‘Do not look behind you’
On a banned book, a sanitized past, and our desire to always look back.
A school board in Tennessee decided to ban a book about the Holocaust. It became a global news story.
The 10-person McMinn County Board of Education decided to remove a book from their eighth-grade curriculum “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
The book, “Maus,” is a graphic novel that portrays Jews as cats and Nazis as mice.
“The atrocities of the Holocaust were shameful beyond description, and we all have an obligation to ensure that younger generations learn of its horrors to ensure that such an event is never repeated,” the Board said in a statement. But in the case of Maus, “we simply do not believe that this work is an appropriate text for our students to study” because it was too adult-orientated.
They recommend schools find other words that accomplish the goals of “teaching our children the historical and moral lessons and realities of the Holocaust.”
“Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust” begins with a dedication page. A prelude to a collection of mythical stories Hasidim tell about some of the fortunate ones who managed to survive. This is how the collection begins:
When the Pharoah restored the chief butler to his position as foretold by Joseph in his interpretation of the butler’s dream, he forgot Joseph. “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgot him” (Genesis 40:23).
Why does the Torah use this repetitive language? It is obvious that if the butler forgot Joseph, he did not remember him. Yet, both verbs are used, ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting.’
“The Torah, in using this language, is teaching us a very important lesson,” said the Rabbi of Bluzhov, Rabbi Israel Spira, to his Hasidim. “There are events of such overbearing magnitude that one ought not to remember them all the time, but one must not forget them either. Such an event is the Holocaust.”
I wonder how many Jewish kids will be in those classes in that rural, southeast corner of Tennessee learning about the Holocaust? There can’t be many. Maybe one or two in a class, if that.
Those Jewish kids, if they exist, will get to experience what it is like to be one of the few Jews in a classroom of non-Jews learning about the extermination of European Jewry. They will get to experience their classmates’ quick glances in their direction. They were never long stares. Just a quick peek.
Were their concerned looks to see if I was handling the lesson? Or were they the curious looks of people who wanted to know if learning about the annihilation of people like me, but not like them, had a different effect on their classmates than it did on them?
Was he crying? Was he sad? Was he keeping a brave face? What was he thinking about?
In my tenth-grade English class, I remember reading Ellie Weisel. And I remember being split into groups to do research and a brief presentation on a different camp. My group did Majdanek, a camp in the southeast corner of Poland, outside Lublin. They murdered at least 80,000 there.
And I remember the glances.
Around Sept. 26, 1941, a message was placed all over Kyiv:
All the Yids of the city of Kyiv and its vicinity must appear on Monday September 29, 1941 by 8 a.m. at the corner of Melnikova and Dokhterivskaya streets (next to the cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, bed linen etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.
Over the next two days, the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators shot and killed some 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar.
There are many moments from high school I wish I could go back in time and fix. The day we watched the film Life is Beautiful (1997) is one of them.
To be Jewish is to make jokes about Hitler, about the Nazis. To cut the fear with a bit of laughter. To be Jewish is to take a tragedy and commemorate it by making it into a hamantash.
But this sentimental family fantasy comedy built on top of the suffering of Italian Jews during the Holocaust? A film in which the central point is how a father’s expression of great love for his son took the form of totally shielding him from the horrors of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.
That may be hitting a bit too close to home for the people of the McMinn County Board of Education.
The one true bit of Jewish humor Roberto Benigni made was likely something that eluded him. Just two of the film’s main characters survived the camp: The two non-Jews, of course.
“There were orders from Himmler that he wanted to drastically reduce the number of Jews, and so in Riga, of course, there was the notorious Rumbula massacre, the two massacres. And in the middle of December, it was the turn of Liepāja. They had killed a little less than half of the Jews by November. And then they rounded up another 2,700 or so in December and shot them also. And that left about a thousand. And after some further killings, there were 800 left that went in the ghetto. And this time in December, it was also my turn.
“They had three execution squads, one German and two Latvian… So they had rifles and then they counted out groups of ten Jews, and there were 20 marksmen, each of them had two, each of the victims got two bullets. And then came the next group. It was all quite efficiently organized.” - Edward Anders, Survivor of Liepāja, Latvia, in Einsatzgruppen: Nazi Death Squads (2009).
There were 7,145 Jews in the area around Liepāja in June 1941. The Jewish cemetery there lists 6,428 victims.
The Holocaust was unprecedented in its scale. But it was certainly not an abnormal event for Europe’s Jews. Pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, and persecution had been going on for as long as there were Jews in Europe.
The same goes for Europe’s gentiles. If you had lived around Jews for any period of time at any point in history, you knew about all this as well.
Spontaneous or planned, mob-led and state-sponsored, Europe had seen every aspect of the Holocaust before, perhaps except for the sustained intensity of the Nazi’s bloodthirst. And the level of collaboration by people throughout the East in helping the Nazis murder Jews is evidence on its own of the level of interest many people had in killing their Jewish neighbors.
