roma section of the camp in 1944, when thousands of Roma men, women, and children were murdered in the gas chambers. He survived by being transferred to other camps, including Buchenwald, before eventually being liberated near the end of the war. His memoir highlights the often overlooked genocide of the Roma people during the Holocaust. After the war, Rosenberg became an advocate for Roma rights and worked to educate others about the persecution his community suffered under the Nazi regime.

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein (North Carolina Press, 2004)

Hermann Langbein was an Austrian communist who was imprisoned at Dachau before being transferred to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz he worked as a clerk for SS physician Dr. Eduard Wirths. His administrative position gave him access to records, personnel, and encounters with both perpetrators and prisoners. After the war he became one of the most important figures in documenting Nazi crimes and played a central role in organizing the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of the 1960s. While Langbein draws on his own experience, People in Auschwitz is not a personal memoir, but a sweeping historical account of the entire Auschwitz camp complex that covers its administration, its prisoner population, its SS personnel, and the social structures that developed within its walls. This account is important because it documents how Auschwitz functioned as a system, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and deliberately organized. It is an invaluable reference for teachers and students engaged in serious research about the Holocaust.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, Thomas Buergenthal (Original English edition, Hachette, 2007)

A Lucky Child tells the story of Thomas Buergenthal, who survived the Holocaust as a young boy. Buergenthal was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis occupied the region during World War II, his family was forced into a Jewish ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, Buergenthal was separated from his mother and endured harsh conditions typical of concentration camps, including forced labor, starvation, and illness. As a child prisoner, survival was especially difficult, yet Buergenthal managed to endure through a combination of luck, resilience, and help from other prisoners. Later in the war, he was transferred to another camp and eventually survived a Nazi death march before being liberated by Allied forces. After the war, Buergenthal eventually emigrated to the United States. He went on to become an important figure in international law and human rights, serving as a judge on the International Court of Justice. His memoir reflects not only on his childhood survival, but also on how those experiences shaped his later commitment to justice and human rights. The book provides a unique perspective on the Holocaust through the eyes of a child survivor.

At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Jean Amery (Indiana University Press, 2009)

Jean Amery was born Hans Maier in Vienna in 1912. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, he joined the Belgian resistance and was ultimately captured by the Gestapo in 1943. He was tortured by the SS and then deported to Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen. He did not publish his reflections on Auschwitz until 1966 and he took his own life in 1978. The book was written under a French name he adopted to conceal his German and Jewish origins. At the Mind’s Limits is a collection of philosophical essays where Amery explores what the Holocaust did to human consciousness. He writes about torture, about being a Jewish intellectual in the camps, about the experience of aging as a survivor, and about resentment. He argued that survivors have a moral obligation not to forgive their persecutors. His essay on torture, in which he wrote, “I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself,” is considered one of the most important texts ever written on the subject. He argued that “torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence” and compares it to “rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.” This account is important because it moves beyond testimony into analysis.

First One In, Last One Out: Auschwitz Survivor 31321, Marilyn Shimon (Create Space, 2016)

Marilyn Shimon is a Holocaust educator, retired teacher, and volunteer gallery educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. She holds a certificate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Georgetown University as well as a master’s degree from Hofstra University. Her book explores the story of her own uncle, Murray Scheinberg. Scheinberg was a Polish Jew who received prisoner number 31321 and was among the first eight men to enter Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1940 and was also among the last to escape Dachau in 1945. The memoir traces Scheinberg’s journey through a variety of locations including Pawiak prison in Warsaw, Tarnow prison, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. Shimon reconstructed this story from various sources including family testimony and historical records. A publisher originally rejected the manuscript in the 1960s finding the details too extraordinary to be believed. Scheinberg was one of Auschwitz’s earliest prisoners which helps to offer a rare chronological view of how the camp system was built and expanded. The book illustrates how the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers but with a deliberate and escalating system of imprisonment and dehumanization.

The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter, Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin (HarperCollins, 2025)

Josef Lewkowicz was a Polish Jew who was born near Krakow, Poland in 1926. When German forces occupied Poland in 1939, Lewkowicz was just thirteen years old and he and his family were deported to a Nazi concentration camp. Before being liberated by Allied forces in 1945, Lewkowicz passed through six concentration camps. He was the only member of his extended family of 150 people to survive. After the war Lewkowicz became a Nazi hunter who worked to identify and bring SS perpetrators to justice. Among those he pursued was Amon Goeth, the SS commandant of the Plaszow camp who was later depicted in the film Schindler’s List. Goeth was tried by a Polish court and executed in 1946. Lewkowicz passed away in December 2024 at the age of 98, just weeks before his memoir was published. The memoir was co-written with British journalist Michael Calvin and follows Lewkowicz from the occupation of Krakow through liberation and his postwar pursuit of Nazi perpetrators. The book is as much an account of survival as it is a story of justice. The book is exceptionally useful because it raises questions that go beyond survival. What does justice look like after genocide? What is the difference between simply getting revenge and accountability? The connection to Schindler’s List provides students with a recognizable cultural entry point into a deeper historical discussion.

Lipstick in Auschwitz, Miriam Nick (Valcal, 2025)

Miriam Nick was born and raised in Krakow, Poland and was seventeen when Germany invaded in 1939. She was relocated to the Krakow ghetto with her mother and subsequently deported through a series of seven concentration camps. She survived two death marches over five years of imprisonment. After the war, she studied at the Paris Academy of Arts and later taught art history in Israel. The memoir was originally written for her grandchildren before she died in 2012. The book centers on Nick’s experience alongside her mother in Auschwitz and other camps. The title refers to a pivotal moment upon arrival: facing the SS selection process that would determine whether they lived or died, Nick found a discarded tube of lipstick and applied it to both their cheeks to make them appear healthier and more capable of work. That small act may have saved both their lives. The book is particularly effective for discussing woman-centric experiences in the Holocaust, the moral weight of everyday decisions under Nazi rule, and the meaning of resistance.

Teaching about the Holocaust will Not End Antisemitism

Teaching about the Holocaust will Not End Antisemitism

By Alan Singer

Tuesday April 14, the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew lunar calendar, is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. The U.S. Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the European Holocaust. Each year across the United States, state and local government organizations, workplaces, schools, and religious and community centers host remembrance activities to reaffirm our nation’s commitment to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. The Days of Remembrance run for eight days from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year it will be April 12th, through the following Sunday.

Currently thirty states require that the events of the European Holocaust be part of the public school curriculum. Many of the requirements were recently enacted. Since 1996, a New York State law amended in 2022 “provides specific requirements for a course of instruction relating to the Holocaust and genocide” in grades 8-12. In 2025, the state’s Department of Education unveiled a new online resource for “Teaching the Holocaust and Other Genocides.” It includes information about ghettos where Jews were congregated before being shipped to concentration camps, the 1936 Olympics, the Kristallnacht, eugenics, resistance movements, and other significant events and ideas.

New Jersey’s Commission on Holocaust Education surveys the status of Holocaust/Genocide Education in public schools; designs, encourages and promotes the implementation of Holocaust and genocide education and awareness; sponsors programs and coordinates events that memorialization the Holocaust. Its website includes curriculum guides for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-8 that are aligned with the Universal Design for Learning and links to other Holocaust education groups. It has videoed interviews with Holocaust survivors appropriate for classroom use.

As a former high school social studies teacher and a teacher educator, I welcome expanded Holocaust education, especially comparative lessons that have students examine similarities and differences between different genocides. But I do not pretend that in the current political climate studying about the extermination of European Jewry over eighty years ago addresses antisemitism today.

There have been an upsurge in antisemitic language and attacks in the United States and in other countries since Israeli responded to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas with the near total destruction of Gaza and the murder of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Antisemitism today is promoted by many rightwing nationalist movements, including elements of the MAGA movement in this country, and it is tolerated by segments within the Republican Party where rightwing influencers and organizers like Candice Owens, Nick Fuentes, and James Fishback have been welcomed as part of the party’s conservative wing. Owens and Fuentes were defended at the last conference of Turning Point USA where prominent activists including Tucker Carlson and Erika Kirk urged the assembled to be tolerant of the views of movement allies they might not be in complete agreement with. The connection between Republicans and antisemitism is broad. Leading young Republicans in New York and Florida were caught participating in antisemitic and racist group chats.

