Does the way we teach WWII and the Holocaust in schools need to change? A teacher’s perspective
Last October, I was erasing the smartboard after my 10th grade WWII lesson, the map of concentration camps still blurry at the edges, when I noticed Mia hanging by the door. She was twisting a frayed hair tie around her wrist, her backpack half slung over one shoulder, the rest of the class already sprinting toward the lunch line for pizza day. She waited until everyone was gone, then asked, “Why didn’t we talk about Roma people being sent to camps? My great-grandma was there.”
I froze. I’d taught this exact lesson eight times by that point. I had a study guide, a review game, a multiple-choice assessment that asked students to recall the 6 million Jewish death toll and the date of the Wannsee Conference. I’d added a one-sentence footnote about “other victims” on the last slide and moved on. I admitted that to her, and she nodded, then said, “I didn’t even know her story was part of the Holocaust until Thanksgiving. I guess I thought it just wasn’t important enough to talk about.”
I went home that night, pulled my old lesson plan up on my laptop at the kitchen table, and started picking it apart. It was structured as a clean sequence of political events: Hitler’s rise, the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, the Final Solution, liberation, Nuremberg Trials, end of unit. It fit perfectly into the two weeks we’d allotted for WWII before semester exams. But it was missing most of the people. A week later, Javi, a quiet kid who sat in the back row, raised his hand and said what I’d heard a hundred times before: “Why do we even care about this? It was 80 years ago. It’s not like it matters here.”
That question pushed me to talk to the other two history teachers in my building after school that week. We grabbed gas station coffee and sat on the back steps, talking about what we could change. None of us had extra planning time, none of us wanted to throw out all the materials we’d spent years building. We just wanted to fix the gaps that had been staring us in the face.
We started small. First, we swapped the opening. Instead of starting with Hitler’s rise and the Treaty of Versailles, we opened with 10 printed photos laid out on each group’s table: a Jewish teen at her 16th birthday party in 1930s Berlin, a Roma family sitting around a campfire near Munich, a disabled teen playing soccer with his friends, a gay couple at a gathering in Berlin before 1933. We asked kids to write one thing they noticed that these people have in common with them. Almost every kid wrote “they’re just having fun” or “they look like my family.” That small shift changes the whole conversation before we even get to the violence. It’s not just a list of dates to memorize—it’s people whose lives were destroyed.
Next, we pulled that footnote about other victim groups out of the last slide and moved it into the main lesson. We talk about how the first mass killing program of the Nazi regime targeted disabled people, years before the Final Solution was formalized. We talk about how Roma, Black Germans, political dissidents, and LGBTQ+ people were targeted alongside Jewish people, and how many of those groups didn’t get official recognition for their losses for decades. After Mia talked to me, she brought in a copy of her great-grandma’s camp registration card, and we added it to our lesson materials this year.
For parents who notice these gaps in their kid’s classroom, you don’t have to organize a protest or write a ten-page complaint to make a difference. Just ask one simple question over dinner after the unit wraps up: “What kinds of people did your teacher talk about being hurt in the Holocaust?” If they only name one group, pull up the free victim profile section on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. It takes five minutes to read one story together. If you have a family connection to any of these histories, share what you know, even if it’s just a small story you heard once once from an older relative. That small act of validation makes a bigger difference than any textbook lesson.
I’ve heard the concern that adding these stories dilutes the specific trauma of Jewish people, and I get that worry. I felt it too when we first started talking about changes. But what I’ve seen in the last year is that it doesn’t take anything away. It adds context that makes the entire horror of the Nazi regime clearer, and it lets more kids see themselves or their families in the story, which makes everyone pay more attention. Last semester, a kid who’d shared anti-Semitic jokes in the hallway before stayed after class once we finished the new lesson. He said he’d always thought of the Holocaust as just something that happened in a textbook, not something that happened to actual people who went to birthday parties and played soccer like he did.
We still don’t get it right every time. Last month, a parent emailed me saying we were “adding extra stuff” that distracted from the main facts. We only have two weeks for the entire unit, so we still rush through some parts. We’re still adjusting, still asking kids what we missed after every lesson. There’s no perfect version of this lesson that will cover all the stories or fix all the gaps.
But I keep thinking about what Mia said that day by the door. For years, we’ve taught this topic as a set of facts to memorize for a test, not as a story of real people whose losses still echo in families today. That’s the part that needs changing. We’re not done, but we’re moving in the right direction.
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