“Lot’s wife looked back, and she thereupon turned into a pillar of salt.” (Gen. 19.26)
They were commanded to flee and told “do not look behind you.” But she looked back. Rashi, the great medieval French rabbi who wrote an extensive commentary on the Talmud and Tanakh, explains that “By salt had she sinned and by salt was she punished.”
But what if Rashi is wrong, and this was not a punishment? The common interpretation is Lot’s wife, Idit, couldn’t resist turning back to see the destruction of her native Sodom. Curiosity was a contributing factor in her demise.
What if there was a more practical reason: Lot and his family were told not to look back “because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family must now do,” Daniel Mendholson wrote in “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.”
Mendholson continues, “For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears… not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, a Haredi rabbi who was the only member of his family to survive the Second World War, wrote in his commentary on Idit it is common for people to delve deeply into the details of tragedies, and warned that learning too much about horrific events can have negative consequences, like excessive fear and paranoia.
How important is it that these kids in a Tennessee county of 50,000 learn about the Holocaust?
From a purely educational standpoint, it is important these American kids know their history. It is important the kids of America learn about the events of the world they have inherited. ‘What happened before I got here that will help me understand the world of today?’ That part is simple. Education that triggers intellectual discussion and debates about politics.
But should the education of the youth of America, when learning about the atrocities which took place during World War II, include the graphic depictions of the systematic mass murder of the Jews of Europe? Education that triggers an emotional response, questions of morality.
If we teach them just the first part, they may come away with a completely false understanding of the Holocaust as just the result of one awful man coming to power in Germany. Come to the conclusion that there once were bad people and they have been vanquished.
I don’t know the answer. I am not an educator.
Selfishly, for me, the best method for teaching kids about the Holocaust would be the one that results in them not wanting to murder Jews.
Of course, most kids in American classrooms will never have even the slightest inclination to murder Jews. But the track record of Jews is such that our neighbors’ spontaneously deciding to murder us is always a distinct possibility. And maybe, education designed to prevent that is necessary.
“There are those who refused to believe, or only now and then. We survey these ruins with a heartfelt gaze, certain the old monster lies crushed beneath the rubble. We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes, as though we’ve been cured of that plague. We tell ourselves it was all confined to one country, one point in time. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to the never-ending cries…” - The final lines of Night and Fog (1956)
It seems there is little hope of American kids being taught the Holocaust in its naked truth. The case study from Tennesee is pretty clear. We don’t teach atrocities in American schools without first making sure we do not upset the children.
There’s too much nudity in the documentaries about the shooting deaths of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis' mobile killing units of Eastern Europe. And there is far too much nudity and gruesome, ghastly images of carcasses being tossed into mass graves at concentration camps in the half-hour (a perfect length for a high school class) French film Night and Fog.
So America will sanitize the lessons. The concerned parents will make sure the horrors are not too horrible. The words are about the triumph of the human spirit and the bonds of love and less about the brutality and the antisemitism that caused the murder of some six million Jews and ended European Jewry.
I would show the kids the truth. Make them read the descriptions of the murder. Read about the men, women, and children who were marched down the street of their town in front of their neighbors, sometimes by the neighbors, stripped naked, lined up in a ditch, and shot.
And then show them the footage of those killings. Because the nudity and the violence are absolutely necessary and appropriate to see.
I have no idea if this is an effective education method. But it would make them confront the past. These were not cats and mice. They were people.
Because, sometimes, you need to look behind you.
Afterward, June 14, 2023:
In the black-and-white photograph, a man kneels before a large ditch. Above him, there is a uniformed man, a soldier in the Einsatzgruppen, pointing his gun at the man’s head. Below him are corpses. He will soon be the final one, to complete the set. He is the last Jew in the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa.
There is no nudity in the image. And the violence is implied. The faces of the dead are not shown, just the tangle of their legs in the ditch.
There is boredom in the picture. In the faces and the body language of the soldiers in the background. They look as if they have grown tired of waiting for the execution of the Jews to finish. Some have hands in their pockets, others arms crossed or hands clasped behind their back, and one man, of the SS in black, has his hands on his hips. One last execution and they can fill the mass grave and be done with their work here.
The kneeling man, who is moments from death, is not looking at his executioner and his bespectacled face. He is not looking at the camera. But forward and to the left. Possibly at the person giving the order for his murder.
I thought about this photo amid the discussions of the last panic over banning books in public schools and public libraries that are ‘age-inappropriate for children.’ And I was reminded of it once again, amid the latest panic to ban books for their supposed ‘sexually explicit material.’
The Last Jew in Vinnitsa is a much different photograph than the famous Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto which shows mothers and children with their arms raised walking into the street with soldiers standing behind them. In both the threat of violence against innocents is apparent, but in one the reality of the violence is still several steps removed from the moment in time the image captures.
We believe one to be age-appropriate for children. The one that is a slightly more palatable moment that we may teach. But in the case of “Maus,” an attempt to sanitize horrors so they can meet the standards of palatability for people who have no interest in ever looking behind them is a fool’s errand.
There are numerous people throughout the decades who believed that they might be the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. We know that there are none who can claim to be the man in Vinnitsa.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.