While Donald Trump told a 2024 campaign rally, “Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society,” National Public Radio identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists including Paul Ingrassia, formerly the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security and current deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, Rachel Cauley, communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Ed Martin, the pardon attorney in the Justice Department. Trump himself had dinner with Christian nationalist podcaster Nicholas Fuentes and Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.

The second problem that I see feeding into antisemitism is the behavior of the State of Israel in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. While Israel declared war against Hamas and Hezbollah, it launched aerial bombardments on civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. At the same time leading Israeli government officials and the Israeli military support and protect an illegal Jewish settler movement on the West Bank that is determined to drive Palestinians out of their homeland and annex the territory as part of a Jewish State.

Many Americans believe that Israel manipulated the United States into a war with Iran that did not have to happen. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio fed into those suspicions when he told reporters “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. … We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a key advisor in the Trump administration resigned because of opposition to the Iran war and what he charged was Israel’s influence over the Trump’s policies. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He charged that “high ranking Israeli officials . . . sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” In a March 2026 Quinnipiac poll, a majority of American voters agreed with Kent and said they did not believe Iran posed an “imminent military threat” to the United States.

Israeli actions have also led to a sharp decline in American support for Israel overall. According to a February 2026 Gallup poll, 41% of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while only 36% sympathize with Israel, a major reversal over the last two decades. Sixty-five percent of Democrats report their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, which means that pro-Israel Democratic Party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer are out of step with party voters.

Jewish organizational support for Israel, including lobby campaigns and efforts to oust critics of Israel from public office, may be having a boomerang effect. I believe the more pro-Israel groups in the United States label opposition to Israeli policies as antisemitic and accuse those who challenge Zionism, which proclaims Israel as an exclusively Jewish State, the more there will be opposition to Israel that will spill over into anti-Jewish sentiments and actions.

Focusing on the European Holocaust under Nazi Germany in the global history curriculum, while it may increase sympathy for Jews as a people, may also lead to more anti-Israeli sentiment because of Israeli actions in Gaza and on the West Bank that much of the world community label as genocide.

Teaching about the Holocaust and Challenging Antisemitism

Teaching about the Holocaust and Challenging Antisemitism

by Cynthia Vitere

For more than a decade, I have been teaching an International Baccalaureate curriculum focusing on authoritarian states and twentieth-century wars. As part of this class, I lead students through a months-long exploration of the emergence German fascism, its promotion and weaponization of antisemitism as a means for consolidating power, and the implementation of the Holocaust within the broader context of World War II. Over the years, I have found my students to be curious and willing partners in our exploration of this essential subject. Our study of Nazism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust has included hosting in-person survivor testimonials and expanded to include a comparative analysis of the Rwandan genocide. This year, students and teachers participated in a three-day workshop with Carl Wilkens, the only American to remain in Rwanda during the genocide. While grounded in historical understanding, this workshop emphasized the possibility of peace and reconciliation through restorative justice practices. Students were eager to engage with history and to imagine peaceful outcomes through direct interaction with those who experienced it firsthand.

New York State’s mandate for Holocaust education and the requirements of the IB curriculum has made this work possible. In its absence, teachers would find it difficult to address antisemitism in a sustained and substantive way. Long Island communities have a proud history of supporting the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. However, as that era grows more distant and our demographics shift, that support has evolved in complex ways. In my own classroom I have witnessed student discomfort, especially among Jewish students who are in the minority, when these topics are addressed. Cast as representatives of Jewish identity within their peer groups, they sometimes encounter subtle antisemitic comments or assumptions.

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the ongoing war involving the Unted States, Israel, and Iran, the potential for such dynamics have intensified. While students filter their assumptions and comments within the classroom, it is clear that beyond the classroom, they are being exposed to the familiar conspiracy theories of the “Jewish banker” and “international globalist” that are circulating across their social media feeds. In a recent poll I conducted with my own students, more than 65% acknowledged that they had regularly encountered these types of posts.

Educators must recognize the powerful role these online narratives play in the lives of our students. Their continuous exposure to misinformation and antisemitic tropes requires more than historical instruction alone. We must help students identify and deconstruct these viral feeds – treating digital content as a modern form of antisemitic propaganda, in the same way that we challenge the work of Goebbels and Hitler.

This work calls for a curriculum that connects media literacy and historical study to the students’ lived experience. I recognize that this work is fraught with pedagogical and political hurdles, but it is a task worth addressing. Teachers, working collaboratively, can and must create safe spaces to examine these controversial issues, past and present. Within these spaces, students may express conspiracy theories and biases, but we cannot ignore them. Rather, these teachable moments are ripe for critical engagement. Together, we can examine the history and contemporary dangers of scapegoating and practice a civic minded response that nurtures our democracy.

Understanding and Teaching about the European Holocaust

Understanding and Teaching about the European Holocaust

By Joshua Wolk

The European Holocaust remains one of the most studied and debated events in modern human history by historians, philosophers and educators. Only conspiracy theorists question whether the European Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews happened or happened on that scale. Debate centers on why it happened and whether it should be understood as a unique historical event, a singularity, incomparable to other historical events, or one of a number of 20th century genocides.

As a teacher, I believe what makes the European Holocaust unprecedented is that it was an industrialization of mass murder carried out by the Nazi regime utilizing modern bureaucracy, transportation networks, and mechanized killing center. This allowed the Nazis to create a system of extermination that functioned with an efficiency and scale previously unheard of and not since replicated. Understanding the Holocaust therefore requires recognizing both its place within the broader history of genocide as well as the distinctive features that made it historically unprecedented.

Sadly, genocide is far from a unique phenomenon in human history. Prior to the European Holocaust, societies had engaged in the systematic destruction of ethnic, religious or national groups. The word “genocide” itself was not coined until World War II by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee to the United States from Poland in 1939. Lemkin did not limit the definition of holocaust to the extermination of European Jewry. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he defined genocide as any coordinated plan aimed at destroying the life of a national group including the Ottoman treatment of Armenians during World War I. He included the destruction of cultural, economic, and religious life, not just physical extermination.

Genocidal campaigns attempt to eliminate populations viewed as threatening or undesirable. They are generally fueled by profound ethnic hatred, religious intolerance, political ideology, economic competition, and fears about national security. Studying earlier examples helps teachers and students better understand both the recurring nature of genocide while also understanding the ways in which the European Holocaust differed from other instances of mass violence. An important example of genocide was the Armenian Genocide, “Medz Yeghern” or “Great Catastrophe.” During the first World War, the Ottoman Empire carried out mass deportations and the murder of Armenians resulting in the death of an estimated one to one and a half million people. Communities were uprooted and subjected to violence by soldiers and paramilitary groups. Armenians were removed from their homes and forced to march through the Syrian desert under brutal conditions leading to widespread starvation. Property was confiscated and Armenian cultural institutions were destroyed. In this case, the killing process did not rely on technological systems or industrialized methods. Violence occurred through forced displacement and direct physical attacks carried out across large geographic areas.

Another example that illustrates the recurring nature of genocide, but also differences, is the Rwandan genocide in 1994 when over the course of 100 days the country’s Hutu majority murdered 800,000 members of its Tutsi minority. Radio broadcasts encouraged violence while simultaneously spreading propaganda that portrayed the Tutsi population as unhuman enemies who needed to be eliminated. Local Hutu communities were mobilized to participate and killings were often carried out by rampaging mobs with machetes and other basic weapons. These killing were personal and face-to-face unlike the Armenians who were left to die in the desert or European Jews murdered in concentration death camps.

What makes the European Holocaust unique is not murder, but the system by which Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies was carried out. One of the most significant elements of this system was the extensive use of transportation networks. Millions of victims were deported from cities and villages in countries under Nazi control and railroads were used to transport them across Europe to concentration and extermination camps. These deportations and executions were not random acts of violence but rather were carefully planned and coordinated operations. Trains were scheduled and routes were organized. Detailed records were kept in order to optimize the movement of people. This logistical coordination demonstrates how modern administrative systems were integrated into the machinery and fabric of genocide. Officials working in offices were able to be far removed from the killing sites.

