O pinion
The Holocaust is Exaggerated in Pop Culture. That Makes it
Hard for Educators Like Me to Teach the Truth
BY LUKE BERRYMAN
“HEY, I DID HAVE one
question ...” That was the
tentative opening to an email
I recently received from a high
school teacher. The Ninth
Candle, the Holocaust educa-
tion organization I founded,
had led some educational
programs for her students, and
the teacher and I had been
trading emails for a few weeks.

Even teachers at schools
with established Holocaust
programs can be reluctant
to get too close to the big
questions about it. I sense a
widespread but unspoken fear
of being called insensitive or
offensive — or worse, antise-
mitic. She only asked me her
“one question” after a relation-
ship had begun to form and she
had my repeated reassurance
that nothing was off the table.

And the question?
She wanted to know if
the Nazis had used human
fat, rendered from Jewish
prisoners, to make bars of
soap. The class materials she’d
been given said they had. She
doubted the claim but was too
afraid to challenge it.

The answer is no, they
didn’t. Despite the teacher’s
apprehension, it was perfectly
reasonable to ask.

This teacher shared more of
her class materials with me as
our exchange went on. Along
with the “soap myth,” which
academics are still untangling,
there was a mess of small
10 JULY 29, 2021
but significant factual errors:
chronology, place names,
victim numbers. We soon
realized that Holocaust educa-
tion at her school, like at many
schools across the country,
needed to be overhauled. A
recent study revealed that our
knowledge of the Holocaust
is declining. Most millen-
nials and Gen Z members
surveyed don’t know that 6
million Jews were murdered
during the genocide, and half
preparation of corpses made
a soapy byproduct used to
clean the institute during the
final months of the war. The
corpses weren’t Jewish, and no
bars of soap were ever made.

But Allied and Soviet propa-
ganda, and pop culture works
like Zofia Nałkowska’s 1946
book, “Medallions,” inflated
the institute’s disrespect for
the dead into something even
worse. There are many other
treatment of the Holocaust
makes it difficult to think
about it critically, or to feel
empathy for its victims, or to
connect it with the present —
especially if that’s where one’s
Holocaust education begins
and ends. (More than 30 U.S.

states still have no mandate
that the Holocaust be taught
at all.) Folding more cases
of resistance into Holocaust
curriculums is one way to
address this. I’ve seen students’
We learned many lessons from the war, but the threat of indifference
enabling hatred to run riot is as pressing today as it was in Germany in
the 1930s and 1940s. The Holocaust is the most radical demonstration
of what can happen when the suffering of others goes unchecked.

This is why improving the way we teach it must be a priority for
schools everywhere.

of those surveyed can’t name
a single concentration camp or
ghetto. Meanwhile, antisemitic
incidents are surging.

One of the first things we
can do to improve the situation
is to uproot myths from our
curriculums. This will involve
discussing all those difficult
questions. We also need to keep
class materials updated because
our knowledge of the Holocaust
is still evolving. (The U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum
is a good source for teachers
who want to make sure their
lessons are up to date.)
Take the soap myth.

Rumors that the Nazis made
soap from Jewish prisoners
emerged before World War
II was over, and evidence to
support them was presented
at the Nuremberg Trials. In
the 1980s, historians discov-
ered that the issue was more
complex than first realized, and
their investigations continued
into the 21st century.

We now know that the
Danzig Anatomical Institute’s
examples of our knowledge of
the Holocaust improving over
time. But such changes don’t
always make it into curricu-
lums and schools.

This is partly due to
Holocaust education’s depen-
dence on pop culture, with its
liberal use of works that delib-
erately blur fact and fiction.

Schools commonly choose to
include books and movies like
“Schindler’s List,” “The Boy
in the Striped Pajamas” and
“The Tattooist of Auschwitz.”
But these works aren’t useful
teaching tools. They treat
the Holocaust as a game of
cat-and-mouse, Jews as an
interchangeable mass who
went to their deaths unthink-
ingly and survival as a matter
of attitude. In addition, there
are so many advocacy groups
putting free, one-size-fits-all
Holocaust lesson plans on the
internet now that some schools
and teachers barely know
where to begin.

For students, pop culture’s
repetitive, two-dimensional
JEWISH EXPONENT
relationships with the subject
change when light is cast on
the uprisings in Auschwitz,
Sobibor and Treblinka, or
on resisters like Alexander
Pechersky and Zivia Lubetkin.

Another way is to study
the Holocaust alongside
Nazi Germany’s “forgotten
victims,” as the historian
Richard J. Evans calls them:
the Roma and Sinti peoples,
gay people, people with mental
and physical disabilities and
Slavs, among others. Students
often connect with books that
reach imaginatively beyond
the settings of camps and
ghettos. Liza Wiemer’s novel
“The Assignment” is about
two students challenging their
school over a classroom activity
that requires some of them to
argue in favor of the “Final
Solution.” Wiemer illumi-
nates historical facts about the
Holocaust with contemporary
ideas about what it means to be
an ally to marginalized groups.

The story is a timely response
to real-life “assignments.”
As a Holocaust educator, the
most common question children
ask me is: “How come the Jews
didn’t fight back?” This is a
product of their exposure to the
myth that Jews went to their
deaths “like lambs,” and it shows
the inadequacy of contemporary
Holocaust education. It also helps
explain why many young people
are prone to taking the Holocaust
lightly. Such ignorance can breed
indifference, and as the historian
Ian Kershaw said, it was indif-
ference that paved the road to
Auschwitz. Hitler wrote in “Mein
Kampf” that the Nazis would
never recruit members from “the
unthinking herd” of the public.

He knew that widespread indif-
ference would help his pursuit
of antisemitism more than
widespread fanaticism.

We learned many lessons
from the war, but the threat of
indifference enabling hatred to
run riot is as pressing today as
it was in Germany in the 1930s
and 1940s. The Holocaust is
the most radical demon-
stration of what can happen
when the suffering of others
goes unchecked. This is why
improving the way we teach it
must be a priority for schools
everywhere. l
Luke Berryman is the founder of
The Ninth Candle, a Chicago-based
nonprofit trying to end antisemitism
by sharing knowledge.

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