Does the Way We Teach WWII and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change? A Teacher’s Perspective
The bell rang for lunch last month, and 10th graders scrambled to stuff their notebooks into backpacks, yelling plans for after school over the clatter of desk chairs. I wiped the whiteboard, leaving a smudged “6 million” in the corner, when I noticed Lila hanging back by the door, twisting the strap of her canvas bag. She waited until everyone else left, then stepped forward. “All the stuff we learned today,” she started, “it’s all just numbers and dates. My grandma’s cousin David was killed in Auschwitz. But even to me, he just feels like another name on a list. Does that make me a bad person?”
I’ve taught this unit for nine years at a public high school in the Midwest. For most of that time, I followed the standard curriculum: two weeks sorting through battle timelines and key political leaders, three days on the Holocaust, a mandatory 1980s video of liberation footage, and a closing worksheet about why prejudice is harmful. I never really questioned the structure until a couple of years ago, when my own 15-year-old son came home from his high school WWII unit, dropped his backpack on the kitchen table, and said, “I get it, it was bad, but why do I have to memorize the date of the Battle of the Bulge if it happened 80 years ago? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Lila’s question brought that same discomfort roaring back.
I don’t have the power to rewrite the entire state curriculum overnight—we still have standards to hit, tests to prepare for. But I started testing small changes last year, and they’ve shifted how my students connect to the material more than I expected. The biggest shift wasn’t cutting content; it was moving human stories to the start of the unit, not the end. Instead of opening with “On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland,” I assign a simple, low-stakes homework: Bring one short story or photo of someone in your family who had to leave their home, or was treated unfairly because of who they were. It doesn’t have to be related to WWII at all.
The first time I assigned this, I worried most kids would show up with nothing, or that it would veer off into irrelevant tangents. Instead, Lila brought a crumpled photo of David, 19 years old, grinning on a Greek beach. She told us her grandma still keeps David’s wool jacket in a cedar trunk in her attic, and still cries when she pulls it out. Another quiet boy, whose family fled Syria when he was 7, shared that his great-aunt was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who moved to Damascus after the war, then had to flee again when the war in Syria started. Javi, whose family has lived in South Texas for five generations, told us about his great-uncle, who fought at Normandy, came home with a medal, and still couldn’t eat at the local white-owned diner. For the first time in all my years teaching, we talked about how WWII didn’t end injustice for millions of people who fought and won it, right here in the US.
The old way of teaching frames the Holocaust as a one-off event, caused by one uniquely evil man, in a faraway place, a very long time ago. That’s a problem, because it lets students distance themselves from it. If it was just Hitler, it can never happen again, right? But when you start with people instead of politics, students start to see how hate builds in small steps: first you strip people of their jobs, then their citizenship, then their right to be seen as human. Ordinary people go along, or look away, one small choice at a time. That’s the lesson that matters, more than memorizing any date.
For other teachers who want to make small shifts, you don’t need to completely rearrange your unit. Just take 45 minutes you’d normally spend on memorizing minor battle details, and replace that with personal stories. If your students don’t have family stories to share, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has free, short clips of survivor testimonies online—pick one that talks about the survivor’s childhood, their favorite food, their friends, before the war started, not just their experience in the camps. That small shift makes all the difference.
For parents, there’s a simple thing you can do at home, too. When your kid comes home from their WWII or Holocaust unit, don’t ask “Did you learn anything important?” Ask “What person’s story stuck with you?” If you have a small family story of displacement or discrimination, share it, even if it has nothing to do with the Holocaust. It helps kids draw the line between events that happened decades ago and the world they live in now.
It’s not a perfect fix. Some days, discussions go off the rails and we run out of time to cover all the required content. Last week, a student still raised his hand and said, “This is cool, but what does it actually have to do with my life right now?” I didn’t give him a neat, pat answer. I just reminded him of the story the Syrian student shared about his great-aunt, who had to flee her home twice, and said “It matters because this isn’t something that just happened to other people a long time ago. It’s something that happens when we stop seeing each other as whole people.”
It’s still a work in progress. I’m still figuring it out, year to year. But last week, Lila stopped me in the hall between classes, and said she went home over the weekend, looked up David’s name in the online Holocaust memorial database, and found it. “He’s not just a story grandma tells anymore,” she said. That’s more than I ever got when I taught the old way. That’s enough for right now.
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