The European Holocaust illustrates how genocide can be carried out, not only by perpetrators with weapons, but also by administrators who help maintain a system designed to maximize efficiency, maintain order, and enable mass murder. Once victims arrived at extermination camps, the killing process itself was organized in a manner that resembled an industrial system. In camps such as Auschwitz, gas chambers were used to quickly and efficiently kill large numbers of people. Victims were often deceived into believing they were entering showers or disinfection facilities and once inside the sealed chambers poison gas was released killing those trapped inside. Prisoners forced to work in the camps were assigned to specialized labor units responsible for removing bodies and operating crematoria expediting the process of killing and disposing of human remains at an efficient rate. This process allowed the Nazis to murder thousands of people each day and millions during the course of the war.

Historian Raul Hilberg, a refugee from Nazi occupied Europe and a World War II veteran serving with the American army, described the mass production of death through industrial means in his work The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle, 1961). Hilberg, a professor at the University of Vermont, argued that the Holocaust was not simply the result of uncontrolled violence but instead was the culmination of a complex bureaucratic process that involved many institutions of the Nazi state. Hilberg explained the destruction of European Jews unfolded through a sequence of stages including identification, isolation, deportation, and extermination. Each stage required the participation of numerous officials who performed specialized roles within the broader system. Police forces enforced anti-Jewish regulations, civil administrators organized deportations, and transportation officials coordinated the movement of trains carrying victims to extermination camps.

It is important for teachers and students to examine survivor accounts to understand how detached bureaucratic systems impacted individuals and to humanize murder on such a grand scale. One of the most influential survivor testimonies is the work of Primo Levi. Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz and in his memoir If This Is a Man, he describes his experiences within the camp system with clarity and reflection. Levi’s background as a scientist shaped the way he observed and interpreted the world around him in a way that is unique from many other stories of survivors. Levi portrayed described the organized and systematic nature operation of the concentration camps where prisoners were reduced to numbers tattooed onto their arms. This stripped them of their identities and allowed for the easier movement, organization, and murder of people. Every aspect of life in the camp was regulated by rules and procedures. Prisoners who were physically strong enough to work were assigned to labor units while others were selected for extermination. Levi’s account highlights how the camp system functioned as a mechanism designed to extract labor but simultaneously facilitated mass death. His observations reveal how the Nazis created a system that treated human beings as expendable resources within a larger machine.

Levi also wrote about the psychological strategies prisoners used in order to survive such harsh conditions. Many prisoners attempted to compartmentalize their experiences. These prisoners learned to focus on immediate survival rather than fully confronting the reality of the system surrounding them. Levi’s reflections illustrate how the industrialized structure of the European Holocaust affected not only the physical lives of prisoners but also played a large part in their mental and emotional experiences. Levi’s writing offers a powerful reminder that behind the bureaucratic machinery of genocide were millions of individual human lives.

The European Holocaust should be understood both as part of the broader history of genocide and as a uniquely industrialized form of mass murder. Genocide itself is not a singular phenomenon in human history. We see this demonstrated by events such as the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. The European Holocaust stands apart not due to the willingness to kill but because of the way the Nazi regime transformed the process of killing into a systematic and industrial enterprise. Through the use of transportation networks, mechanized killing centers and extensive administrative coordination the Nazis created a system capable of exterminating millions of people with unprecedented efficiency. The work of scholars like Raul Hilberg and the reflections of Primo Levi help us to better understand how this system operated. Studying the European Holocaust in this way helps illuminate the dangers that arise when modern systems of power are directed toward destructive and dehumanizing goals.

Rethinking Holocaust Education

Rethinking Holocaust Education

By Ari Mandel

Holocaust education occupies a paradoxical position in modern classrooms. It is one of the most widely taught subjects in social studies and history curricula in secondary schools and colleges, appearing in textbooks, museums, films, and commemorative programs across the world. Yet widespread exposure has not necessarily produced deeper historical understanding. Many students leave these lessons with strong impressions but only a limited grasp of the broader historical context, and of the historical forces that produced the Holocaust. In some cases, repeated exposure can even produce a kind of numbness in which the subject loses the weight it should carry.

The problem is clearly not a lack of exposure, but the way the history is framed and taught. Efforts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust may be well intentioned, but they risk reducing a complex historical catastrophe to a simplified parable. When history becomes primarily a vehicle for moral messaging, students may disengage or fail to grapple with the deeper questions the event raises.

Effective Holocaust education therefore requires a shift from quantity to quality. Instruction should prioritize historical context, careful analysis of evidence, and deep engagement with the social and political forces that made the genocide possible. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students not only to understand the event itself, but also to examine how genocide develops, compare it with other episodes of mass violence, and evaluate contemporary issues with greater historical awareness.

Visibility Without Understanding

Despite its prominence in school curricula, Holocaust education often produces uneven results. Research and classroom experience suggest that many students retain only a fragmented grasp of the subject. They may recognize familiar symbols such as Auschwitz, Hitler, and concentration camps without understanding the broader context that made the genocide possible. Chronology is often unclear, the ideological foundations of Nazism are poorly understood, and the political and social mechanisms that enabled the Holocaust frequently remain unexplored.

Part of the difficulty lies in how instruction is structured. Lessons often prioritize emotional engagement over analysis. Graphic imagery, survivor testimony, and powerful narratives can leave lasting impressions, but without careful contextualization they may produce reactions without deeper comprehension. Students may remember what they saw or felt without understanding how or why events unfolded.

In some cases, the sheer volume of Holocaust imagery and storytelling has the opposite effect. Rather than strengthening engagement, repeated exposure can create a form of desensitization in which the subject becomes familiar but intellectually distant. Some historians have called this “Holocaust fatigue.” When it occurs, the Holocaust risks becoming just another tragedy rather than a historically specific event shaped by identifiable causes and decisions.

These patterns suggest that more exposure is not necessarily better. Depth of instruction matters more than frequency. A smaller number of carefully structured lessons that emphasize context, evidence, and inquiry may prove more effective than repeated encounters with sanitized and decontextualized narratives. Examined as a complex historical process shaped by ideology, political decisions, bureaucratic structures, and social participation, the Holocaust becomes far more intelligible.

The Problem with Moral Slogans

Attempts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust often produce the opposite of the intended effect. Teachers understandably want students to leave with a clear ethical message. Yet when the event is reduced to slogans about tolerance or bullying, its complexity disappears. Such framing turns a vast historical catastrophe into a simple moral parable and often produces indifference rather than engagement. More importantly, this framing allows students to distance themselves too easily. If the lesson is that Nazis were uniquely evil, students can reassure themselves that they are nothing like the perpetrators. As long as they are not committing atrocities, the history appears irrelevant. Modern Holocaust scholarship challenges this assumption. The individuals who carried out the Holocaust were not monsters drawn from some separate category of humanity. Most were ordinary people who lived ordinary lives, saw themselves as respectable, and participated in a system that persecuted and murdered millions.

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison prior to the post-World War II trial of leading Nazis. Kelley examined 22 high ranking officials of the Nazi party, including Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Goring and his deputy Rudolf Hess to determine whether they were insane and predict if they would suffer a breakdown before and during their trial. In his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg. A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (London: W. H. Allen, 1947) published after the trial, Kelley argued the defendants did not represent a specifically Nazi pathology, but that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.” He believed that under similar circumstances, other people, including Americans might act in the same way. Kelley’s work with the Nazi prisoners is at the core of the recent movie Nuremberg.

Reaching similar conclusions, Hannah Arendt famously described this as the “banality of evil.” Observing Adolf Eichmann’s trial, she argued that genocide was often carried out not by fanatics but by individuals who were disturbingly normal. Eichmann presented himself as a bureaucrat who had simply performed his duties. While controversial, her argument forced historians to confront an unsettling reality: the Holocaust depended not only on ideology but on widespread participation.

Subsequent research reinforced this point. Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated how ordinary individuals could be persuaded to harm others. Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men showed how middle-aged reservists, with little prior ideological commitment, became participants in mass murder through a mixture of obedience, peer pressure, and gradual moral accommodation.

Another crucial dimension concerns bystanders. Many people did not directly participate in violence, yet they witnessed persecution and chose not to intervene. Neighbors watched families disappear. Railway workers transported deportees. Civil servants processed the machinery of persecution. Their inaction helped sustain the system. For students, this category is often the most relevant. Few imagine themselves as perpetrators, and many hope they would be rescuers. In reality, most people occupy the space in between.

