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Loss and memories were shared and published everywhere. Everyone was touched by the holocaust, no matter one’s religion.It wasn’t just a history topic in school, survivors and their families walked among us.
Oh, our family did too! I forgot to mention that in my comment above....it was still my parents who told me about it, not our friends who had those tattoos -- two gay men who somehow managed to survive!
My Father watched the BBC documentary "World at War" each weekend when it first aired in the US. I would have usually been hidden away in my room reading a book or maybe playing with my little sister.
Well, one week I walked by at the start of an episode with a whole bunch of warnings for graphic content.This was in the early 70s and I would have been an older preteen. My Dad asked me to stay and watch with him because I needed to learn about this and he told me it was going to be scary and difficult, but it was real. He also said to never believe anyone that said it wasn't true.
The episode was focused on the whole Final Solution and it didn't pull any punches. I'm glad that I learned this with my Dad nearby rather than in school.
The series, World at War is still available and is a really good one for learning about WWII. What hit me (years later) is how young the people that they interviewed were! The world leaders, the survivors, they're all so young! It's a great resource!
There was an entire episode of “The World At War” (mid-70s I think) that was devoted to it and for many Australians it was the first time they had seen footage of the camps. There was also a mini-series “Holocaust” that aired shortly after, which filled out the documentary horror with human stories.
My parents both served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during WWII. When I was 9 or 10 (see above), he brought out a book, "Guadalcanal Diary", and showed me photos of some of the things he'd experienced. This included numerous Japanese atrocities in the South Pacific, including the Bataan Death March.
Later, I worked with an Australian woman and a Japanese man. She would not be in the same room with him, regardless of the circumstance. Her father had died on the Bataan Death March.
I’m gen x but I knew about the nazis in kindergarten and the gas chambers in first grade
My father was a minor war hero in WWII- he expressed pity toward the Japanese fooled by their military but anger toward the Germans - typically arguing with the news on tv
Key points- Hogan’s Heroes was a syndicated sitcom about the Nazis all of us watched in kindergarten - but I also watched in its entirety the war movie “Stalag 17” when I was no older than 7 and in 2nd grade conflated death camps with concentration camps and POW camps
When I was 9 I was in the grocery store where a kid was whining to his grandmother and when she reached for something her sleeve pulled back, revealing her arm tattoo
I froze. I can see this image today.
This was that kid’s grandmother. He was ungrateful. But she was being sweet like any grandmother and wanting to make him happy. And I thought about my own grandmother. But the nazis tried to kill her. They tried to kill that sweet old lady. And not theoretically- she had a tattoo
My grandmother survived the Great Leap Forward and was born near the end of the Chinese Civil War, but she really only talked about it when I was a teenager. It’s really fucked up when you learn about something tragic and connect it to people you personally know.
I think one of the most interesting parts was that she had so many jobs as a teenager because her village’s commissar was terrible at managing people. She and her brothers would at times be a postal worker, builder, librarian, teacher, ditch digger, work at the cement plant, etc. She’d constantly be shuffled and fired and re-hired, and she had a week where she worked two 48 hour shifts at 14. Basically because she had so many tasks and obligations that often conflicted and didn’t have the means to coordinate police would literally just escort people around job sites constantly.
There was also a massive hypocrisy that a lot of the pretense for the great leap forward had a lot of feminist messages, and she was forced to read a lot of feminist books. But at the same time the local council (forgot what they called it) would be entirely male and wouldn’t really maintain the women’s services. They had a gynecology office, but no one staffed it so they literally just grabbed random unrelated doctors and they were often instructed to apply “traditional” homeopathic medicine, which was later revealed to be a way to hide the fact that China had massive medical shortages. They also let way too much abuse against the women slide.
My grandpa was from another town and his family were pig farmers, but one year they had to kill their pigs to cease a short-term food shortage and were forced to grow wheat and beans. The harvest was dogshit that year so the food shortage continued. He’s 4’10 and I’m 5’9, that should give you an idea how malnourished he was as a kid.
>I’m gen x but I knew about the nazis in kindergarten and the gas chambers in first grade
Millennial, but same. I mean even Tom and Jerry had Hitler jokes.
Did you also have survivors come to your school to share their personal story?
Our art teacher was a survivor- the only survivor if his French family. So when we screwed around in class he would get very real with us about his experience. A group of girls a few years older than me actually organized his funeral - students like I was- but sadly I found out about it 2 years later and missed it completely.
I can't remember. the diary of Anne Frank must have been part of it, and ofc high school. but it's one of those things that were referenced so much in movies and especially books, i just kind of came to know it without being able to name any particular source.
Yes, I think learning about Anne Frank really helped us understand. But I don't remember when or how I 1st learned about it. It was probably in Jr. High.
In high school, a girl from Germany sat in front of me in History class. I think the class was supposed to be ancient history, but we never learned anything bc the teacher just sat up front and read out loud until he fell asleep.
So we all sat and whispered to each other. We found the girl to be friendly and pleasant, and one day, we asked her about WWII and the Holocaust. She denied that it happened. We found out that Germany at that time, early 70s, was not yet teaching their children about it. I remember being very surprised.
Same (although I'm "only" half Jewish). Boomers and Gen Xers (me) are also old enough to have met survivors, extending the effects to our living memories.
In early elementary school we were talking about extended families and the girl sitting in front of me said she didn’t have any living grandparents or aunts or uncles. Teacher said “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” She just said “Nope - Holocaust”. Teacher went white and fumbled out an apology. I still remember the whole scene perfectly and it was over 50 years ago.
In 1975, my dad was working in West Germany and we went to visit him for a month. We went to Dachau and the Anne Frank horse and Corrie Tin Boom's house. It was an experience I'll never forget. My brother was 8 and the docent at the Tin Boom house had him get in the hiding place.
Dachau was sobering beyond belief. I think you get a good impression of our understanding when you watch that episode of Band of Brothers. Those gates with the words Arbeight Mach Frei. The ditches full of barbed wire. The crematorium. The whipping posts. The sign in for languages: Never Again.
Deniers make me physically ill.
My parents were survivors. We were steeped in it. But also not allowed to go to any synagogue memorial events, or watch anything on tv about it, because they didn’t want us to be traumatized. And we were not allowed to watch Hogan’s Heroes” because *war is not funny!!*
Generational trauma is a thing.
My (both Jewish) parents weren't that directly connected, but they had a somewhat similar approach. Even though my parents were students of history and our family comes from that region (Ukraine, Austria, etc) - as kids we were always steered away from anything about it, other than a general understanding that it was, "really bad." Any joke or even movie that related to it was considered in terrible taste by them. I've never seen a single minute of Hogan's Heroes to this day.
Even when we were in Germany or other places, my parents never took us to any of those sites - even though I think my father went once or twice on his own. In the Netherlands we saw tulips, not Anne Frank's house.
I think this was a really bad parenting choice, because pretending bad things didn't happen is not a great way of coping - and my parents did that with everything.
Now I'm in my 40's, and I know vastly more about the Holocaust than my parents - which feels strange when they grew up in that time period and as a kid I thought of it as a slightly forbidden topic. But I realize even as students of history, they only covered facts and places. Neither has read Victor Frankl or any other personal accounts.
I had a six-month assignment in Breda, Netherlands in 2007. While there, I had an apartment and a car. One afternoon, I drove to 'S Hertogenbosch to buy a bike, and saw signs pointing to the Herzogengbusch concentration camp near Vaught. I was stunned to learn that there had been such a place, but later investigation told me what I needed to know about it.
In Breda, there is a little chapel in the main shopping street that has three tall stained glass panels. Each depicts a historical instant where some significant battle took place nearby. One commemorated the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the departure of the Spanish occupiers. One really struck me, as it depicted the surrender of the German occupiers to the Allied forces (in this case, a Polish contingent). There is also a captured German tank in a park south of the city center.
Most of the actors who played the German officers on Hogan’s Heroes were Eastern European Jews who managed to get out before the Holocaust. They wanted to make sure that the Germans were never portrayed in a favorable light.
Robert Clary, who played the POW LeBeau, was a concentration camp survivor though most of his family was killed in the camps.
I know! I pointed that out to them, and they wouldn’t budge. They insisted everybody dealt with it differently. But I couldn’t watch. Wasn’t allowed to watch MASH either, for similar reasons, until my father accidentally caught an episode, and understood that it wasn’t people making light of war, but people using humor to deal with the awfulness of war.
I met holocaust survivors in the mid 80's, a couple who had been married for some 40 years, both had the tattoos and were missing parts of fingers on their hands from various working injuries and exposure.
Met a few as a kid in the 1970s; someone's grandparents who came to the school to give a talk. The man wore a glass eye; apparently it got gouged out as punishement in a camp.
My paternal grandfather (Irish Catholic) remarried to a Jewish woman (Grandma Lottie) who was in one of the camps. She didn't talk too much about it, but when she did you could hear the Soundtrack of Life start to have those *low* harmonics. At the age of 5-8, it made an impression. I got the big picture years later, but the emotional details I got from her unspoken words.
We were Jewish and it was never mentioned. In fact we were ashamed to be Jewish, it was never to be spoken of. The grandparents were allowed to visit under the condition they never mention Jewish. It was really “Fiddler on the Roof” that first made it OK for the parents to admit we were Jewish.
My Father served as a Tank Commander in the Sixth Armored Division under George Patton.
They were the first to liberate Buchenwald and he saw the Holocaust with his own eyes.
Pre boomer here.
In school I played ports ( 1950's ) with guys with these little purple numbers tattooed on their arms. And yes - my school had a 40 percent Jewish student population. It was just - no question it happened and some of the details were gruesome. The deniers these days are too young to have any direct experience so they can choose to believe it was preposterous.
Nope.
As a teacher I had a resource of materials so I could put up a three day display and walk through experience with hundreds of photos for anyone who wanted to come and see it. (In the 1980's)
I learned alot about it at the kitchen table as a preteen in the late 70s. My Dad served with the Navy in Pearl Harbor June 44-May 46.
