Does the Way We Teach WWII and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change? A Teacher and Parent’s Perspective
The bell blares for last period, and I’m shoving crumpled exit tickets into my desk drawer, stirring my half-cold coffee in a chipped mug my oldest kid got me for Mother’s Day. Most of my 10th grade history students are already out the door, off to soccer practice or after-school jobs, but Mia hangs back, twisting the strap of her neon backpack, scuffed white sneakers tapping the linoleum. “Can I ask you something?” she says. I nod, and she leans against the desk: “Why did all the Jewish people just… go? Why didn’t they fight back?”
Ten years ago, when I started teaching, I would have given her the same answer I learned in high school: that the Nazi system was brutal and organized, that people were disoriented and cut off from one another, that the regime was too powerful to resist. That answer is technically true, but it’s incomplete. That’s what happens when you teach this history as a list of dates and a final body count, not as something that happened to real people.
Back when I started, I taught it exactly that way: open with Hitler’s beer hall putsch, move through the Nuremberg Laws, build up to the Final Solution, end with liberation, write 6 million on the whiteboard, play a 20-minute black-and-white documentary, give a multiple-choice test. Students left remembering the number, but not much else. A few years in, my own son, then in 8th grade, came home from his WWII unit and said, “It’s just a bunch of dead people I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it actually happened.” That hit me, because I was doing the exact same thing in my own classroom.
I signed up for a free one-day workshop for local educators hosted by our city’s Holocaust center, and that’s where things shifted. I met a woman whose grandmother was a survivor, and she brought her grandmother’s pre-war photo album. Every page had kids the same age as my students: riding bikes, blowing out birthday candles, posing for prom photos. She said, “My grandmother didn’t start out as a victim. She was a girl who loved dancing and hated algebra, just like any of your students.” That line stuck with me, and I went back to my classroom and started changing things, slowly.
The first small change I made was opening the unit not with a timeline, but with 20 half-sheet profile cards. Each card is about a teenager between 14 and 18, living in Germany or Poland in 1935. Each lists what they do after school, their favorite food, their dream job. I got all of them for free from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s online education portal, and it took me an hour after school one day to print and cut them out. Kids pick one profile, and we check in on their person every few days as we move through the unit. Some survived, most didn’t. That small shift changes everything. Mia had picked Zlata, a 15-year-old from Poland who loved writing and wanted to be a journalist.
When she asked why Zlata didn’t fight back, I pulled out the excerpt of Zlata’s diary I’d printed for that day’s lesson. It talked about how she shared her last piece of chocolate with her 8-year-old cousin the day the ghetto was liquidated, how she lied to Nazi soldiers about where her father was hiding. I said, “Fighting back doesn’t have to mean picking up a gun. For Zlata, it meant keeping her cousin alive, it meant keeping writing her diary when she thought no one would ever read it. That’s fighting, too.” Mia stared at the page for a minute, then nodded, and said she’d never thought of it that way.
The other change I made is ditching the neat three-box sorting: perpetrator, victim, hero. I talk about the baker in Warsaw who snuck bread into the ghetto every week for a year, even though he wasn’t Jewish. I talk about the neighbor who turned in a family that had hidden in their attic for two years, just to get their apartment. I talk about people who did nothing, because they were scared for their own kids. Last year, a student who’d been bullied for being trans told me that made her think about the times she’d stayed quiet when other kids were picked on, instead of speaking up. That connection never would have happened if we’d just stuck to memorizing dates.
For teachers who don’t have time to overhaul their entire unit, you don’t need to. Just add one personal story to your existing timeline – the USHMM has free, age-appropriate content that takes 10 minutes to pull up. For parents whose kids come home saying the unit feels flat or abstract, you don’t need to plan a big home project. Just pull up the museum’s kid-friendly page after dinner one night, pick one story to read together, and ask what they think. It’s 15 minutes, no prep required. And always give kids an out: if a story or description feels too heavy, let them step out, or assign a different project for that day. I had a parent email me last year saying their kid had lost a family member to gun violence and graphic descriptions were triggering, so I had that kid do a project on rescuers instead, and it worked perfectly.
I still get questions about whether this approach is too much, whether we’re putting unnecessary emotional weight on kids when they just need to learn the facts. I get it – this is not an easy topic to teach. Some days I leave class feeling like I rushed through something that deserves more time, or that I fumbled a nuance. There’s no perfect way to teach something this terrible. But I do know that when we reduce 6 million people to a single number on a multiple-choice test, we miss the whole point of teaching this history in the first place.
After Mia left my class that day, she texted me that night – she’d looked up more of Zlata’s story online. She said, “She sounds just like me.” That’s the point. It doesn’t fix everything, and there’s still a lot I’m figuring out as I go, but that moment makes every messy, hard lesson worth it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Does the Way We Teach WWII and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change