For Holocaust education, these insights are essential. The goal is not simply to label Nazis as evil, but to examine the social and psychological processes that made participation possible. Violence rarely begins with a single decision. It develops through smaller choices, compromises, and acts of conformity until the unthinkable becomes normalized. Taught this way, the Holocaust becomes not a distant moral fable but a deeply human and troubling historical process.

This approach also shifts the focus from abstract judgment to historical inquiry. Instead of asking whether people in the past were good or evil, students are encouraged to examine how ordinary individuals understood their actions, how institutions shaped behavior, and how social pressures influenced decision making. These questions do not excuse participation in violence, but they make it possible to understand how such participation occurs. In doing so, they bring the history closer to students’ own world, where moral choices are rarely presented in clear or dramatic terms.

What Students Never Learn: Jewish Life Before the Holocaust

Holocaust education often begins with persecution and ends with genocide. While these topics are essential, this framing creates a distorted picture of Jewish history. This problem is compounded by the fact that, for many students, Holocaust lessons may be their first real exposure to Jews or Judaism. Without prior knowledge or personal connection, their initial encounter may come through the lens of Nazi ideology itself. Students are often shown antisemitic caricatures to illustrate prejudice. These materials are important historical evidence, but without a broader context they can unintentionally reinforce the distortions they were meant to expose. With little else to draw on, students may come to understand Jews primarily through the representations created by their persecutors.

Before the Holocaust, Jewish communities across Europe were longstanding and integral parts of the social, cultural, and economic life of many cities and towns. Their traditions had evolved over millennia and supported vibrant intellectual, artistic, and political cultures. Jewish merchants, professionals, writers, musicians, and scholars played visible roles in the life of cities from Moscow to Paris. Political movements ranged from religious traditionalism to socialism and liberalism. Yiddish literature and theater flourished, and newspapers, schools, and community institutions shaped daily life across thousands of communities. This world was not defined solely by persecution. It was a living civilization with its own language, debates, and cultural achievements.

Understanding this world is essential to grasping the magnitude of the Holocaust. The destruction of European Jewry was not only the murder of millions but also the destruction of communities and traditions that had developed over generations. Without this context, students cannot fully understand what was destroyed.

Teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust corrects a deeper distortion. Jewish history is often presented as a sequence of persecutions culminating in genocide, reducing a complex civilization to a narrative of suffering. While antisemitism is part of that history, education should also present the richness of Jewish life that existed long before the Nazis attempted to eradicate it and that ultimately survived their attempt. Too often, students encounter Jews only as victims rather than as participants in a long and complex civilization.

This broader perspective has an additional benefit. When students encounter Jewish life as a living culture, they are better able to recognize the gap between antisemitic stereotypes and historical reality. In this sense, teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust is not a diversion but a necessary foundation for understanding it.

Why Holocaust Education Matters Now

Holocaust education matters not only because of the historical significance of the event itself, but also because the patterns that made it possible continue to appear in other contexts. Antisemitism has often flourished during periods of political instability, economic stress, or cultural anxiety. When individuals or communities explain difficult conditions by blaming vulnerable groups, it reflects a deeper failure to confront underlying problems and often leads to consequences that extend far beyond the targeted minority. In such moments, scapegoating replaces serious engagement with complex realities.

Crises have repeatedly produced movements that seek simple explanations for complex conditions. Economic hardship and rapid social change can generate narratives that attribute national decline to hidden enemies or internal betrayal. In these environments, conspiracy thinking takes hold and blame is redirected outward. Antisemitism has long provided one of the most persistent frameworks for this kind of explanation.

Teaching the Holocaust provides an opportunity to examine how such narratives develop and gain influence. Nazi ideology did not emerge in a vacuum. It drew on long standing traditions of antisemitism, racial theories, and conspiracy myths circulating across Europe, shaped in part by the political and economic crises that followed the first World War. Studied in context, these ideas reveal how prejudice becomes institutionalized and how conspiracy thinking can be translated into policy.

Holocaust education also encourages students to distinguish between different forms of mass violence. Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity are related but distinct. Examining these categories allows for more precise analysis and comparison without diminishing the Holocaust.

In this sense, Holocaust education serves an important civic function. Students learn how propaganda reshapes public opinion, how institutions become instruments of persecution, and how narratives of blame take hold. The goal is not to draw simplistic parallels, but to equip students with the tools to recognize dangerous patterns.

Understanding the Holocaust therefore requires more than memorization. It requires examining how prejudice becomes normalized, how conspiracy thinking spreads, and how societies respond to crisis by directing anger toward vulnerable groups. When approached this way, Holocaust education becomes not only an exercise in remembrance but a framework for understanding how societies can descend into exclusion and violence.

Conclusion

Teaching the Holocaust presents educators with a difficult but essential responsibility. The challenge is not simply to present the facts, but to ensure that students understand the processes that made the genocide possible. Holocaust education can easily fall into repetition, emotional overload, or simplified moral messaging that leaves students with impressions but little analysis.

A more effective approach places historical inquiry at the center. Students should examine the ideological roots of antisemitism, the political and economic conditions that allowed extremism to flourish, and the structures that enabled genocide. This includes attention to the broader context in which Nazism emerged, including the aftermath of the First World War and the crises that followed. They should also confront the role of ordinary individuals, bystanders, and incremental choices in shaping events.

Equally important is situating the Holocaust within the broader history of Jewish life. The destruction of European Jewry cannot be understood solely through persecution. Without that context, the scale of the loss is diminished.

Ultimately, the purpose of Holocaust education is not only remembrance but understanding. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students to grapple with the complexities of human behavior and the fragility of modern societies. It equips them to recognize patterns of scapegoating, conspiracy thinking, and political extremism before they escalate into something far more dangerous.

Remarks by German Chancellor Merkel, U.S. President Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-german-chancellor-merkel-and-elie-wiesel-buchenwald-concent

In June 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, United States President Barack Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel spoke at a memorial service at the Buchenwald Concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Wiesel was fifteen years old when he was imprisoned by the Nazis, first at Auschwitz, and then at Buchenwald These are excerpts from their speeches.

CHANCELLOR MERKEL: “Unimaginable horror, shock — there are no words to adequately describe what we feel when we look at the suffering inflicted so cruelly upon so many people here and in other concentration and extermination camps under National Socialist terror. I bow my head before the victims. We, the Germans, are faced with the agonizing question how and why — how could this happen? How could Germany wreak such havoc in Europe and the world? It is therefore incumbent upon us Germans to show an unshakeable resolve to do everything we can so that something like this never happens again.

On the 25th of January, the presidents of the associations of former inmates at the concentration camps presented their request to the public, and this request closes with the following words: “The last eyewitness appeal to Germany, to all European states, and to the international community to continue preserving and honoring the human gift of remembrance and commemoration into the future. We ask young people to carry on our struggle against Nazi ideology, and for a just, peaceful and tolerant world; a world that has no place for anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and right-wing extremism.”

This appeal of the survivors clearly defines the very special responsibility we Germans have to shoulder with regard to our history. And for me, therefore, there are three messages that are important today. First, let me emphasize, we Germans see it as past of our country’s raison d’être to keep the everlasting memory alive of the break with civilization that was the Shoah. Only in this way will we be able to shape our future. I am therefore very grateful that the Buchenwald memorial has always placed great emphasis on the dialogue with younger people, to conversations with eyewitnesses, to documentation, and a broad-based educational program. Second, it is most important to keep the memory of the great sacrifices alive that had to be made to put an end to the terror of National Socialism and to liberate its victims and to rid all people of its yoke . . .

Third, here in Buchenwald I would like to highlight an obligation placed on us Germans as a consequence of our past: to stand up for human rights, to stand up for rule of law, and for democracy. We shall fight against terror, extremism, and anti-Semitism. And in the awareness of our responsibility we shall strive for peace and freedom, together with our friends and partners in the United States and all over the world.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I’ve seen here today. I’ve known about this place since I was a boy, hearing stories about my great uncle, who was a very young man serving in World War II. He was part of the 89th Infantry Division, the first Americans to reach a concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. … He returned from his service in a state of shock saying little and isolating himself for months on end from family and friends, alone with the painful memories that would not leave his head. And as we see — as we saw some of the images here, it’s understandable that someone who witnessed what had taken place here would be in a state of shock.