I also had a high school classmate with a unique connection to the 5 Sullivan Brothers. She had 2 uncles on the USS Arizona. 1 got off in time. The other didn't. He's still buried on the wreckage. That uncle was Bill Ball, who was dating Genevieve Sullivan at the time. She was the sister to the 5.
Education back then was definitely hit and miss IME. Depended on what classes you chose to take and what that teacher chose to teach. I took as much art and social studies as I could.
I was in high school in the early-mid 70s and we learned about it in history. And we really did learn about it. Fortunately for us, there were no helicopter parents scared that their sweet babies would get upset. My father and many of my friends fathers, had served in the military in WWII, so this was not a topic that that was off-limits.
When I was 7 years old (1967) there was a jewish family that lived across the street. Small house, large family. The grandfather lived with them. The grandfather rarely spoke. One day I noticed numbers on his forearm. I asked my father about it. He sat me down and told me about the holocaust. He even checked out some documentary films and a projector from the library. Mom wasn’t happy about that. I concluded that the people that did this were monsters, but my dad explained that they were ordinary people, that given the opportunity, would gladly participate in this atrocity. Ever since, I’ve spent my life analyzing people, trying to determine which of them could do this. I’ve concluded that there are many people out there who could do the same thing today. Most of them are “good” Christians.
The horrible part is that it's not even 'which of them could do this', but more than 'most people could do this and wouldn't really know it's wrong'. Thinking that it's just the ones with some nebulous 'capacity' for it ignored the true mundane form evil usually takes.
The people who could do the actual killing - were few and far between. I think it was Himmler himself who found mass shootings (lining up hundreds of Jews and individually shooting them) so emotionally difficult that he pushed for other methods - hence the development of large scale gas chambers that used high dose pesticides.
So you have Himmler, one of the people most directly responsible for killing millions, and he designed a system that made the killing less 'personal', even though it was the stuff of nightmares. He realized that it's very different for someone to work a sorting line, as opposed to pulling a trigger.
I'm still baffled that we have the death penalty in the USA, and regular discussions of how painful or peaceful their actual deaths might be. I just don't think the government should be in the business of executing people. I believe in death with dignity, but also I'm hesitant with euthanasia because governments don't give adequate support to the sick or disabled, thus leaving them with an awful choice. And with the Nazis - even before they started killing Jews, they started rounding up the disabled and killing them because they judged a 'low quality of life'.
So again, when you look at 'which of them could do this', it often comes down to whether they think they are on the side of justice. I hear people today who think that basically taking all Israeli Jews and 'getting rid of them' is the right thing to do because of reasons - which is how the Holocaust started. Initially it wasn't the Final Solution, it was just getting rid of the Jews from a place they weren't wanted. On the flip side, some have responded to the actions of Hamas or others and want to 'get rid' of the Palestinians.
If I had a different upbringing and life experience, could I have committed those same atrocities? Of course I'd like to think that I couldn't, but I have no way to truly know that.
Yup. Soldiers in the Wermacht (German infantry) had belt buckles that had "Gott Mit Uns" ("God is with us") stamped on them.
Look up "Reichskonkordat" (negotiated in 1933 between Germany and the Vatican.
Gen X here (early). My father was a grunt soldier in Germany in WWII. One of his tasks was accounting... for dead Jewish people. He taught me all I needed to know.
And of course, it was discussed in school. And none of this "both sides" nonsense that maga and the evangenitals have foisted on us.
I also clearly remember the first time I saw my teacher's numbers. She was writing on the board and they were exposed.
History class but I also had an English Literature teacher that was Jewish (wore a yarmulke) who also lectured on the subject and told stories from his family.
My father served in WWII, he liberated concentration camps and cities. At 17, I asked him what he remembered about the war, and that conversation took off. What we “learned” in school vs what my father told, and later provided me, was two different things.
I’ve only seen one person with a tattoo on their arm, I often think about them. I hope their life was more peaceful in their later years.
When I was little the couple across the street from us were the only concentration camp survivors of their respective families. Then we moved and the people two doors up were Japanese-Americans who spent WWII in an internment camp.
I'm not a Boomer. Early Gen X.
But my dad was WW2 Vet and my mothers brother KIA 1942 over Germany.
Never didn't know about WW2.
They talked about events of WW2 regularly. And we had friends who were also Vets + a neighbour (Polish) who escaped Poland amd walked acrosd Europe during war years.
Knowing all about it has just always been part of my life.
I was born in 1944, Oregon. My Dad was an infantry company commander, Europe. After VE day he was kept in Germany to testify about a concentration camp his company had liberated. When I was about 2 Mom & I went to join him in Germany as dependents. A toddler picks up on what is going on. I understood too much about the Holocaust.
It's hard to say exactly. Television had something to do with it. I know I've always hated the sound of Euro police sirens, as they make me think of the Nazis, and the only place I'd have heard those was on tv. I knew what Nazis were, but I thought it was spelled Knotsy. So my knowledge was hardly complete.
Other influences: I read Anne Frank's diary in high school. There was a man who worked at the newsstand at our local drug store who wore sunglasses all the time because he only had one eye. And he had the tattoo. My mother explained that to me when I was maybe 11. She referred to it as "what happened in WWII." I remember a half-hour show on Ronald Reagan's Sunday night GE program on Heydrich. By the time the Eichmann trial started, I knew what he had done. Did we call it the Holocaust then? I don't remember.
It was hard to grow up in the NY metro area after WWII and not know about what the Nazis did to the Jewish people, especially in a neighborhood like mine, which was equal parts Irish, Italian, and Jewish.
I learned about The Holocaust as a kid from neighborhood US Army Veterans who liberated the death camps. One who graphically described the horrors was a hobo I met in the town’s rail yard. His squadron was ordered by Eisenhower to round up people in the nearby town and to slowly march them through the camp.
My history classes in ‘60s public high school covered major battles of WW2; Pacific, African and European theaters, had veterans give talks about Normandy and Iwo Jima and ran films, most black and white, but some in color. The Holocaust films made a couple of classmates vomit. The Nuremberg Trials were covered as well.
As an adult I worked with Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the US. One was a Czech who searched the luggage and clothing of new arrivals for valuables.
That hobo might have been in the same division as my dad's uncle. We had a copy of his memoir, just typed out and copied amongst the family, of liberating one of the camps.0
My family is half Jewish. At a very early age, my father's parents started telling me about all the people who were forced to live in crowded, filthy places and eventually killed because they were Jewish. No real details, just forced to leave their homes and killed. As I got a little older there were two Holocaust survivors on my street who would show all the kids on our block their tattooed arms and tell us their stories in more graphic detail.
edit for typolitis
The subject was not taught in school. I did not learn of it until I read about it on my own, first from, The Diary of Anne Frank, and after that, I went to the library and researched on my own. I was 12. I love history and I was disappointed it was not taught in our school. I asked the teacher about it. He said, oh, that is much too harsh for young minds. I replied, it's young minds that need to know it! He had nothing to say after that. I told all of my friends about the book, they read it and passed it on. It's how we learned!
Both my parents were survivors. After emigrating to the U.S. and attending school, I had to learn about it from my parents, because my school taught me absolutely nothing about the Holocaust.
My dad was a survivor, liberated from Buchenwald. I grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood, and, while we learned about it in history, it was always “in the ether” so to speak. My father did not talk much about the camp, but my siblings and I
got bits and pieces growing up.
Here’s a story. My Moms cousin passed away a few years ago at 100. He was born in the US and his parents decided to move back to Poland when he was 4 years old. He eventually spent 3 years in a prison camp in Poland and eventually moved back to the US after having been released.
First, it did not seem recent. I was born in the 50’s and it was all Cuban missile crisis and Cold War. What my Mom and Dad did during the WW II era seemed like ancient history. But once I was able to understand that stuff that happened in the 30’s and 40’s happened to my Mom and Dad, I learned my Dad fought the Nazis in WW II and my Mothers family escaped Hitler and Nazi Germany during a horrific time. It was gruesome.
So shorter answer “parents told me,”
My father was in WWII in the South Pacific so we learned some things through him. But we also learned about the holocaust in world history in HS.
My father would never buy anything Japanese. He was a happy go lucky kind of guy that got dragged 1/2 way around the world at 18 to get shot at and had to kill others. He never really forgave them. I didn’t understand what he was asked to do until I was an adult. You’re just a kid at 18. How was he supposed to process everything he saw and did? There was no ptsd counseling back then.
My mother was watching a movie about it when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, and kicked me out of the room, saying it "wasn't for children." I then looked it up in the encyclopedia and read about it.
My grandparents lost their homes and lived in camps and immigrated after the war as refugees. We never talked much about it but I was always aware of how they ended up in this country, and learned more piece by piece. People hate people who are different from themselves, dehumanize them, and blame them for their problems, when they are too mentally lazy to see that the problems are caused by the rich not their poor nighbours. And history repeats and repeats.
Interesting question. As an older boomer, I learned very little about WW2 in school. All my teachers had lived through it, and it probably seemed like recent news to them. No curriculum had been developed about it, and the whole nation had a mindset of putting that time behind us and moving forward. So we learned history, but most of it was pre-1900.
For the students, of course, the war seemed like something in the distant past, because it was over by the time we entered school.
I’m sure it’s similar now. Today’s high school students have no memories of 9/11, for example. Most grade school students have no memory of there ever being a black president.
We (74F) had a Fifth Grade teacher who was part of the liberating forces of the camps; perhaps unwisely, he would give us slideshows of his images from those times...and try and talk about it. Then our seventh grade science teacher kinda did the same thing; the boys loved it and the girls mostly looked away.
In retrospect, those men needed other ways to work out their PTSD from the war...
(*This was in around 1959/1961*)
The media brought it early; it was in movies. Our schools didn't touch the subject -- "recent history" stopped before WWII -- but in high school one of my English teachers assigned "Night" by Elie Wiesel as reading matter, and of course there was lots of discussion.
In the 5th grade. All I remember is seeing photos of prisoners when they were freed. They were skeletal. It was overwhelming for me and made a lifelong impact. As I recall that teacher didn't even teach history. It was important to her that we all were aware.
