A Holocaust book for young children
News
that Israeli children are to receive compulsory lessons about the
Holocaust provoked an outcry from pundits who were traumatised by
teachers when they were young. But a book for the youngest
schoolchildren aims to avoid this mistake.
It looks like the sort of children's book you find the world
over - illustrations of a chubby three-year-old boy flying a plane or
playing in snow, drawings of different food and animals - a standard
educational tool. But this boy is Tommy and the circumstances of this
book's creation were anything but standard.In 1944 Tommy and his father, Bedrich Fritta, were trapped in the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia - Jews caught in the Nazis' net.
During the day Bedrich was forced to draw propaganda posters, but at night, he secretly painted this watercolour album, to give his son a vision of normality amid the seething hell of the ghetto.
Now this book is at the centre of a row in Israel, where I have come for a conference at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre high on a hill in Jerusalem.
"We wonder who your bride will be": Shulamit Imber says the book teaches what life has to offer
Imber, a smiling woman wearing a red felt hat and a red-and-white polka-dotted dress, complete with Minnie Mouse bow, has been devising a curriculum for Holocaust education for children as young as six.
This is where Tommy comes in: the book is to be course material for the youngest students.
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"Are traumas what kindergartners in Israel lack? Do they need
to add Hitler to the list of Goliath-Pharaoh-Haman-Antiochus?... After
my first Holocaust Memorial Eve, the dream appeared: a squadron of
Messerschmitts adorned with swastikas, diving toward the square in front
of the communal dining room of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, their cockpits
open, their pilots and gunners draped in kaffiyehs, raining down
machine-gun fire. The attack has gone on for 30 years now, on nights too
numerous to count." Niva Lanir, Haaretz
"The Holocaust is the most horrific event in human history, but it has no connection to Israel's security situation today. We must remember and honor its victims, but we must not make our children imbibe it with their milk. Every Israeli child has the right to live a life free of collective traumas, and to deal with those traumas only once he is ready to do so." Haaretz editorial
Haaretz on children's 'trauma'
"The Holocaust is the most horrific event in human history, but it has no connection to Israel's security situation today. We must remember and honor its victims, but we must not make our children imbibe it with their milk. Every Israeli child has the right to live a life free of collective traumas, and to deal with those traumas only once he is ready to do so." Haaretz editorial
The author, says Imber, is teaching Tommy what life has to offer.
"He wants to make him happy in the ghetto," she says. "He
wants to show him that there is a nice world outside the ghetto, and he
wants to tell him he is going to build him a future… He is drawing him a
world he can survive in."The book is a good tool, she says, because it concentrates on life rather than death, without ignoring the true circumstances. It will educate but not traumatise.
The storm which broke out when education minister Shay Piron announced that Holocaust education was to become compulsory for all Israeli schoolchildren precisely illustrated why a book like Tommy might be necessary.
In newspaper opinion pieces, writers recalled the traumas they had suffered when Holocaust education had been done badly.
One remembered being shown the movie Night and Fog aged 14, with footage from the death camps of "mountains of bodies being bulldozed", leaving him "tormented", while another still suffered nightmares 30 years after a teacher showed him, aged seven or eight, photos of what he called "walking corpses in striped pyjamas".
In Imber's office, a modern academic cubbyhole with children's drawings on the wall, this atmosphere of trauma seems very distant.
She explains that under the new curriculum children will have 15 to 20 hours of Holocaust education a year using materials that are age-appropriate.
At the moment teachers deal with the subject as they think best, often in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, but they are rarely suitably trained.
"Cow - moo, cheap, bow wow, baah"
One story I heard was of a teacher who showed their class the nature of the Holocaust by making them write down their dreams, then putting them in a bucket and burning them.
It is not an easy line to tread, I suggest to Imber. Aged six, children have already heard the siren which goes off across Israel on Memorial Day and probably asked their parents about it, so they may well already have knowledge that six million Jews died.
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But the curriculum's approach is
to stress the lives those Jews led. She says: "I do not think numbers
and bodies have meaning. I, in fact, think that this is the Nazis'
method, to dehumanise the people, and actually we rescue the individual
out of the pile of bodies."
As I visited the museums and memorials of Yad Vashem, this emphasis on the individual recurred. Inside the Children's Memorial, a darkened structure of glass, mirrors and candles which seem to reflect forever, the names, ages and countries of some of the boys and girls who died in the Holocaust are read out.
The art gallery displays piteous and angry portraits and self-portraits made inside the ghettos and death camps, while the archive contains diaries and other artefacts left behind by those who died.
I would not say it was uplifting - but it was not traumatic.
"Trauma is the opposite of education," says Imber. "Education has to lead to hope, and trauma doesn't have a meaning."
Josh Spero is editor of Spear's magazine.
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