My great uncle’s commander, General Eisenhower, understood this impulse to silence. He had seen the piles of bodies and starving survivors and deplorable conditions that the American soldiers found when they arrived, and he knew that those who witnessed these things might be too stunned to speak about them or be able — be unable to find the words to describe them; that they might be rendered mute in the way my great uncle had. And he knew that what had happened here was so unthinkable that after the bodies had been taken away, that perhaps no one would believe it. And that’s why he ordered American troops and Germans from the nearby town to tour the camp. He invited congressmen and journalists to bear witness and ordered photographs and films to be made. And he insisted on viewing every corner of these camps so that — and I quote — he could “be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished. To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened — a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. Also to this day, there are those who perpetuate every form of intolerance — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victims and diminishes us all. In this century, we’ve seen genocide. We’ve seen mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground; children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war. This places teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests . . .

When the American GIs arrived they were astonished to find more than 900 children still alive, and the youngest was just three years old. And I’m told that a couple of the prisoners even wrote a Buchenwald song that many here sang. Among the lyrics were these: “…whatever our fate, we will say yes to life, for the day will come when we are free…in our blood we carry the will to live and in our hearts, in our hearts — faith.”

ELIE WIESEL: “As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visiting my father’s grave – but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people. The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there. And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will . . .

What can I tell him that the world has learned?

When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned – that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people’s minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless . .

But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia. Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important – as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It’s important because here the large – the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons –

political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings . . .

Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.

Teaching the Unteachable: The Holocaust and Kids These Days

Teaching the Unteachable: The Holocaust and Kids These Days

Ari Mandel

The Holocaust is one of the most daunting subjects for teachers to tackle, and it grows more challenging as its survivors and their direct memories fade away. Educational approaches to this profoundly significant chapter of history are constantly evolving, often revealing critical issues about how the Holocaust is presented, the consequences of universalizing its lessons, and the need to balance meaningful engagement with the risk of trivialization or desensitization. While Holocaust education remains an indispensable part of modern curricula, current instructional methods sometimes risk diluting its impact by reducing it to an oversimplified lesson on intolerance, rather than treating it as a distinct historical catastrophe shaped by complex historical, social, and political dynamics.

This paper argues that effective Holocaust education requires maintaining a delicate balance between universal lessons and historical specificity while addressing ongoing issues in its presentation. It examines how educational approaches sometimes fall short in emphasizing the Holocaust’s unique characteristics, critiques the risks of trivialization, and underscores the importance of thoughtful engagement. It argues for interdisciplinary and experiential methods to ensure students engage deeply and critically with this critical subject, fostering both historical and moral awareness.

Andy Pearce writes in The Shapes of Holocaust Education in the Early Twenty-First Century (2022)[1] that despite the increase in Holocaust education, many adults today still have an incomplete or even incorrect understanding of what happened. This is a major paradox – Holocaust education is more widespread than ever, with school programs, museums, documentaries, and memorials, yet people’s understanding of the event seems to be declining. Pearce argues that this may be because we are putting too much focus on quantity over quality. Simply adding more content about the Holocaust – more books, more films, more commemorations – does not necessarily lead to deeper understanding. Instead, there needs to be a shift toward more thoughtful engagement that encourages students to question, reflect, and truly understand the gravity and complexity of what happened.

One of the biggest issues in Holocaust education today is the tendency to universalize it – to present the Holocaust as a symbol of general human suffering or to draw broad lessons about human rights and tolerance. While it is true that the Holocaust contains important universal lessons about prejudice, hate, and what can happen when these go unchecked, there is a risk in oversimplifying it. Historian Peter Novick, in The Holocaust in American Life[2] (2000), argues that the Holocaust has become a “moral and ideological Rorschach test,” meaning that people tend to see in it whatever they want to see, often using it to support their political or social agendas. This way of looking at the Holocaust can make it lose its specificity – the particular historical, ideological, and cultural circumstances that led to this genocide. When we use the Holocaust as a general metaphor for evil or intolerance, we can easily lose sight of the particular factors that allowed it to happen in the first place: the racial theories, the bureaucracy, the complicity of ordinary people, and the very specific political and social context of post-WWI Europe. Without focusing on these details, students may struggle to understand how an advanced, seemingly “civilized” society could systematically plan and execute the murder of six million Jews and millions of other innocent people.

Arthur Chapman, in Learning Lessons of the Holocaust[3](2020), also critiques this trend of framing the Holocaust mainly in terms of human rights or as an example of intolerance. He argues that while connecting the Holocaust to other events or to broader human rights issues can make it feel more relevant to students, it can also obscure what made the Holocaust unique. The Holocaust was not just another example of prejudice – it was a carefully planned and executed genocide, driven by specific racial ideologies, supported by modern technologies, and enabled by the collaboration or indifference of millions of people across Europe. When educators draw too many parallels between the Holocaust and other historical atrocities or present it as just another case of human cruelty, they risk minimizing the specific dangers posed by antisemitism.

Edward Rothstein[4] makes a similar point in his critique of the Museum of Tolerance, where he argues that mixing the Holocaust with contemporary issues like bullying or discrimination creates an oversimplified narrative. When the Holocaust is used as a kind of shorthand for any and all forms of prejudice, we end up losing the specificity of what actually happened, and why it happened. This is not to say that the Holocaust does not have broader lessons – it absolutely does – but those lessons need to be rooted in a deep understanding of the historical facts and circumstances.

Another major problem in Holocaust education is that students often come away with a focus on the perpetrators – on Hitler, the Nazis, and the details of how the genocide was carried out – while the voices and experiences of the victims are sometimes lost in the process. It is crucial to remember that the six million Jews who were murdered were not just numbers. They were individuals, each with a story, a family, hopes, dreams, and a culture that was nearly erased. Jewish communities in Europe were diverse, vibrant centers of culture, religion, art, and intellectual life. Yiddish literature, theater, music, religious study – these were all thriving before the war. Thousands of towns and cities were emptied either partially or entirely, and an entire way of life that had evolved over centuries was violently destroyed. When we reduce the Holocaust to numbers or see it only in terms of evil perpetrators, we risk losing sight of what was really lost – the human beings, the families, and the incredible cultural richness that was almost entirely wiped out. By focusing on the stories of individuals – children whose lives were cut short, artists whose work was lost, religious leaders whose wisdom was extinguished – we can help students understand the profound human cost of the Holocaust.

Teaching the Holocaust effectively also means addressing what made this genocide possible. How could it happen? How could so many people be complicit, either actively or passively? How did a modern, industrialized country like Germany become a place where millions of innocent people were murdered in cold blood? These questions are not easy to answer, but they are essential if students are to truly understand the Holocaust. One key factor was the long history of antisemitism in Europe, which paved the way for the Nazi ideology to take root. Antisemitism was not new – it had been part of European society for centuries, and the Nazis were able to exploit existing prejudices and fears. They used modern technology – propaganda, the radio, the press – to spread their hateful ideology and to dehumanize Jews in the eyes of the German public. Bureaucracy also played a huge role. The Holocaust was, to a large extent, a “bureaucratic genocide,” carried out not by a handful of madmen but by thousands of ordinary clerks, railway workers, policemen, and soldiers, each of whom played a small role in the killing machine.

Historiographical debates surrounding the Holocaust add another layer of complexity to the topic. Two of the most prominent debates are the functionalist versus intentionalist interpretations and the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) of the 1980s. Functionalists argue that the Holocaust evolved gradually and was not the result of a single, premeditated plan by Adolf Hitler. They emphasize the chaotic and improvised nature of Nazi governance, suggesting that local initiatives and bureaucratic momentum led to the escalation of genocidal policies. Historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat represent this view, arguing that Hitler’s role, while significant, was not one of a micromanager dictating every step of the Final Solution.