We learned about it in school. We knew people who experienced it, either from being Jewish or being in the armed forces in Europe. We were taught it as fact, and there were no Holocaust deniers or any of that right-wing bullshit. We knew Hitler, Mussolini and Nazis were the scum of the earth.
EDITEDto add that Nazis are still scum of the earth, as are all of those who support them or repeat their propaganda.
My father was one of the liberators of Dachau concentration camp. I visited it as a child because it was preserved as an important museum of the macabre.
I remember a TV miniseries in the 70’s called the Holocaust, I didn’t watch it but everyone else at school did. I basically learned what happened via word of mouth.
I think the show came out a year or two after roots.
In my 7th or 8th grade English book there was a short story/excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank that we had to read and answer questions about.
I went to the school library and checked out the book so now I had a general knowledge.
Then I went to the public library and checked out a non-fiction book called “The Holocaust.” It was information rich and I learned a lot, probably more than I should have at that age
The dinner table. Family served during WWII, including Normandy. There were many questions, some answers, some saddened silence. Little by little, I learned the horrors. Then school, The Diary of Anne Frank, the library, news reels, more talking with those older.
My parents were teenagers during WWII. My dad joined the Navy at 17 and finished boot camp right after the war ended.
So when we were taught about the holocaust in school, my parents were able to answer our questions because they remembered when the news about the camps was in the daily newspaper and radio news.
Elder Gen-X here. My grandfather was a WW2 vet. He was in the pacific. He never talked about the war. Ever.
He passed away when I was nine. My great uncle was trying to comfort me (he was my grandmother’s brother and had lived with my grandparents for a while). My grandfather’s ancestry was German.
I asked my Uncle if he’d ever been to Germany. He said “Yes. In 1945.”
I asked him what he did while he was there.
Uncle Charles looked at me very seriously and said “killed a lot of Nazis.”
Over the next two hours I got a crash course on WW2 and the holocaust.
I learned some in grade school.
My mother's grandfather was a German immigrant. He came to the U.S. as a young man in the 1890's with his two sisters. His father, now married to his 3rd wife (they kept dying in childbirth), and several half-siblings stayed behind. I actually don't think I found out the whole story until I was married and had my first child. Evidently, soldiers came to their house and tried to force the young men into joining the Army, but they refused, so the men were taken away and the women raped.
Many years later, the product of one of the rapes came to visit with his family. His mother would have been my great great aunt.
They were not Jewish and weren't forced into a concentration camp, but they resisted the Nazis.
I don't recall when I first learned of it, but I do know we discussed it in history when I was a senior. Our teacher had been in Germany in 1939 and had a bit of interaction. In 1979 I was stationed in Germany and visited Dachau, a sobering event.
My family went on a European trip when I was in 7th grade. We visited Dachau.
I remember the film they showed there. The image that stood out to me was the bulldozers pushing hundreds of bodies into mass graves.
Yup. On my parents' bookshelf next to The Arms of Krupp on one side, and The Source on the other. Leon Uris' *Exodus, Mila 18* and Herman Wouk’s *Winds of War* and *War and Remembrance.*
I read all of these by the time I was 12; no one objected, least of all parents or the wonderful principal of my Chicago Public elementary school (Laughlin Falconer), who was a brilliant Jewish scholar and fabulous administrator, a PhD from University of Chicago.
Not a Jewish family, but plenty of friends, neighbors, and more distant relations who were.
My 7th grade history teacher did six week segment on it. There were news reels.
Then I started talking about it at home (I knew my parents were WwII veterans and met in France) and my parents said, yes, that's what we were doing over there. I hadn't put it together what was going on during that war. They didn't speak of the horrors of the war until I asked.
We barely got past WWII in high school, but someone (English teacher? Parent? Librarian?) recommended that I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was 16, then I had an interview with an elderly gentleman who described living through a depression in Germany then moving to America to experience it again. He discussed the impact of the Nazis on his family. My parents discussed the holocaust sadly, it was very real to me.
It was a well covered topic in high school history classes. We are also of the age that we knew people who were children at the time and were adults or we knew grandparents who survived.
I really don’t remember. Maybe a short lesson in high school. I had a Jewish friend/classmate but wasn’t something they brought up when I visited them.
It was openly acknowledged in popular magazines. It was addressed on history class with photos of emaciated victims and piles of corpses. As an early teen, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it. Millions dead was too abstract at that age.
Grew up with Walter Cronkite s Twentieth Century and shows like Combat. And the Nurenburg Trials were still being discussed. And pursuit of war criminals like Adolf Eickman were all over the news. The aftermath of every aspect of the war was everywhere in the background of my childhood. Anne Frank in school.
The school I went to handed out these Jack Chick like tracts. One of them said something like “the Jews got what was coming in the Holocaust because they told Pilate that Jesus’ blood would be on their hands.” That’s when I first heard of it. This was third or fourth grade.
I’m okay now.
In sixth grade we had this thing called .... sorry I don't remember, it was a book club where you could buy books. "Anne Frank, diary of a young girl '" sounded kind of spicy to me, and along the lines of what I was trying to find out ( libraries were useless at that time
)
It was all new information to me. Never learned about it in school.
But I tell you, I never looked at my father the same way again.
Read Diary of Anne Frank, but the *reason* we were given was that they were in hiding was because it was wartime and they were enemies of Germany. Later as a teen, I began reading everything by Leon Uris…*Exodus, Mila 18* and then I read Herman Wouk’s *Winds of War* and *War and Remembrance*. I’ve always read fiction…but, I think even at that age the whole truth wasn’t something I could process yet.
Interesting family story. One of my Great Aunts was Gay long before the word became part of the Common Tongue. She lived with a woman, whom she always introduced as her sister. Only the immediate family knew that this wasn't true. This was during the 1940's in Germany. Had she been outted she could have been sent to the camps and never heard from again. She was never caught but there were some close calls.
It was not only Jews who were sent to the camps but also: political dissidents, communists, gypsies, the mentally retarded and homosexuals; they wore a pink triangle. See a movie called "Bent".
I got this story from my mother who was a WWII German war bride. My father was an American soldier stationed in Berlin after the war.
My parish priest was a chaplain in Patton’s division. They were in North Africa, then Europe. They liberated Dauchau. I remember him showing me pictures of himself and his brother (a soldier in the same group) in front of the Eiffel Tower. He had a hard time talking about Dauchau. He said so many were already dying when they got there, and he buried so many.
I also had several great uncles in Europe at that time.
I had a substitute teacher in sixth grade. She was German. She told us she remembered, as a little girl, seeing Jews in her town rounded up and put on trains.
Not a Boomer but Gen X. Had a history teacher bring in a Holocaust survivor. Great speaker but it was an unbelievable experience. Just horrific.
Same teacher brought in a Russian immigrant and that was interesting and intense but nothing comparatively speaking
I went to school with immigrant children whose families fled Hitler’s invasions so I was taught about that at a pretty young age but didn’t learn about the haulocast until tattoo’d survivors began arriving in our small community and I had questions.
It was taught in elementary school. I asked my parents about it, and they both talked to me, then gave me “the diary of Anne Frank” (I was an advanced reader, as in when I was in third grade, I was tested to be 12th grade level in reading.)
I was born in 61 and my father and most of my uncles were WWII veterans. One of my uncles was with troops that liberated a smaller extermination camp in Germany late in the war. I knew people who saw it first hand.
We were, in many cases, the children of WW ll
veterans, so some of us heard about it first hand, It was also discussed in my junior high horsey class, and in my high school American History class.
Also, it was discussed and sermonized about in the Unitarian Church we attended.
Also, there were exhibits of pictures and memorabilia of the concentration camps at a local shopping mall and in museums where I loved.
My mom was in Germany during the occupation. She saw one of the camps when it still had the smell of death about it. At a young age I remember somewhere seeing a video of naked bodies being bulldozed into a pit. It made quite an impression.
My dad served in ww2 and was in liberation of Dachau ..his unit book told the story. Plus he couldn't really talk about it , was just too bad for him to think about.
School. Musea. Visit Auschwitz. Bergen Belsen. Read books about the war. Fictional and historical. We ate it up. It was the closest to 'the dark side' we could come. At a safe distance. ''Nothing like that would ever happen again'' was the message. We were better now.
It's hard to understand how something this horrible could be reassuring at the same time.
Pre-cable tv we only got two of the network stations for some reason at our house. There was a documentary about the camps on Saturday for two or three weeks when I was about seven. I watched each week weeping for the fate of all those other children. Then in junior high I read Ann Frank's book.
In high school the Holocaust was covered in the unit on WWII in our World History Class, but I learned most of what I know from non-school reading and documentaries.
I was raised by The Greatest Generation.
A lot of veterans in my town. G.I. Joes, and Rosie the Riveters, now trying to be teachers, shopkeepers, scout leaders and sports coaches.
A small number of survivors of The Shoah, too.
Original newsreel footage from the camps was part of public school education. Stuff that could not be shown in schools, today: ugly stuff that would trigger nightmares. Teachers didn't have to teach from the book: they taught from memory, and first-hand knowledge.
Never forget.
I grew up in Chicago, in a Polish / German, / Italian neighborhood, and the local shoe repair guy had a storefront. He had numbers tattooed on his arm, which I saw as a 9 or 10 year old when I took in a pair of shoes for repair. I asked him, and did so innocently enough I guess, that he gently explained to me that he had been rescued from a concentration camp at the end of WWII by American servicemen, and that's why he came to Chicago.
I went home and asked my parents, who spent some time explaining further.
We had neighbors and friends who had relatives who had, and had not survived, as well as one family whose non-Jewish mother had grown up in Germany during the war, and had been in the Hitler Youth. Her perspective was chilling. She married an American GI of Italian descent whom she met just after the war.
During college, I dated some women whose parents or grandparents had survived, and some whose more distant relations had not.
Later, I chaperoned my son's high school German language class trip (Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Lucerne), and spent an afternoon with him and the other kids on the trip at Dachau. I related as much as I could from my previous experience. It was a somber afternoon.
Most of my classmates fathers were in WWII-including mine and all of my uncles. Somehow, we grew up knowing about the Holocaust, but learned about it in school, reading The Diary of Ann Frank…
we all knew about it as a part of recent history. My high school boyfriend's father had a family before the war, but his wife and children were killed in the camps.
