Choosing to Remember

Two weeks ago I started Year 18 as a teacher. It’s been a good start - good but challenging. Students have a lot of questions about what is happening in our country. I’ll admit I do too. I’m worried about where we are, where we’re going. 

In part because of these worries, I spent a week this summer in Poland at a seminar run by the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust (ICEAH). Part of me is still there, thinking about things you can only learn by living for a week on the grounds of an actual killing field. 

I’m thinking about how authoritarianism preys on prejudice. We all have biases. We all have things we fear. But unexamined prejudice leaves us open to exploitation by those whose only North Star is their own power. Prejudice makes it easier to ignore when our neighbors are disappeared. Prejudice makes it easier for someone to stick a gun in our hands and tell us where to point it. When we allow prejudice to govern our thinking, we become nothing more than levers the authoritarian can pull to protect and enhance their power. 

I’m thinking about the scale of operations necessary to enact something as all-encompassing as the Holocaust. The original Auschwitz I camp is relatively small, the size of an up-state liberal arts college. It didn’t meet the grotesque requirements of the Final Solution, however, so the SS built Auschwitz-II Birkenau next door. Birkenau is the size of a city. You can stand on the train platform where the SS sorted those who would immediately be killed from those who would eventually be killed and see the remains of acres and acres of barracks. Auschwitz administered somewhere around 40 square kilometers - 24 miles - of land near the town of Oświęcim. The mechanisms of mass detention and mass death are by necessity enormous. 

Finally, I’m thinking about how corporate partners both aided and benefited from the Holocaust. IG Farben, the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world at the time, worked hand-in-hand with the Nazi regime to build a factory at Auschwitz III-Monowitz that relied on slave labor - disposable slave labor. I’m thinking about how current corporations put their bottom line before their workers and consumers. I’m wondering which ones might be willing to follow IG Farben’s example in the presence of a genocidal regime. 

I’m still processing it all. I’m still working on ways to share what I learned with my students, with all of you. I will say my time in Auschwitz informs every lesson I teach on some level. I’m not teaching the Holocaust every day - that wouldn’t be healthy for me let alone my students! But I believe even more firmly than I did before that high-quality social studies instruction is critical for the maintenance of a functioning society. 

We laugh - a lot - in class. We have fun while we learn. We play games. And we talk about serious topics that we have to be brave enough to face. 

Happy new (school) year to you all. Let’s learn together to make this place we share one where we can all thrive, one where we remember the legacy of Auschwitz and stand up to those who prey on prejudice. There’s really no other option.