Intentionalists, on the other hand, maintain that the Holocaust was a deliberate plan masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. This perspective emphasizes Hitler’s ideological obsession with antisemitism, as seen in Mein Kampf and his public speeches, where he frequently referred to the “annihilation of the Jews.” Intentionalist historians, such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel, argue that the Holocaust was the culmination of a long-standing plan to eliminate Europe’s Jewish population. These contrasting views shape how we understand the Holocaust – whether as the result of a chaotic and disorganized regime or as the fulfillment of a clear and unchanging ideological mission.

The Historikerstreit further complicated Holocaust historiography by raising questions about how the Holocaust should be contextualized within broader histories of violence and genocide. German historian Ernst Nolte argued that the Holocaust was not unique but part of a larger pattern of twentieth-century atrocities, including Soviet gulags. Nolte’s views sparked intense backlash, with critics like Jürgen Habermas accusing him of relativizing Nazi crimes and diminishing the Holocaust’s moral and historical significance. The debate highlighted deep divisions among historians over how to approach the Holocaust – as an event that stands apart or as one atrocity among many in an age of ideological conflict.

Understanding these debates is critical for educators because they influence how the Holocaust is taught in classrooms. Should the Holocaust be presented as the inevitable result of Hitler’s ideological hatred, or as a complex process driven by bureaucratic chaos and opportunism? Should it be contextualized within global histories of genocide, or treated as a unique event? These questions shape the narratives students encounter and affect how they interpret the Holocaust’s causes, consequences, and lessons.

In recent years, there has been a troubling rise in Holocaust denial and distortion. Surveys by the Claims Conference reveal that many young people are unaware of basic facts about the Holocaust, such as what Auschwitz was or even the number of Jews killed. This lack of knowledge makes students more susceptible to denialist arguments and misinformation. To combat this, it is crucial to teach students not just what happened during the Holocaust but also how we know what we know. Holocaust denial is not just about denying facts, it is about undermining the credibility of survivors, historians, and the very idea of historical evidence. Teaching students how historians verify facts, how we know what happened, and why it matters is essential. This means incorporating lessons on media literacy, primary and secondary sources, teaching students how to critically evaluate evidence, and showing them why denialist arguments are false. This is especially important in the age of social media, where misinformation can spread so quickly and where conspiracy theories thrive.

Jeffrey Glanz[5], in Ten Suggestions for Teaching the Holocaust (1999), advocates for “hands-on” and “minds-on” learning, emphasizing that students should actively engage with the material through reflective analysis rather than passive learning. Educators must focus on the specific aspects of the Holocaust – its historical context, the entrenched antisemitism that enabled it, and the societal structures that allowed it to happen. Holocaust education should go beyond simply transmitting historical facts, encouraging students to critically engage with how systemic hatred, conspiracy theories, and scapegoating can lead to mass violence. By framing antisemitism as the “oldest and most dangerous conspiracy theory,” educators can help students understand the deep roots of this prejudice and its persistence throughout history.

James Joyce once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” We don’t need to tell students that the lesson of the Holocaust is not to be a bully – they will come to that conclusion themselves if they are given a deep understanding of what happened. The power of Holocaust education lies in the details – the particular stories of individuals, the specific historical circumstances, the choices people made. If students understand these details, they will understand the broader lessons.

Another key aspect of effective Holocaust education is the use of interdisciplinary methods. The Holocaust is not just a historical event – it is also a deeply moral, psychological, and cultural one. Literature, like the works of Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl or Elie Wiesel, can help students understand the emotional and personal aspects of the Holocaust in a way that pure history might not be able to. These personal accounts give a face to the victims, allowing students to see them not as numbers but as people. Psychology can help explain how ordinary people became complicit in such an atrocity. Studies on obedience, such as those by Stanley Milgram, show how people can be influenced to do things they would not normally do. Philosophy and ethics also play a crucial role in Holocaust education. Discussions about moral responsibility, the nature of evil, and the role of individual agency allow students to grapple with the ethical questions raised by the Holocaust. Was it possible for perpetrators to refuse to participate? What motivated bystanders to remain silent? These questions encourage students to think deeply about moral choices and about the factors that influence human behavior.

Experiential learning – such as visiting Holocaust museums, listening to survivor testimonies, or using virtual reality to explore historical sites – can also make a big difference. These experiences bring history to life and make it more immediate and real. Survivor testimonies, whether read, watched, or listened to, are incredibly powerful. They humanize the history and help students connect to it on an emotional level. They help students see the Holocaust not as an abstract historical event but as something that happened to real people, people like them.

The challenges of teaching the Holocaust in high school revolve around maintaining historical specificity while making the content accessible and impactful for students. The risks of universalizing the Holocaust, of losing its specificity, or of overwhelming students with its horrors, require a thoughtful approach. By using interdisciplinary methods, encouraging critical thinking, and providing meaningful engagement, educators can ensure that Holocaust education respects the memory of the victims and provides students with the understanding they need to recognize and combat hatred and bigotry today, equipping them with a nuanced understanding of one of history’s darkest chapters. Ultimately, the goal is to empower students not only with historical knowledge but also with the intellectual tools needed to recognize and combat the forms of hatred and bigotry that continue to threaten society today.

The stakes for Holocaust education could not be higher. In an era of rising antisemitism, misinformation, and historical revisionism, ensuring that students have a deep, critical, and empathetic understanding of the Holocaust is crucial. This means moving beyond superficial narratives and creating a learning environment that respects the complexity of history and honors the memory of those who suffered. Through thoughtful, reflective, and innovative approaches, educators can play a key role in ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust continue to resonate with future generations, fostering a commitment to justice, human dignity, and the prevention of future atrocities.

References

Aly, G. (2014). Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Metropolitan Books.

Chapman, A. (2015). Learning lessons of the Holocaust. UCL Press.

Cole, T. (1999). Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; how history is bought, packaged, and sold. Routledge.

Dawidowicz, L. S. (1975). The war against the Jews: 1933–1945. Bantam Books.

Feinberg, S., & Totten, S. (Eds.). (2009). Essentials of Holocaust education: Fundamental issues and approaches. Routledge.

Glanz, J. (1995). Ten suggestions for teaching the Holocaust. The Social Studies, 86(3), 111–113.

Habermas, J. (1989). A kind of settlement of damages: The Historikerstreit and the past that will not pass. New German Critique, (44), 25–39. https://doi.org/10.2307/488496

Mommsen, H. (1986). The realization of the unthinkable: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the Third Reich. Contemporary European History, 1(1), 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777300000045

Novick, P. (1999). The Holocaust in American life. Houghton Mifflin.

Pearce, A. (2018). The shapes of Holocaust education in the early twenty-first century. Holocaust Studies, 24(3), 261–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2018.1444113

Rothstein, E. (2002, November 17). Whose history is it? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/arts/whose-history-is-it.html

Slezkine, Y. (2004). The Jewish century. Princeton University Press.

Stone, D. (2010). Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford University Press.

[1] Pearce, A. (2020). Challenges, issues and controversies: The shapes of ‘Holocaust education’ in the early twenty-first century. In A. Pearce, S. Foster, & A. Pettigrew (Eds.), Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies (pp. 1–27). UCL Press. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15d7zpf.7

[2] Novick, P. (2000). The Holocaust in American life. Mariner Books.

[3] Chapman, A. (2020). Learning the lessons of the Holocaust: A critical exploration. In S. Foster, A. Pearce, & A. Pettigrew (Eds.), Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies (pp. 50–73). UCL Press. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15d7zpf.9

[4] Rothstein, E. (2011, April 30). Making the Holocaust the lesson on all evils. The New York Times. nytimes.com/2011/04/30/arts/design/museums-make-the-holocaust-a-homily.html

[5] Glanz, J. (1999). Ten Suggestions for Teaching the Holocaust. The History Teacher, 32(4), 547–565. doi.org/10.2307/494162

Isolationism: FDR’s Immigration Crisis

Isolationism: FDR’s Immigration Crisis

Madison Kohlhepp

Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, and Ravensbrück. Think of an ice-cold place with no hope of getting out of your worst nightmare. These were some of the most well-known labor camps during World War 2 in Germany and Poland. They were built to target many different groups, like Jehovah’s witnesses, gypsies, and homosexuals. The biggest group targeted was the Jewish population. Hitler’s goal with building these labor camps was to relocate as many Jewish people as possible and make them work to death or just to kill them, these camps were meant for mass murder. There is a lot of hidden history that is not discussed about the Holocaust.