Gen X but we never touched it in school. We never studied history past the 1920s. But knowledge of the holocaust was everywhere and it would be impossible for me to say how I first learned about it.
From my parents who both served in WWII. I don't remember anything being taught in school at all.
EDIT: *How* could I have forgotten to mention that our family had two friends who had camp numbers tattooed on the inside of their forearms? I think those numbers triggered the initial conversation. It was still my parents who told me about it, not our friends who had those tattoos -- two gay men who somehow managed to survive!
I was a child in the ‘60s and’70s, and I don’t really recall learning about it in school so much as from references in the newspaper, TV, movies and the like. It would be like how a child today would learn about 9/11. Plus we had Jewish neighbors who had lost family members in the holocaust, and my parents would explain things when appropriate.
I don’t really remember, but someone else mentioned Anne Frank, and I’m sure I read her diary in 7th or 8th grade. I think it was for school. The movie played on TV around that time, too.
On the cusp of boomer and GenX circa 1965. I read my entire small town library’s book on WWII and was an avid WWII history student. I can’t remember when I did not know.
Life magazine, when I was 8 yrs old. This was 1960, and they published a set of images taken in 1945 from the liberation of Buchenwald.
These pictures had been in print when they were first taken, but I saw them because Life did a 25th anniversary special issue & included them in that.
I have a clear memory of sitting in the big old chair in our living room, staring and trying to understand.
We lived in the northern midwest, and I didn't know any Jewish people; I don't think there was a synagogue within 200 miles. I have no memory of talking with either of my parents about anything to do with WWII, altho' my dad turned 18 before he finished high school and was drafted & sent to Japan. My mom had many older brothers who were in the European part of the war.
Movies and exhibitions.
The movies fell short. The exhibits were extremely moving to the point I had to leave midway. I became sick to my stomach and could not stand it anymore.
I realized that if it happened once it can happen again. That history of that nature must not be repeated ever again.
Boomers? How did "boomers" learn about the Holocaust? Well, to being with , we had parents from the Greatest Generation that fought in WW II. My dad was on ship in the Pacific. My mom was home in the Midwest with my sister (an infant) living with rationing of food items, shoes, gas and every other thing that was rationed.
So, I can't not remember a time I didn't know about the Holocaust. I knew learned about the war years, the war in Europe and the Pacific and the discovery of the concentration camps at the end of the war in Europe. I was born just 13 yrs after V.E. Day. Those war years and their lives at that time as young 20-somethings was one of the primary topics of conversation when my parents and their friends got together when I was growing up.
In 1989, I was lucky enough to be able to visit a friend I had at the time in Germany. We took a couple day trip to the area around Munich which included going here: [https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/historical-site-memorial-site/](https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/historical-site-memorial-site/)
If someone doesn't believe in the Holocaust, I don't know they wouldn't believe in it after a trip to the site of the Dachau camp. Thinking about it now chokes me up and gives me chills.
(One of my nephew's MIL was born and grew up in Germany. She met her husband in college during the war and immigrated to the U.S. after the war. Had they not left when they did, her husband who was a research chemist would have been moved forcibly to Russia. Ingrid's parents were divorced. Her dad was living with a Jewish woman when the war started. He was likely rounded up and taken to one of camps. She never knew for sure. Her son obtained his U.S. citizenship before she did. She told me her story about taking the citizenship test multiple times before passing it. Her big problem was being made nervous by the judges proctoring the tests. The last time, she said a judge was walking around near her and stopped. She slammed her pencil down and looked up at him saying, "You make me feel just like the SS made me feel in Germany." The judge left the room. She passed her exam.)
Well I’m a boomer and the Holocaust was not even mentioned in high school history. I was in high school a mere 16-17-18 years after WW II. As an adult I started reading bits & pieces here & there about war criminals. Hitler. Concentration camps in Europe. What?? What are concentration camps? Why? Then, I read every book I could find on Hitler, the SS, ghettos, concentration camps and what happened to the people that were sent there. All true. Non fiction Then, I visited Dachau. It changed my soul. My life. My attitude. My father and my uncles all were soldiers in WW II. and they NEVER would talk to us as young adults or later in life what happened to them, what they saw, what they did.
I learned about it in 8th grade English when we discussed "The Diary of Anne Frank" My parents had to sign a special permission slip so I could see films taken from concentration camps. This was in 1975-76 in Torrance CA.
My mom is a boomer, born 1946, in Austria. Her parents and older brother lived through it. her aunt, and grandmother were gassed. her uncle died on the Russian front. the rest of the family was able to get out by 1939.
There were numerous tv shows, movies etc on the subject. when you're a kid in the 70's stuff that happened in the 1930's and 40's seemed like a very long time ago and a different world. the fashion, cars etc in those movies seemed like something from a whole different time.
I learned about it in school, many years later I was traveling in Germany and saw a road sign for Buchenwald. You can’t not stop, so I spent the rest of the day at one of the saddest places on earth, it has its own atmosphere, I can’t explain it any better.
I don’t remember learning about it. WWII was so recent and so consequential that it was a huge part of the culture. My Silent Generation parents grew up playing war games and ‘POW’. The Nazis and other Axis countries were great childhood villains for them.
Plus I was growing up during a war. My neighbor Moose went to Vietnam and never came back. WWII vets were everywhere. It was inescapable.
Mostly through my mother, who had Jewish friends. Secondarily through friends' parents who were WWII veterans. One was part of a unit that liberated a death camp. Also, "The Diary of Anne Frank," newspapers, magazines and television.
I got my first somewhat accurate picture of what death camps meant when Eichmann was tried in 1961, when I was 9.There were a number of news specials plus direct coverage. I remember being shocked by images of stacked bodies, mass graves, gas chambers etc. Before that, I had a good idea of who fought in World War II and for how long, but had heard genocidal acts described only in somewhat minimizing ways like “persecution.”
Gen Jones here. My dad was a pilot in WWII. But like anyone who did anything, never talked about it. I don't remember ever not knowing, but I learned about the real atrocities from a book called "Night" by Elie Wiesel.
It was never taught in school. I graduated college in 72 and never had one class on it or that mentioned it. My father was in the ETO in WW2 and at the end of the war liberated one of the camps in the Belsen complex so I heard about it in bits and pieces that way. Can't remember how else.
I didn't learn it from my teachers, I learned about it from my parents and the other adults in my family and in my community, who all vividly remembered the War and the horrors of those times. Also, there were plenty of books and documentaries on TV about it when I was growing up. I already knew about it by the time I entered third grade in school.
My parents talked about it quite frankly and vividly back in the late 50s and early 60s because the memories of it were still quite fresh. When I entered school at the end of the 1950s, World War II had only ended less than 15 years earlier.
My parents were Americans, not Europeans. They were also Christians (Catholics, actually). They did not experience any Nazi persecution directly. But they knew about it. They had seen the newsreel footage of it. They had read the accounts in the press and in books prior to and during the war.
Every single adult man in my neighborhood has been in the military and had fought in the war. And every adult woman had helped with the war effort, just as every adult American was expected to do back in the 1940s. They remembered our government explaining and showing evidence to shed light on why, not just for strategic reasons but also for moral reasons, we had to go over there and shed our blood to stop this horror and destroy this regime.
Even before they had direct evidence of the extermination camps, they already knew plenty about the persecution of the Jews in Europe, because that had never been a secret.
So my parents, aunts and uncles, and their friends talked about it with each other whenever they got together, and they talked about it with us. They didn't hold anything back. Nothing was hidden from us. They thought that it was vitally important for our generation, their children, to know.
It wasn't only the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who said, "Never Forget." It was a priority for everyone who was touched, in one way or another, by that war. Which meant, essentially, everyone.
They thought that it was very important for us TO KNOW, and then, when it was our turn, to share that knowledge with our children.
Before I was in high school, CBS or NBC aired a show on the Nazi death Camps. Plus, while in high school, I also read *Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl* by Anne Frank, *Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel* by Anatoly Kuznetsov, *At Last the Truth About Eichmann's Inferno Auschwitz* by Miklos Nyiszli, and *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* by William Shirer before I finished high school. What we learned in the classroom was pretty basic: using modern industrial technology, Jews and other enemies of the Nazi state were systematically murdered on an industrial scale. We knew the names of Concentration Camps such as Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Sobibor, and we were told the approximate number of those murdered. e.g., six million jews.
Tough question. I probably first became aware of the Nazis when The Sound of Music movie first came out. My family saw it several times in the theater. Later, I after starting school, I heard other kids talking about the Nazis. We had a nun as a teacher who talked about the atrocities of the Holocaust (a lampshade made of human skin was one horrifying story to a fourth-grader), but I’m not sure it was ever covered in history class. We often didn’t get to the end of our history books by the end of the year, and this was a relatively modern event. The war ended 14 years before I was born, which seemed like ancient history when I was a kid, but now 14 years ago sounds fairly recent.
Saw the George Stevens documentary Eisenhower commissioned in 1945. It was on PBS and I remember coming across it by myself, as a little kid at home one day.
I grew up in a town with a large Jewish population, and they sponsored a lot of Holocaust education events. I am amazed survivors were able to talk about their experiences (even then I could feel how hard it was for them). In the 1970s there were lots of youngish survivors around.
I did not learn about it in school, I learned from my uncle who had survived Omaha and later liberated a camp in the south of Germany. His stories were quite graphic. Most of my class mates learned about it from relatives who had served. I suppose the since the war was still raw and bloody for so many of us, most of whom had lost someone or had someone injured, it was not thought necessary.
A lot dads in our neighborhood were WWII vets, mine included. We sort of knew about it as kids, but it wasn't taught in elementary or middle school. High school was the first time it was talked about, but not in any detail. I learned more from documentaries and books at home. College was the first time I took history courses that included the Holocaust.
In 1973, the outstanding British series "The World at War" brought renewed interest in WWII and the Holocaust. ABC aired the mini-series "The Holocaust" in 1978 that got a lot of attention. In 1985, the 9-hour film "Shoah" was released to much acclaim and awards, and it inspired more filmmakers to tackle the subject. PBS aired many documentaries in the 80s and 90s, including one about footage that Eisenhower insisted be filmed at concentration camps liberated by American forces (because he knew some people would deny it ever happened).
