Students learn about the Holocauat at the appropriate age, and as is the case with the trashy books peddled in Loudon schools, books that have nudity and profanity aren’t needed as one can teach what occurred in the Holocaust without resorting to using junk books.
I saw the book “Maus” years ago while browsing a bookstore, and was admittedly a bit puzzled by it. It seemed odd, this theme, in comic book format.
But I think about the first real exposure I had of the Holocaust other than a dry recounting in some history class, when I read a book back in the mid-late Sixties called “I Cannot Forgive”.
It was hard to wrap my head around, I think I may have been 11,or 12 at the oldest, and nobody told me to read it as an assignment or anything like that. There was a lot I couldn’t understand, and it was terrible to read.
But when I looked at that book “Maus” as an adult, I thought how much different reading a book like “I Cannot Forgive might have been if I had looked at something like “Maus” first.
I remember being puzzled by the concept of “Kapos”. It is a pretty evil concept, not just violence, but betrayal on top of that, and I recall having a hard time accepting that people would do that to their own.
Worse, it began to dawn on me what people were capable of doing if they were desperate. Disavow their family, their own children or parents, even their God, just to survive. That was a powerful thing to realize as a kid.
It could be that the concept, and others like it, might be more understandable to a kid who might get it but doesn’t really want to see it.
It was right around that time when I was 11 or 12 that I read a book about the allies who were POW’s of the Japanese. It was a thick, comprehensive account, and not meant for a young kid. I lived in the Philippines, and the memory of the Japanese occupation was still evident. There were the white markers on the route of the Bataan Death March. And I had just spent the last few years in Japan, and liked the Japanese very much.
It was hard to read these accounts of brutality by the Japanese and square them with the friendly people I had known. I think that is what led me to that book about Auschwitz.