There was a lot of blame going around and new power coming into place that America was not fully aware of because they focused on being stable after the Great Depression. In Europe tensions rose and Germany became very angry about the outcome of World War 1. Germany believed the repercussion from World War I they had gotten was not fair. Hitler blamed the Jewish population for their loss in World War 1 and thought that they had to pay for their betrayal to the German people. Thus, sparked the idea for Hitler to create labor camps to torture and destroy the Jewish population. While the labor camps were being built there were things going on beforehand that sparked antisemitism in Germany. They had to go around wearing the star of David on all their clothing, they couldn’t go to public schools just Jewish schools, couldn’t go to the movies or to certain restaurants and a lot of Jewish business owners lost their businesses from German soldiers trashing it and shutting them down all because they were Jewish.

Gas chambers were the kiss of death. Jews and others who made it farther would get tattoos. Jews had no name anymore and just were referred to as a number. All hair would be cut off and then would be told to change into the same striped outfits and sent to their barracks and from there they would be sent to work all day and every day with little to no food. One wrong move and anyone could be killed. Reapings would happen as well. Those who were picked were sent to either different camps or to the gas chambers to be killed. This was kept secret in Europe and only thought to be rumors for many years. Around 6 million lives were lost.

FDR was a great leader in so many ways and did want to help the country and the people of the United States out first and foremost. He wanted to get the country out of the Great Depression and make sure that the people were being taken care of. However, there were split sides on what the United States should have been doing during this time. Historians are still debating this topic to this day and disagree with the isolationist mindsets that were put into place and FDR should have gotten involved and helped the Jewish population more. Saying he should have done what he wanted regardless of the backlash he would have gotten from the people. The isolationist mindset and closed-door policies has been seen as something that ruined the United States because in 1941 Japan had conducted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. That created other countries to have animosity towards the United States. Pearl Harbor ended up being the turning point for the United States to get involved in the war, leading to all of those closed-door policies to go out of the window. America was finally waking up and realizing what was going on outside of the country.

FDR and the public

The public loved FDR. He had a great relationship with the country because they had felt like they truly knew him. This starts with his fireside chats where the country was able to listen to him and what he wanted to do for the American people. While he was their president there was his hominess about him where he became more than a president to them. The people saw how FDR had a helping hand in the reason the country got out of the Great Depression because of his New Deal policy. The New Deal was a domestic program between 1933-1939 which aimed to provide relief and reform the people of the country.

So many lives were lost. Lives were lost because of leaders not believing the rumors of the labor camps, but also because of the restraints put on the immigration policies and visas that would have helped the immigrants trying to get into the country. Policies have to get passed through many different levels of the government because of the checks and balances system so FDR isn’t the main source of the issue, it was the government as a whole. While the borders had been closed and not as open for quite some time, the decision to close the border angered immigrants who greatly needed help.. There was a genocide happening in Europe because of Nazi regime and the antisemitism running through Germany. America had a lot of difficult decisions to make when it came to policies and deciding what they wanted to do with the immigrants, specifically the Jewish population. America wants to be neutral, and the Jewish population was not something the country was prioritizing. From another entry that was written by FDR he states “I have no intention in getting into a war with Germany. American will not enter. (343) There was no way that FDR was going to allow American to assist with anything including with the immigrants. The US turned an eye and the immigrants had to then go back to their countries they were trying to leave. Many went into hiding and others were captured and sent to different places, whether it be different countries or a labor camp. This did not just affect the Jewish population, it affected so many immigrants from all over and while the Holocaust as a whole killed around 13 million innocent lives, 6 million of which were Jewish men, women and children.

At this point the country was torn on what to do. There were some groups that wanted to just get involved in the war because they didn’t want anything to happen to us because we were staying out and cutting ties with other countries. Yet there were the other groups that wanted nothing to do with the war because it was on European soil and did not concern the US in any way. Due to this split there were discussions being had in Congress over what to do with these sets of Neutrality acts that were rolled out and how to rethink the mindsets of the isolationist.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor it was like the United States woke up. The Japanese had bombed America’s soil and the people were shocked and distraught. This is what isolationist mindsets do, they had created enemies because with these policies the US was cutting ties with allies and countries had been trading with which was going to create conflict. We never truly had any issues with Japan until all of this happened. The immigration policies after the attack got even tighter than they were before. They truly didn’t want anyone, no matter where they were coming from, to come in and that showed because of the way they were treating the Japanese American groups in the country. However, the containment mindset and isolationism changed completely after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The people were angry; they wanted everyone who was on the axis side to pay for what they had just done to us, so America joined the allied powers and in 1941 America was officially a part of the war.

The United States was involved in the war and helping out the Allied powers, men and women were being a part of the war being nurses and taking over the jobs that men were doing and in ways being a part of the war was an eye opening for what women’s roles were like showing women can do just as much as men could do. The American citizens started to speak out more about how they were feeling about the policies already in place and in the novel America Between The Wars there is a letter that gets discussed about how the American families are feeling during his time of presidency, this section shows the side of the American families that want nothing to do with the war, it states“ Dear Mr. President, my wife and I have just heard your speech over the radio, I can not refrain from expressing our deepest appreciation for your state will do everything to keep this country neutral.”(214) This was what the American citizens were thinking; however, being isolated was the wrong move for this country even though the leaders and some of the public agreed to just be focused on the country but in the end the country got attacked by enemies. The isolationism did bring harm to the country and didn’t truly help us. It made the country look weak and made the people feel divided because if the country had not been isolated could Pearl Harbor have been prevented. While that is a question historians will never truly know it shows FDR should have listened to his heart. FDR should have focused on the people like he did but not in a containment isolationist mindset where certain events might have been avoided.

Overall, FDR did a lot of good for the people of the country. Did he do the same for immigrants that wanted to come into the country or for the immigrants already in the country? That is questionable. FDR did not treat the Japanese American immigrants in America right after that attack on Pearl Harbor and FDR changing his immigration quotas and rejecting the Jewish population into the country was not seen as a good move. There will always been good and bad things that any president will do but in this case things could have been different and prevented if he did what he wanted to do and stopped listening to mixed opinions of the public and his cabinet members and because of these policies and the split down the middle this caused a lot of antisemitism and hatred in the country to the Japanese Americans and to the Jewish population that were already here and or the ones who were trying to come in.

FDR’s America with antisemitism

Antisemitism is all too well known throughout the world. Antisemitism is something that has been seen for centuries, the meaning of antisemitism is to be hostile or prejudiced against Jewish people, this has dated back to ancient times but became more seen during the time when Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany. The Nazi’s were corrupting the youth and they were being taught how to spot a Jew based on their eyes and hair color, their nose side, how their skull lined up etc. The antisemitism that was happening in Germany would later on during the war spread to the United States in a different way. As mentioned before, it was antisemitism was always around but because of the increase in hate crimes and antisemitism, other countries were seeing what was really going on.

The Jewish population is one of the groups throughout history that have been blamed and have suffered for far too long. Hitlers building of the labor camps was a genocide and a way to try and erase them for good. FDR and the American population had heard word about these labor camps that were built out in Germany and Poland but had just thought they were rumors. Over in the United States, immigrants had always been coming in for quite some time from all over the world for a fresh start for their families and at the time we were a very friendly and welcoming country when it came to these matters. This had stopped for a while and had been tightened during World War I. When the Great Depression began and people were laid off from their jobs and couldn’t afford anything for their families, their outlooks on immigration started to shift. The people of the United States started to think it wasn’t fair that there were all of these immigrants coming into the country and because they had just suffered through a Depression where they could hardly afford anything that the immigrants should either go somewhere else or that America should be going from open door to a closed-door policy with self-containment and isolationism.

From that moment on when FDR listened to the majority of the public to become self-contained and isolated matters started to get worse from the Jewish population trying to come into the country and the Jewish population that was already here in the states before the policies were put into place. Historian Breitman who has done a lot research specifically when it comes to the Holocaust and the efforts FDR had states “FDR knew that many Americans held prejudicial views of the Jews.”(5) Breitman has done a lot of research through his book to be able to make a statement like this. There were protests before WW2 was happening towards immigrants and the Jewish population because of fear. . There was an argument made my Breitman stating “ Even if FDR has been more willing to override domestic opposition and twist arms abroad, he could not have stopped the Nazi’s in the mass murder of about six million Jews.”(5) to make this point is saying that nothing was going to change regardless of the United States changing their quotas and foreign policies to now not allowing them in wouldn’t change anything. There was nothing that could have happened from these events and issues from happening.