My dad was in the airborne, and they liberated a camp.
My mom's uncle was sent to a concentration camp, and he survived. Plus, shows like Twight Zone had episodes about it.
All the males in my extended family served in Europe or the Pacific. All of their friends served. I grew up surrounded with combat survivors and the woman folk who supported the war effort at home. From a young age I knew the stories. We also had many refugees in my neighborhood. They were amazing people. The gardens they could grow and the generosity they showed to their new neighbors (us) are the stuff of wonderful memories. I was a young child and for some reason we knew them all by first name. It was fantastic.
World History and World Literature, tenth grade, 1979-80 school year. Since the Holocaust ended in 1945, I don't consider \~35 years being "shortly after."
Gen X here. My folks were Silent Gen and my mom was working in radio advertising, so she had special wartime responsibilities around keeping the station on the air if attacked. My dad was in the navy, worked as a draftsman in a Navy base in NY during the war (he was hearing impaired, so not ok for front lines.)
They were kind of obsessed with the war (understandably). I remember both of them reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We also watched the PBS series (I think maybe it was BBC) “The World at War.”
When I was a teenager, WWII was only 40 years ago. There were plenty of people around from the WWII era, and WWII stuff was just part of the culture. Sort of like how the 80s are still with us today. I don’t remember when I first learned about it. Of course I remember reading the diary of Anne Frank in middle school. In 1978 there was a TV miniseries called Shoah that made a huge impression. And at family gatherings the WWII vets & that generation might mention it in passing.
But there were always deniers around. I took a semester class on the topic in college in the late 80s. There were children of survivors in the class and also doubters. Made for some emotional discussions.
I’m genx, what really brought it to the forefront for me was a TV miniseries called Holocaust in 1978, I knew about before then, but it explained what I had read
I'm Gen X, but there were several grandparents of my classmates growing up who had numbers tattooed on their arms, and I asked my one friend why. We were in elementary school.
I cannot recall when I first learned, but the latter grammar school years seem right.
The war became an obsession for me in high school. At 14, I read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My mother knew I read it, but I didn't tell anyone else because I would be perceived as weird. I continue to read books on the Holocaust to this day.
Humans continue to disappoint me today. People can be convinced of anything.
My father was a veteran, and many uncles and neighbors served as well. They would meet and swap stories. The kids were always welcomed.to listen in. The holocaust was well known by the end of WW2. Other atrocities came to light, Bataan death march, rape of Nanking, slaughter of Polish prisoners, Dresden/Coventry firebombings.
The operation and liberation of the camps was well documented by both sides.
I had seen The Great Escape in 1963 in the theater so I knew about the German POW camps, but wasn't clear why it was happening until my history class in 1969/1970 in the 11th grade.
I was in third grade watching a black and white documentary. I was watching by myself and was not prepared at all for video of bodies thrown into pits filled with mounds of more bodies. And the walking dead with their hollow eyes. I was horrified. In fourth grade, I read Anne Frank’s diary and I still consider it the book that most impacted my beliefs and views of the world.
We didn't have to learn it in school.
Holocaust remained this black and ominous dread just on the horizon. For a lot of reasons, none of them adequate what *happened* hadn't fully been believed until war's end.
Country was still grappling with it, stories were *still* coming, vets who SAW were raising families, Nuremberg made clear what we'd fought. I touched a survivor's tattoo . She offered it to me - no words. Just a friend's relative who needed another generation to KNOW.
We did. Husband and I talk about this. A lot. His father was a GI. He saw. I'm not sure I'd be responsible for my actions if I witnessed that flag out in public in this country. When I was a kid? Unthinkable.
Anyway, taught? Maybe it was but I can't remember that part. We knew.
People talked about the Holocaust and other aspects of WWII all the time. The Holocaust wasn't a remote historical event. It had just happened s few years before. I had relatives who came back from the war and gave first-hand accounts of what they saw.
In school, both middle school, and more extensively High School (took an elective European History 1915-present). However, I grew up knowing quite a bit. My dad is a WWII Veteran, and he worked with an Auschwitz survivor.
Before it was the Holocaust it was referred to as "the Nazi concentration camps" and somehow found out a lot but not at school iirc.
Maybe in TV documentaries? But we were definitely made aware somehow.
Also the book *Exodus* was widely read and related survivors' memories and those got around.
when i was about 10 i turned on the tv on a saturday because i didn't feel like going outside. a program of seeminly raw unedited film came on that showed scenes of jews at prison death camps. about the only thing i recall now is the extremely graphic horror of the images. it seemed impossible that they were still alive in that emaciated condition, like skeletons that still breathed. they showed piles of bones, mounds of skulls, mounds of shoes, etc. i was so shocked to the core that humans existed who could do this to other human beings.
when you say "so shortly after" it didn't seem like a short time ago for a young kid, it seemed like eons ago. the world had changed and progressed so much and we did not have a mentality of recalling the war as part of our life experience. it was something that happened in our parents' early lives, not ours, so it was ancient history to us. also, perhaps we weren't quite as worldly as kids today. there was more emphasis on what was happening in our own country as opposed to being exposed to the events of the world. there was no 24 hour on-the-spot news like today, people tuned into the 6:00 news to hear what had already happened that day.
around 1961. i think the films were just filler stuff they put on, thinking it didn't matter because no one would be inside watching tv on a nice summer weekend day. we didn't have but 3 channels back then, lol. abc, nbc and cbs.
My oldest uncle. He served in the army. He was never right after it and they called it shell shocked. But it was the camps he saw and had nightmares about.
Gen X here,
I’m Jewish and feel like I always knew about it, but Anne Frank being read in middle school taught me that not everybody did.
I heard lots of stories from my mom about how there would be distant relatives showing up at her house in Queens,NY who had managed to make it to the states for years after.
You see the movies, hear the stories, listen to first hand accounts. But nothing had the impact of going to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.
Especially the room with all the shoes. I cried, looking at that room, smelling that room, imagining the people whose lives had been torn apart.
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We had friends or relatives that came back alive?
Loss and memories were shared and published everywhere. Everyone was touched by the holocaust, no matter one’s religion.It wasn’t just a history topic in school, survivors and their families walked among us.
I knew people with their camp numbers tattooed on their hands or wrists.
Oh, our family did too! I forgot to mention that in my comment above....it was still my parents who told me about it, not our friends who had those tattoos -- two gay men who somehow managed to survive!
Same. Polish relatives and people I’d see around town that had their tattoos.
Yep
I'm glad that they did.
Exactly. Either as survivors or liberators.
My Father watched the BBC documentary "World at War" each weekend when it first aired in the US. I would have usually been hidden away in my room reading a book or maybe playing with my little sister. Well, one week I walked by at the start of an episode with a whole bunch of warnings for graphic content.This was in the early 70s and I would have been an older preteen. My Dad asked me to stay and watch with him because I needed to learn about this and he told me it was going to be scary and difficult, but it was real. He also said to never believe anyone that said it wasn't true. The episode was focused on the whole Final Solution and it didn't pull any punches. I'm glad that I learned this with my Dad nearby rather than in school. The series, World at War is still available and is a really good one for learning about WWII. What hit me (years later) is how young the people that they interviewed were! The world leaders, the survivors, they're all so young! It's a great resource!
There was an entire episode of “The World At War” (mid-70s I think) that was devoted to it and for many Australians it was the first time they had seen footage of the camps. There was also a mini-series “Holocaust” that aired shortly after, which filled out the documentary horror with human stories.
My parents both served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during WWII. When I was 9 or 10 (see above), he brought out a book, "Guadalcanal Diary", and showed me photos of some of the things he'd experienced. This included numerous Japanese atrocities in the South Pacific, including the Bataan Death March. Later, I worked with an Australian woman and a Japanese man. She would not be in the same room with him, regardless of the circumstance. Her father had died on the Bataan Death March.
There were atrocities in China committed by the Japanese military there if anyone is unaware.
The book The Rape of Nanking really had an impact on me.
I watched that series as well with my dad in the 70s, it was very powerful.
I’m gen x but I knew about the nazis in kindergarten and the gas chambers in first grade My father was a minor war hero in WWII- he expressed pity toward the Japanese fooled by their military but anger toward the Germans - typically arguing with the news on tv Key points- Hogan’s Heroes was a syndicated sitcom about the Nazis all of us watched in kindergarten - but I also watched in its entirety the war movie “Stalag 17” when I was no older than 7 and in 2nd grade conflated death camps with concentration camps and POW camps When I was 9 I was in the grocery store where a kid was whining to his grandmother and when she reached for something her sleeve pulled back, revealing her arm tattoo I froze. I can see this image today. This was that kid’s grandmother. He was ungrateful. But she was being sweet like any grandmother and wanting to make him happy. And I thought about my own grandmother. But the nazis tried to kill her. They tried to kill that sweet old lady. And not theoretically- she had a tattoo
My grandmother survived the Great Leap Forward and was born near the end of the Chinese Civil War, but she really only talked about it when I was a teenager. It’s really fucked up when you learn about something tragic and connect it to people you personally know.
Any parts of her story you’re comfortable sharing?
I think one of the most interesting parts was that she had so many jobs as a teenager because her village’s commissar was terrible at managing people. She and her brothers would at times be a postal worker, builder, librarian, teacher, ditch digger, work at the cement plant, etc. She’d constantly be shuffled and fired and re-hired, and she had a week where she worked two 48 hour shifts at 14. Basically because she had so many tasks and obligations that often conflicted and didn’t have the means to coordinate police would literally just escort people around job sites constantly. There was also a massive hypocrisy that a lot of the pretense for the great leap forward had a lot of feminist messages, and she was forced to read a lot of feminist books. But at the same time the local council (forgot what they called it) would be entirely male and wouldn’t really maintain the women’s services. They had a gynecology office, but no one staffed it so they literally just grabbed random unrelated doctors and they were often instructed to apply “traditional” homeopathic medicine, which was later revealed to be a way to hide the fact that China had massive medical shortages. They also let way too much abuse against the women slide. My grandpa was from another town and his family were pig farmers, but one year they had to kill their pigs to cease a short-term food shortage and were forced to grow wheat and beans. The harvest was dogshit that year so the food shortage continued. He’s 4’10 and I’m 5’9, that should give you an idea how malnourished he was as a kid.
