I've been having really weird dreams lately, most likely brought on by my reading selections of recent days. In class this quarter, I'm teaching The Chosen, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal, and a more "young adult" Holocaust novel called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Today, I showed a clip of the Band of Brothers miniseries; you know, the scene where they liberate one of the Landsberg camps? I've also been in contact with some folks who know Holocaust survivors and are going to help me arrange for one or two of them to come speak to my classes.
As a result of this influx of WWI/WWII information, my night-time visions have had mostly to do with being bombed in the trenches of France, getting carried off to Poland by the Gestapo, or being eaten by a giant raccoon. Well, okay, that last one might have more to do with reading Cal's blog than the novels I'm teaching, but whatever.
All this unrest reminds me of when I was little and my mom got on what we now refer to as her "Holocaust Kick", which is, I realize, a totally disrespectful phrase and one I probably should not put in print. My sisters and I mean no harm by it, of course, so I'll leave it here in good faith that you all will take it as such. During this period of time (I was probably about 7 or 8), she got really interested in all things related to the Nazis and the Jews, particularly if there was a movie about it. She must've rented a million films over that time: The Hiding Place, Empire of the Sun, The Music Box, Diary of Anne Frank, etc. Because we were at home with her, we watched them, too, regardless of the fact that we were probably WAY too young to be exposed to such atrocities, particularly in a visual mode.
I vividly remember lying in my bedroom one night crying because I was so scared that someone would one day decide that we should be sent to a concentration camp, and I recall tiptoe-ing into my parents' room to receive their reassurances that it couldn't happen to us. (From my current, less naive perspective, however, I would beg to differ with their confident assertion.)
In Mom's defense, my childhood fear of the Nazis eventually led to a keen interest in the Jewish culture, so much so that I focused on Jewish Lit. for my Master's degree. And now here I am, 25 years later, exposing a new generation of children (are 16-year-olds children?) to the horrors of genocide, feeling completely inadequate for the task, yet, even so, hoping to instill in them a hatred of racial (or any kind of) prejudice, praying that I can somehow help to cause the slightest bit of decrease in the chances that this type of tragedy will ever happen again.
Off to bed soon. Pray for sweet dreams!
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
2 comments:
sweet dreams....keep up with exposing the young students with history.
I grew up during WW2 and one of my good friends was a Jewish boy who escaped from Poland and was in my class.He had to learn English but he did so and was a good student. He lived with a local Jewish family and never knew what happened to his parents.Very sad.
Post a Comment