Congress at that point was getting very frustrated. They were seeing the reactions from FDR and the people of the US. There was craziness because emotions were all over the place. In Texas the governor had reported “Efforts to expand Jewish immigration, he said had created a terrible anti-semetic sentiment throughout the country which might break into riots if his bills go through.”(150) The people were getting very vocal about their feelings towards immigration. FDR made a case to congress about their concerns and stated “ This would be a divide with the American people and add to widespread perceptions at home and abroad that Jews had manipulated the policies.”(207) Whether Congress believed what FDR had to say is still a mystery however, what FDR had to say about the American people was something that was already going through the American people’s minds.

When the rumors were going around about the labor camps in Europe the people wanted nothing to do with. The public didn’t believe that in Europe there could possibly be any chance of a genocide to a specific group of people. FDR had heard wind of these rumors as any leader would have during this time and states in one of his letters to his Secretary of State “ I do not favor American participation over this matter.”(55) The fact he was getting wind of this and still didn’t want to believe it either and was listening to the American people was an outright shock. FDR seemed to be brushing these rumors away and just wanted to continue to only focus on his isolationism and being neutral during this war.

The closing statement

While the Jewish population was living in fear not only in Germany, they had come to fear the United States. The Jewish population had thought the states would be a safe place for them to come to but when they were turned away because FDR and his committee wanted to change his foreign immigration policies that all changed. The Jewish population was happy for what FDR had done for them, they felt like they were finally able to escape the troubles they were having with the Nazi’s slowly growing to have power. However, once World War II had started those policies changed drastically. Some of those policies were not in place anymore or changed significantly. Numbers were cut by over half and so many Jewish families were sent back to Germany at the start of the war and taken to the labor camps or just killed on the spot for trying to escape. In some ways the United States did such a disservice to the Jewish population They lost all of their clothes, jewelry, houses and worst of all their identity, they were not humans anymore according to the Nazi’s. So many of the Jewish population were killed or died of illness in those labor camps and the antisemitism that was in Germany had spread to the United States.

The people of the United States were calling the Jewish population spies to the Nazi government thinking they wanted us to get involved in the war. That was not the case. They wanted a safe place to live where they didn’t have to fear for their lives. Some were sent back to Germany. The people did not want to believe that a genocide towards the Jews were actually happening and they wanted to live in their own happy bubble. The government did nothing to stop the hatred that had spread to the United States because it was not their issue. A little later on in the war when the Americans were on Europe soil and came across a strange looking area in the middle of nowhere was when they realized what they had just stumbled upon. The United States had to do something about this, so they sent word back to the United States and FDR declared that all of the labor camps be liberated. The anger and sadness that got back to the American people and their views on the Jewish population changed drastically.

References

Secondary sources

Breitman, Richard, and Allan J Lichtman. 2014. FDR and the Jews. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press.

Wayne, Cole. 1983. Roosevelt & the Isolationists, 1932-45. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press.

Robert, Divine A. 1969. Roosevelt and World War II. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bernard, Fay. 1972. Roosevelt and His America.

Rafael,Medoff. 2009. Blowing the Whistle on Genocide : Josiah E. Dubois, Jr. And the Struggle for a U.S. Response to the Holocaust. West Lafayette, Ind: Purdue University Press.

Primary sources

Welky, David, 2012. America between the Wars, 1919-1941: A Documentary Reader. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. Harrap, and Elliot Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Letters Volume 3; 1928-1945.

Book Review: The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport—A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival,

The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport—A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival, by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, 2002. New York: Grand Central, Paper, 272 pages.

Reviewed by Thomas Hansen, Ph.D.

The Children of Willesden Lane is based on the true story of the pianist Lisa Jura, a Jewish girl from Vienna, who was sent by her parents to England where she was supposed to be assisted by a cousin there during the time of the Kindertransport, the program sending children out of Austria and Germany to safety. The book is written by her daughter, Mona, who reports on what was happening in Vienna after the Annexation.

When Lisa arrives in England, the cousin who is supposed to house and feed her reneges on the agreement. This leads her to the hostel on Willesden Lane where she and a score of other Jewish children from various countries in Europe form bonds, become strong, and face with dignity and perseverance a very uncertain future.

Lisa fights hard to get her older sister to England, enlisting the help of the other children in the facility to find a sponsor for her. Lisa herself is protected by the woman running the hostel, and Lisa becomes a leader of the other youngsters. Lisa’s father is a tailor, and he has taught her how to use a sewing machine. Because of this, she is hired right away to work in a factory making trousers. Her income helps support the hostel.

A musician, Lisa is faced with a lifetime of servitude until she has some decent breaks because of the woman in charge of the hostel and others who are pulling for her. She is allowed to audition for a scholarship to study classical music.

Teachers, writers, and musicians will appreciate this book because it tells of worlds that sometimes can only be imagined. I was able to understand most (not all!) of the technical information about music here because of my mother filling our home with melodies—and constant discussion of music theory. I too studied the piano, but alas I was not meant to be a pianist!

Lisa perseveres in the story. She fights hard to practice for the scholarship, at the same time she works making uniforms in the factory.

The human spirit is so strong. I am always amazed by this fact.

Lisa’s story is a beautiful one. It includes such hope and so much good news. The story also includes some bad news, however, because of what is happening in Europe with the war and all of Hitler’s policies uprooting and destroying entire threads of history, family ties, destiny of entire peoples, and freedom.

It is freedom itself that is at the core of the themes in this book. Losing freedom and gaining freedom are two of the biggest events we can experience as thinking persons.

Once We Were Brothers: A Novel, by Ronald H. Balson, Reviewed by Thomas Hansen, Ph.D.

Once We Were Brothers: A Novel, by Ronald H. Balson, 2013. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Review by Thomas Hansen, Ph.D.

This is yet another wonderful book with great writing and captivating action—but it is a book about a terrible story. It describes the close friendship between a German/Polish Christian boy who is raised by a Jewish family in a small village in Poland. The time is World War II, and the story is based on–and connects to–historical points of the time.

It is said to be a book that is “hard to put down.” Indeed it is. Balson’s first novel, this book contains good writing, suitable pacing and forward movement, plus a lot of information about what was happening in rural Poland in that period. There is also some direct teaching involved, with characters explaining what certain terms meant and what various Nazi policies entailed.

The book consists mainly of flashbacks to what was happening in Poland among the families and friends of Ben Solomon, the Jewish boy whose life is at the center of the story. Chicago readers will be interested to know that the modern-day sections include scenes from Winnetka, the Loop, and the lakefront also.

The book is a novel, with a huge amount of factual and historical foundation.

It dovetails into Common Core Standards college-readiness levels and college-use levels also.

I will recommend the book, but I remind readers that many of the scenes described and the action discussed will not be at all pleasurable. Like many stories of the Holocaust, this one is very disturbing yet one which we must read, discuss, and remember.

The book should be required reading for college students–in any major–and good for educators to read also. As always, educators should read the book closely to see if there are passages inappropriate for younger readers.

Review of Once We Were Brothers: A Novel, by Ronald H. Balson,

2013. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Review by Thomas Hansen, Ph.D.

The book is a novel, with a huge amount of factual and historical foundation.

It dovetails into Common Core Standards college-readiness levels and college-use levels also.

The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport—A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival, by Mona Golabek & Lee Cohen

The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport—A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival

by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, 2002.

New York: Grand Central, Paper, 272 pages.

…based on the true story of the pianist Lisa Jura, a Jewish girl from Vienna

Reviewed by Thomas Hansen, PhD.

Lisa perseveres in the story. She fights hard to practice for the scholarship, at the same time she works making uniforms in the factory.

The human spirit is so strong. I am always amazed by this fact.

It is freedom itself that is at the core of the themes in this book. Losing freedom and gaining freedom are two of the biggest events we can experience as thinking persons.