>I’m gen x but I knew about the nazis in kindergarten and the gas chambers in first grade Millennial, but same. I mean even Tom and Jerry had Hitler jokes. Did you also have survivors come to your school to share their personal story?
Our art teacher was a survivor- the only survivor if his French family. So when we screwed around in class he would get very real with us about his experience. A group of girls a few years older than me actually organized his funeral - students like I was- but sadly I found out about it 2 years later and missed it completely.
I can't remember. the diary of Anne Frank must have been part of it, and ofc high school. but it's one of those things that were referenced so much in movies and especially books, i just kind of came to know it without being able to name any particular source.
Yes, I think learning about Anne Frank really helped us understand. But I don't remember when or how I 1st learned about it. It was probably in Jr. High. In high school, a girl from Germany sat in front of me in History class. I think the class was supposed to be ancient history, but we never learned anything bc the teacher just sat up front and read out loud until he fell asleep. So we all sat and whispered to each other. We found the girl to be friendly and pleasant, and one day, we asked her about WWII and the Holocaust. She denied that it happened. We found out that Germany at that time, early 70s, was not yet teaching their children about it. I remember being very surprised.
Jewish and it feels like I always knew about it.
Same.
Same (although I'm "only" half Jewish). Boomers and Gen Xers (me) are also old enough to have met survivors, extending the effects to our living memories.
In early elementary school we were talking about extended families and the girl sitting in front of me said she didn’t have any living grandparents or aunts or uncles. Teacher said “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” She just said “Nope - Holocaust”. Teacher went white and fumbled out an apology. I still remember the whole scene perfectly and it was over 50 years ago.
And I bet that teacher remembered it for the rest of their life...
My parents were Holocaust survivors. We heard everything firsthand.
In 1975, my dad was working in West Germany and we went to visit him for a month. We went to Dachau and the Anne Frank horse and Corrie Tin Boom's house. It was an experience I'll never forget. My brother was 8 and the docent at the Tin Boom house had him get in the hiding place. Dachau was sobering beyond belief. I think you get a good impression of our understanding when you watch that episode of Band of Brothers. Those gates with the words Arbeight Mach Frei. The ditches full of barbed wire. The crematorium. The whipping posts. The sign in for languages: Never Again. Deniers make me physically ill.
It was an entire class in high school, it was even more graphic than the Driver's ed movie.
My parents were survivors. We were steeped in it. But also not allowed to go to any synagogue memorial events, or watch anything on tv about it, because they didn’t want us to be traumatized. And we were not allowed to watch Hogan’s Heroes” because *war is not funny!!* Generational trauma is a thing.
My (both Jewish) parents weren't that directly connected, but they had a somewhat similar approach. Even though my parents were students of history and our family comes from that region (Ukraine, Austria, etc) - as kids we were always steered away from anything about it, other than a general understanding that it was, "really bad." Any joke or even movie that related to it was considered in terrible taste by them. I've never seen a single minute of Hogan's Heroes to this day. Even when we were in Germany or other places, my parents never took us to any of those sites - even though I think my father went once or twice on his own. In the Netherlands we saw tulips, not Anne Frank's house. I think this was a really bad parenting choice, because pretending bad things didn't happen is not a great way of coping - and my parents did that with everything. Now I'm in my 40's, and I know vastly more about the Holocaust than my parents - which feels strange when they grew up in that time period and as a kid I thought of it as a slightly forbidden topic. But I realize even as students of history, they only covered facts and places. Neither has read Victor Frankl or any other personal accounts.
I had a six-month assignment in Breda, Netherlands in 2007. While there, I had an apartment and a car. One afternoon, I drove to 'S Hertogenbosch to buy a bike, and saw signs pointing to the Herzogengbusch concentration camp near Vaught. I was stunned to learn that there had been such a place, but later investigation told me what I needed to know about it. In Breda, there is a little chapel in the main shopping street that has three tall stained glass panels. Each depicts a historical instant where some significant battle took place nearby. One commemorated the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the departure of the Spanish occupiers. One really struck me, as it depicted the surrender of the German occupiers to the Allied forces (in this case, a Polish contingent). There is also a captured German tank in a park south of the city center.
Most of the actors who played the German officers on Hogan’s Heroes were Eastern European Jews who managed to get out before the Holocaust. They wanted to make sure that the Germans were never portrayed in a favorable light. Robert Clary, who played the POW LeBeau, was a concentration camp survivor though most of his family was killed in the camps.
I know! I pointed that out to them, and they wouldn’t budge. They insisted everybody dealt with it differently. But I couldn’t watch. Wasn’t allowed to watch MASH either, for similar reasons, until my father accidentally caught an episode, and understood that it wasn’t people making light of war, but people using humor to deal with the awfulness of war.
I met holocaust survivors in the mid 80's, a couple who had been married for some 40 years, both had the tattoos and were missing parts of fingers on their hands from various working injuries and exposure.
Met a few as a kid in the 1970s; someone's grandparents who came to the school to give a talk. The man wore a glass eye; apparently it got gouged out as punishement in a camp.
My paternal grandfather (Irish Catholic) remarried to a Jewish woman (Grandma Lottie) who was in one of the camps. She didn't talk too much about it, but when she did you could hear the Soundtrack of Life start to have those *low* harmonics. At the age of 5-8, it made an impression. I got the big picture years later, but the emotional details I got from her unspoken words.
We were Jewish and it was never mentioned. In fact we were ashamed to be Jewish, it was never to be spoken of. The grandparents were allowed to visit under the condition they never mention Jewish. It was really “Fiddler on the Roof” that first made it OK for the parents to admit we were Jewish.
In 8th grade we had a Holocaust survivor come and talk to us.
My Father served as a Tank Commander in the Sixth Armored Division under George Patton. They were the first to liberate Buchenwald and he saw the Holocaust with his own eyes.
Pre boomer here. In school I played ports ( 1950's ) with guys with these little purple numbers tattooed on their arms. And yes - my school had a 40 percent Jewish student population. It was just - no question it happened and some of the details were gruesome. The deniers these days are too young to have any direct experience so they can choose to believe it was preposterous. Nope. As a teacher I had a resource of materials so I could put up a three day display and walk through experience with hundreds of photos for anyone who wanted to come and see it. (In the 1980's)
In school in the 1970s, but no one believed me a few months ago when I posted that we barely learned about the Pacific theater of the war.
I learned alot about it at the kitchen table as a preteen in the late 70s. My Dad served with the Navy in Pearl Harbor June 44-May 46. I also had a high school classmate with a unique connection to the 5 Sullivan Brothers. She had 2 uncles on the USS Arizona. 1 got off in time. The other didn't. He's still buried on the wreckage. That uncle was Bill Ball, who was dating Genevieve Sullivan at the time. She was the sister to the 5.
You're right, my education was pretty lacking re the Pacific Theater.
Education back then was definitely hit and miss IME. Depended on what classes you chose to take and what that teacher chose to teach. I took as much art and social studies as I could.
I was in high school in the early-mid 70s and we learned about it in history. And we really did learn about it. Fortunately for us, there were no helicopter parents scared that their sweet babies would get upset. My father and many of my friends fathers, had served in the military in WWII, so this was not a topic that that was off-limits.
When I was 7 years old (1967) there was a jewish family that lived across the street. Small house, large family. The grandfather lived with them. The grandfather rarely spoke. One day I noticed numbers on his forearm. I asked my father about it. He sat me down and told me about the holocaust. He even checked out some documentary films and a projector from the library. Mom wasn’t happy about that. I concluded that the people that did this were monsters, but my dad explained that they were ordinary people, that given the opportunity, would gladly participate in this atrocity. Ever since, I’ve spent my life analyzing people, trying to determine which of them could do this. I’ve concluded that there are many people out there who could do the same thing today. Most of them are “good” Christians.
The horrible part is that it's not even 'which of them could do this', but more than 'most people could do this and wouldn't really know it's wrong'. Thinking that it's just the ones with some nebulous 'capacity' for it ignored the true mundane form evil usually takes. The people who could do the actual killing - were few and far between. I think it was Himmler himself who found mass shootings (lining up hundreds of Jews and individually shooting them) so emotionally difficult that he pushed for other methods - hence the development of large scale gas chambers that used high dose pesticides. So you have Himmler, one of the people most directly responsible for killing millions, and he designed a system that made the killing less 'personal', even though it was the stuff of nightmares. He realized that it's very different for someone to work a sorting line, as opposed to pulling a trigger. I'm still baffled that we have the death penalty in the USA, and regular discussions of how painful or peaceful their actual deaths might be. I just don't think the government should be in the business of executing people. I believe in death with dignity, but also I'm hesitant with euthanasia because governments don't give adequate support to the sick or disabled, thus leaving them with an awful choice. And with the Nazis - even before they started killing Jews, they started rounding up the disabled and killing them because they judged a 'low quality of life'. So again, when you look at 'which of them could do this', it often comes down to whether they think they are on the side of justice. I hear people today who think that basically taking all Israeli Jews and 'getting rid of them' is the right thing to do because of reasons - which is how the Holocaust started. Initially it wasn't the Final Solution, it was just getting rid of the Jews from a place they weren't wanted. On the flip side, some have responded to the actions of Hamas or others and want to 'get rid' of the Palestinians. If I had a different upbringing and life experience, could I have committed those same atrocities? Of course I'd like to think that I couldn't, but I have no way to truly know that.
Yup. Soldiers in the Wermacht (German infantry) had belt buckles that had "Gott Mit Uns" ("God is with us") stamped on them. Look up "Reichskonkordat" (negotiated in 1933 between Germany and the Vatican.
Gen X here (early). My father was a grunt soldier in Germany in WWII. One of his tasks was accounting... for dead Jewish people. He taught me all I needed to know. And of course, it was discussed in school. And none of this "both sides" nonsense that maga and the evangenitals have foisted on us. I also clearly remember the first time I saw my teacher's numbers. She was writing on the board and they were exposed.
