Does How We Teach WWII and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change? A Teacher’s Perspective
The bell just blared for last period, most kids were shoving notebooks into backpacks and heading for the door last Wednesday when I saw Javi lingering by my desk, one hand twisted in the string of his faded Arsenal hoodie. I was wiping a coffee stain off my chipped ceramic lesson plan mug, and figured he was going to ask for an extension on his essay. Instead he said, “All we’ve talked about this unit is dates, death counts, and maps of concentration camps. My grandma’s cousin was a Holocaust survivor, and I don’t know how to ask her about it. It all just feels like a bunch of words on a page right now.”
I’ve taught 10th grade history for 12 years, and that question isn’t new to me. It stuck with me though, because I used to teach this unit exactly the way Javi described. I’d hand out a study guide with 20 key terms, give a lecture on the Nuremberg Laws and the Battle of the Bulge, end with a slide that said “6 million Jews, 5 million others killed” and move on to the post-war unit. A few years back, a parent emailed me after that unit, her kid was Jewish, and she said he came home upset that “6 million just felt like a big number, not real people.” That’s when I started asking myself the same question everyone’s debating now: do we need to change how we teach this?
I brought it up a couple years ago in the teacher’s lounge over lukewarm bagels, and my colleague Bob, who’s taught here for 32 years, shook his head. He said if we turn the unit into a bunch of personal stories, we’ll lose the big picture. Kids won’t learn how systemic antisemitism led to the Holocaust, how political choices allowed it to happen, they’ll just remember one sad story and miss the why. He had a point. I’ve seen it myself: when I first started adding more personal narratives, a student told me at the end of the unit that the whole thing was just Hitler being evil, and that was that. She had no clue about the years of legislation, the complacency of other countries, the way ordinary people went along with it. That’s a gap we can’t leave.
I went to a free workshop put on by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a couple years back, and picked up one small change that I started testing, then another. Instead of opening the unit with a lecture on the rise of Hitler, I open with a 3-minute clip of a survivor talking about what they ate for breakfast the day before the Nazis came to their town, or how they used to sneak into soccer games with their friends. I swapped one multiple-choice question on my unit test for a short response that asks students to connect one key event we studied to the life of the survivor they researched. For a small final project, instead of a 10-page research paper on a battle, students can choose to map the life of one person who lived through the era—any person: victim, rescuer, soldier, even a teenager who had to leave their home.
I told Javi about the free digital archives the Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem have online, showed him how to search by last name and the town his grandma’s cousin came from. A week later he came back, holding a crumpled printout of a black and white photo. It was a young man, around 19, leaning against a tree holding a worn soccer ball. Javi said he found the entry: the cousin made it out to what’s now Israel, raised three kids, died in 2001. His grandma had never seen a photo of him as a young man, Javi said, she sat at the kitchen table and cried for 10 minutes when he brought it home.
That moment got me thinking about what we actually need to change, and what we don’t. It’s not about throwing out all the facts and dates. We still need to teach how antisemitism was baked into Nazi policy, how the Holocaust wasn’t just a random tragedy, it was a planned, systematic event that happened because of choices people made. But the old order of teaching facts first, people second is backwards. If kids don’t see that these were real people with the same favorite snacks, the same sibling fights, the same love of soccer that they have, they won’t care enough to learn the why. That lack of connection is part of why Holocaust denial and antisemitism are gaining traction with young people online right now—if the Holocaust only exists as a set of facts to memorize for a test, it’s easy to question if it was ever real.
For teachers, the change doesn’t have to be a full rewrite of your curriculum. Just add one 3-minute survivor clip at the start of each week, or swap one test question for a personal connection question. That’s low effort, it doesn’t take time away from teaching the big political context that matters. For parents, if your kid comes home and says all they learned was dates and big numbers, you don’t have to plan a whole extra lesson at home. Just pull up the survivor testimonies on the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website one night at dinner, pick one person the same age as your kid, read a 2-paragraph excerpt, and ask “what do you think that would feel like to be in their place?” It takes 10 minutes, and that’s enough to make it stick more than any bullet point on a study guide.
I’m starting the WWII unit with my new group of 10th graders next week. I still don’t get it right every time. Some kids still just cram for the test and forget everything a week later. Sometimes I spend too much time on stories and have to rush through the political context at the end. But after Javi brought that photo in, I know that even small shifts matter. The whole point of teaching the Holocaust is to make sure it’s never forgotten, and you can’t forget something if you know the name and face of the person who lived it. I’m still working on the right balance, and I probably will be for the rest of my career. Right now, though, starting with people instead of facts feels like the right first step.
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