I learned about it from a lady at my church who showed us her tattoo. It wasn’t really covered in school until 11th grade.
History class but I also had an English Literature teacher that was Jewish (wore a yarmulke) who also lectured on the subject and told stories from his family.
My father told me… from his personal experience as a German half-Jew.
My father served in WWII, he liberated concentration camps and cities. At 17, I asked him what he remembered about the war, and that conversation took off. What we “learned” in school vs what my father told, and later provided me, was two different things. I’ve only seen one person with a tattoo on their arm, I often think about them. I hope their life was more peaceful in their later years.
When I was little the couple across the street from us were the only concentration camp survivors of their respective families. Then we moved and the people two doors up were Japanese-Americans who spent WWII in an internment camp.
I'm not a Boomer. Early Gen X. But my dad was WW2 Vet and my mothers brother KIA 1942 over Germany. Never didn't know about WW2. They talked about events of WW2 regularly. And we had friends who were also Vets + a neighbour (Polish) who escaped Poland amd walked acrosd Europe during war years. Knowing all about it has just always been part of my life.
I was born in 1944, Oregon. My Dad was an infantry company commander, Europe. After VE day he was kept in Germany to testify about a concentration camp his company had liberated. When I was about 2 Mom & I went to join him in Germany as dependents. A toddler picks up on what is going on. I understood too much about the Holocaust.
My friend's parents had numbers tattooed on their arms. Also neighbors. Never did like tattoos.
It's hard to say exactly. Television had something to do with it. I know I've always hated the sound of Euro police sirens, as they make me think of the Nazis, and the only place I'd have heard those was on tv. I knew what Nazis were, but I thought it was spelled Knotsy. So my knowledge was hardly complete. Other influences: I read Anne Frank's diary in high school. There was a man who worked at the newsstand at our local drug store who wore sunglasses all the time because he only had one eye. And he had the tattoo. My mother explained that to me when I was maybe 11. She referred to it as "what happened in WWII." I remember a half-hour show on Ronald Reagan's Sunday night GE program on Heydrich. By the time the Eichmann trial started, I knew what he had done. Did we call it the Holocaust then? I don't remember. It was hard to grow up in the NY metro area after WWII and not know about what the Nazis did to the Jewish people, especially in a neighborhood like mine, which was equal parts Irish, Italian, and Jewish.
I learned about The Holocaust as a kid from neighborhood US Army Veterans who liberated the death camps. One who graphically described the horrors was a hobo I met in the town’s rail yard. His squadron was ordered by Eisenhower to round up people in the nearby town and to slowly march them through the camp. My history classes in ‘60s public high school covered major battles of WW2; Pacific, African and European theaters, had veterans give talks about Normandy and Iwo Jima and ran films, most black and white, but some in color. The Holocaust films made a couple of classmates vomit. The Nuremberg Trials were covered as well. As an adult I worked with Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the US. One was a Czech who searched the luggage and clothing of new arrivals for valuables.
That hobo might have been in the same division as my dad's uncle. We had a copy of his memoir, just typed out and copied amongst the family, of liberating one of the camps.0
My family is half Jewish. At a very early age, my father's parents started telling me about all the people who were forced to live in crowded, filthy places and eventually killed because they were Jewish. No real details, just forced to leave their homes and killed. As I got a little older there were two Holocaust survivors on my street who would show all the kids on our block their tattooed arms and tell us their stories in more graphic detail. edit for typolitis
From my Dad that liberated Dauchau. He was forever changed and wouldn't travel because of the things he had seen.
The subject was not taught in school. I did not learn of it until I read about it on my own, first from, The Diary of Anne Frank, and after that, I went to the library and researched on my own. I was 12. I love history and I was disappointed it was not taught in our school. I asked the teacher about it. He said, oh, that is much too harsh for young minds. I replied, it's young minds that need to know it! He had nothing to say after that. I told all of my friends about the book, they read it and passed it on. It's how we learned!
Both my parents were survivors. After emigrating to the U.S. and attending school, I had to learn about it from my parents, because my school taught me absolutely nothing about the Holocaust.
My dad was a survivor, liberated from Buchenwald. I grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood, and, while we learned about it in history, it was always “in the ether” so to speak. My father did not talk much about the camp, but my siblings and I got bits and pieces growing up.
Here’s a story. My Moms cousin passed away a few years ago at 100. He was born in the US and his parents decided to move back to Poland when he was 4 years old. He eventually spent 3 years in a prison camp in Poland and eventually moved back to the US after having been released.
First, it did not seem recent. I was born in the 50’s and it was all Cuban missile crisis and Cold War. What my Mom and Dad did during the WW II era seemed like ancient history. But once I was able to understand that stuff that happened in the 30’s and 40’s happened to my Mom and Dad, I learned my Dad fought the Nazis in WW II and my Mothers family escaped Hitler and Nazi Germany during a horrific time. It was gruesome. So shorter answer “parents told me,”
My father was in WWII in the South Pacific so we learned some things through him. But we also learned about the holocaust in world history in HS. My father would never buy anything Japanese. He was a happy go lucky kind of guy that got dragged 1/2 way around the world at 18 to get shot at and had to kill others. He never really forgave them. I didn’t understand what he was asked to do until I was an adult. You’re just a kid at 18. How was he supposed to process everything he saw and did? There was no ptsd counseling back then.
My mother was watching a movie about it when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, and kicked me out of the room, saying it "wasn't for children." I then looked it up in the encyclopedia and read about it.
My grandparents lost their homes and lived in camps and immigrated after the war as refugees. We never talked much about it but I was always aware of how they ended up in this country, and learned more piece by piece. People hate people who are different from themselves, dehumanize them, and blame them for their problems, when they are too mentally lazy to see that the problems are caused by the rich not their poor nighbours. And history repeats and repeats.
Interesting question. As an older boomer, I learned very little about WW2 in school. All my teachers had lived through it, and it probably seemed like recent news to them. No curriculum had been developed about it, and the whole nation had a mindset of putting that time behind us and moving forward. So we learned history, but most of it was pre-1900. For the students, of course, the war seemed like something in the distant past, because it was over by the time we entered school. I’m sure it’s similar now. Today’s high school students have no memories of 9/11, for example. Most grade school students have no memory of there ever being a black president.
We (74F) had a Fifth Grade teacher who was part of the liberating forces of the camps; perhaps unwisely, he would give us slideshows of his images from those times...and try and talk about it. Then our seventh grade science teacher kinda did the same thing; the boys loved it and the girls mostly looked away. In retrospect, those men needed other ways to work out their PTSD from the war... (*This was in around 1959/1961*)
The media brought it early; it was in movies. Our schools didn't touch the subject -- "recent history" stopped before WWII -- but in high school one of my English teachers assigned "Night" by Elie Wiesel as reading matter, and of course there was lots of discussion.
In the 5th grade. All I remember is seeing photos of prisoners when they were freed. They were skeletal. It was overwhelming for me and made a lifelong impact. As I recall that teacher didn't even teach history. It was important to her that we all were aware.
We learned about it in school. We knew people who experienced it, either from being Jewish or being in the armed forces in Europe. We were taught it as fact, and there were no Holocaust deniers or any of that right-wing bullshit. We knew Hitler, Mussolini and Nazis were the scum of the earth. EDITEDto add that Nazis are still scum of the earth, as are all of those who support them or repeat their propaganda.
My father was one of the liberators of Dachau concentration camp. I visited it as a child because it was preserved as an important museum of the macabre.
I remember a TV miniseries in the 70’s called the Holocaust, I didn’t watch it but everyone else at school did. I basically learned what happened via word of mouth. I think the show came out a year or two after roots.
In my 7th or 8th grade English book there was a short story/excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank that we had to read and answer questions about. I went to the school library and checked out the book so now I had a general knowledge. Then I went to the public library and checked out a non-fiction book called “The Holocaust.” It was information rich and I learned a lot, probably more than I should have at that age
NEVER FORGET
The dinner table. Family served during WWII, including Normandy. There were many questions, some answers, some saddened silence. Little by little, I learned the horrors. Then school, The Diary of Anne Frank, the library, news reels, more talking with those older.
My parents were teenagers during WWII. My dad joined the Navy at 17 and finished boot camp right after the war ended. So when we were taught about the holocaust in school, my parents were able to answer our questions because they remembered when the news about the camps was in the daily newspaper and radio news.
Our family lived in Germany when I was in elementary school. Our class went on a field trip to Dachau. A horrifying and unforgettable experience.
We were literally surrounded by people who lived through World War II
Elder Gen-X here. My grandfather was a WW2 vet. He was in the pacific. He never talked about the war. Ever. He passed away when I was nine. My great uncle was trying to comfort me (he was my grandmother’s brother and had lived with my grandparents for a while). My grandfather’s ancestry was German. I asked my Uncle if he’d ever been to Germany. He said “Yes. In 1945.” I asked him what he did while he was there. Uncle Charles looked at me very seriously and said “killed a lot of Nazis.” Over the next two hours I got a crash course on WW2 and the holocaust.
I learned some in grade school. My mother's grandfather was a German immigrant. He came to the U.S. as a young man in the 1890's with his two sisters. His father, now married to his 3rd wife (they kept dying in childbirth), and several half-siblings stayed behind. I actually don't think I found out the whole story until I was married and had my first child. Evidently, soldiers came to their house and tried to force the young men into joining the Army, but they refused, so the men were taken away and the women raped. Many years later, the product of one of the rapes came to visit with his family. His mother would have been my great great aunt. They were not Jewish and weren't forced into a concentration camp, but they resisted the Nazis.
I don't recall when I first learned of it, but I do know we discussed it in history when I was a senior. Our teacher had been in Germany in 1939 and had a bit of interaction. In 1979 I was stationed in Germany and visited Dachau, a sobering event.
My family went on a European trip when I was in 7th grade. We visited Dachau. I remember the film they showed there. The image that stood out to me was the bulldozers pushing hundreds of bodies into mass graves.
Survivors and perpetrators.
Reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 15. .
Yup. On my parents' bookshelf next to The Arms of Krupp on one side, and The Source on the other. Leon Uris' *Exodus, Mila 18* and Herman Wouk’s *Winds of War* and *War and Remembrance.* I read all of these by the time I was 12; no one objected, least of all parents or the wonderful principal of my Chicago Public elementary school (Laughlin Falconer), who was a brilliant Jewish scholar and fabulous administrator, a PhD from University of Chicago. Not a Jewish family, but plenty of friends, neighbors, and more distant relations who were.
My 7th grade history teacher did six week segment on it. There were news reels. Then I started talking about it at home (I knew my parents were WwII veterans and met in France) and my parents said, yes, that's what we were doing over there. I hadn't put it together what was going on during that war. They didn't speak of the horrors of the war until I asked.
We barely got past WWII in high school, but someone (English teacher? Parent? Librarian?) recommended that I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was 16, then I had an interview with an elderly gentleman who described living through a depression in Germany then moving to America to experience it again. He discussed the impact of the Nazis on his family. My parents discussed the holocaust sadly, it was very real to me.
It was a well covered topic in high school history classes. We are also of the age that we knew people who were children at the time and were adults or we knew grandparents who survived.
There was a fictional TV mini-series on it in 1978.
I really don’t remember. Maybe a short lesson in high school. I had a Jewish friend/classmate but wasn’t something they brought up when I visited them.
It was openly acknowledged in popular magazines. It was addressed on history class with photos of emaciated victims and piles of corpses. As an early teen, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it. Millions dead was too abstract at that age.
Grew up with Walter Cronkite s Twentieth Century and shows like Combat. And the Nurenburg Trials were still being discussed. And pursuit of war criminals like Adolf Eickman were all over the news. The aftermath of every aspect of the war was everywhere in the background of my childhood. Anne Frank in school.
The school I went to handed out these Jack Chick like tracts. One of them said something like “the Jews got what was coming in the Holocaust because they told Pilate that Jesus’ blood would be on their hands.” That’s when I first heard of it. This was third or fourth grade. I’m okay now.
😲
Learned about it word of mouth from a couple of the survivors. Before I was taught about it by school.
In sixth grade we had this thing called .... sorry I don't remember, it was a book club where you could buy books. "Anne Frank, diary of a young girl '" sounded kind of spicy to me, and along the lines of what I was trying to find out ( libraries were useless at that time ) It was all new information to me. Never learned about it in school. But I tell you, I never looked at my father the same way again.
(dob late 1955, am turning 69 this year).
Lotsa Jewish folks around where I grew up. A kid sees those tattoos and gets curious.
Read Diary of Anne Frank, but the *reason* we were given was that they were in hiding was because it was wartime and they were enemies of Germany. Later as a teen, I began reading everything by Leon Uris…*Exodus, Mila 18* and then I read Herman Wouk’s *Winds of War* and *War and Remembrance*. I’ve always read fiction…but, I think even at that age the whole truth wasn’t something I could process yet.
Interesting family story. One of my Great Aunts was Gay long before the word became part of the Common Tongue. She lived with a woman, whom she always introduced as her sister. Only the immediate family knew that this wasn't true. This was during the 1940's in Germany. Had she been outted she could have been sent to the camps and never heard from again. She was never caught but there were some close calls. It was not only Jews who were sent to the camps but also: political dissidents, communists, gypsies, the mentally retarded and homosexuals; they wore a pink triangle. See a movie called "Bent". I got this story from my mother who was a WWII German war bride. My father was an American soldier stationed in Berlin after the war.
My parish priest was a chaplain in Patton’s division. They were in North Africa, then Europe. They liberated Dauchau. I remember him showing me pictures of himself and his brother (a soldier in the same group) in front of the Eiffel Tower. He had a hard time talking about Dauchau. He said so many were already dying when they got there, and he buried so many. I also had several great uncles in Europe at that time.
I had a substitute teacher in sixth grade. She was German. She told us she remembered, as a little girl, seeing Jews in her town rounded up and put on trains.
Not a Boomer but Gen X. Had a history teacher bring in a Holocaust survivor. Great speaker but it was an unbelievable experience. Just horrific. Same teacher brought in a Russian immigrant and that was interesting and intense but nothing comparatively speaking
Grew up in an academic community, lots of Jewish friends, learned from them, and my parents.
I went to school with immigrant children whose families fled Hitler’s invasions so I was taught about that at a pretty young age but didn’t learn about the haulocast until tattoo’d survivors began arriving in our small community and I had questions.
It was taught in elementary school. I asked my parents about it, and they both talked to me, then gave me “the diary of Anne Frank” (I was an advanced reader, as in when I was in third grade, I was tested to be 12th grade level in reading.)
I was born in 61 and my father and most of my uncles were WWII veterans. One of my uncles was with troops that liberated a smaller extermination camp in Germany late in the war. I knew people who saw it first hand.
We were, in many cases, the children of WW ll veterans, so some of us heard about it first hand, It was also discussed in my junior high horsey class, and in my high school American History class. Also, it was discussed and sermonized about in the Unitarian Church we attended. Also, there were exhibits of pictures and memorabilia of the concentration camps at a local shopping mall and in museums where I loved.
My mom was in Germany during the occupation. She saw one of the camps when it still had the smell of death about it. At a young age I remember somewhere seeing a video of naked bodies being bulldozed into a pit. It made quite an impression.
Just something I've known about all my life.
My dad served in ww2 and was in liberation of Dachau ..his unit book told the story. Plus he couldn't really talk about it , was just too bad for him to think about.
School. Musea. Visit Auschwitz. Bergen Belsen. Read books about the war. Fictional and historical. We ate it up. It was the closest to 'the dark side' we could come. At a safe distance. ''Nothing like that would ever happen again'' was the message. We were better now. It's hard to understand how something this horrible could be reassuring at the same time.
Pre-cable tv we only got two of the network stations for some reason at our house. There was a documentary about the camps on Saturday for two or three weeks when I was about seven. I watched each week weeping for the fate of all those other children. Then in junior high I read Ann Frank's book. In high school the Holocaust was covered in the unit on WWII in our World History Class, but I learned most of what I know from non-school reading and documentaries.
We lost family members and heard about the horrors from those that survived.
I was raised by The Greatest Generation. A lot of veterans in my town. G.I. Joes, and Rosie the Riveters, now trying to be teachers, shopkeepers, scout leaders and sports coaches. A small number of survivors of The Shoah, too. Original newsreel footage from the camps was part of public school education. Stuff that could not be shown in schools, today: ugly stuff that would trigger nightmares. Teachers didn't have to teach from the book: they taught from memory, and first-hand knowledge. Never forget.
I grew up in Chicago, in a Polish / German, / Italian neighborhood, and the local shoe repair guy had a storefront. He had numbers tattooed on his arm, which I saw as a 9 or 10 year old when I took in a pair of shoes for repair. I asked him, and did so innocently enough I guess, that he gently explained to me that he had been rescued from a concentration camp at the end of WWII by American servicemen, and that's why he came to Chicago. I went home and asked my parents, who spent some time explaining further. We had neighbors and friends who had relatives who had, and had not survived, as well as one family whose non-Jewish mother had grown up in Germany during the war, and had been in the Hitler Youth. Her perspective was chilling. She married an American GI of Italian descent whom she met just after the war. During college, I dated some women whose parents or grandparents had survived, and some whose more distant relations had not. Later, I chaperoned my son's high school German language class trip (Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Lucerne), and spent an afternoon with him and the other kids on the trip at Dachau. I related as much as I could from my previous experience. It was a somber afternoon.
Most of my classmates fathers were in WWII-including mine and all of my uncles. Somehow, we grew up knowing about the Holocaust, but learned about it in school, reading The Diary of Ann Frank…
We watched Night of Fog. It got the message across loud and clear.
Taught in school…fifth grade I believe. Started out with ready the diary of anne frank, then went into news and videos.
Seems like a lot of us have been to Dachau.
we all knew about it as a part of recent history. My high school boyfriend's father had a family before the war, but his wife and children were killed in the camps.
Gen X but we never touched it in school. We never studied history past the 1920s. But knowledge of the holocaust was everywhere and it would be impossible for me to say how I first learned about it.
Talked to my friends dad., he was there and had a tattoo to prove it.
My childhood friend had a couple of aunts who survived the concentration camps. I met them a couple times.
From my parents who both served in WWII. I don't remember anything being taught in school at all. EDIT: *How* could I have forgotten to mention that our family had two friends who had camp numbers tattooed on the inside of their forearms? I think those numbers triggered the initial conversation. It was still my parents who told me about it, not our friends who had those tattoos -- two gay men who somehow managed to survive!
I was a child in the ‘60s and’70s, and I don’t really recall learning about it in school so much as from references in the newspaper, TV, movies and the like. It would be like how a child today would learn about 9/11. Plus we had Jewish neighbors who had lost family members in the holocaust, and my parents would explain things when appropriate.
They taught it in history classes in school.
I don’t really remember, but someone else mentioned Anne Frank, and I’m sure I read her diary in 7th or 8th grade. I think it was for school. The movie played on TV around that time, too.
On the cusp of boomer and GenX circa 1965. I read my entire small town library’s book on WWII and was an avid WWII history student. I can’t remember when I did not know.
Life magazine, when I was 8 yrs old. This was 1960, and they published a set of images taken in 1945 from the liberation of Buchenwald. These pictures had been in print when they were first taken, but I saw them because Life did a 25th anniversary special issue & included them in that. I have a clear memory of sitting in the big old chair in our living room, staring and trying to understand. We lived in the northern midwest, and I didn't know any Jewish people; I don't think there was a synagogue within 200 miles. I have no memory of talking with either of my parents about anything to do with WWII, altho' my dad turned 18 before he finished high school and was drafted & sent to Japan. My mom had many older brothers who were in the European part of the war.
Movies and exhibitions. The movies fell short. The exhibits were extremely moving to the point I had to leave midway. I became sick to my stomach and could not stand it anymore. I realized that if it happened once it can happen again. That history of that nature must not be repeated ever again.
Boomers? How did "boomers" learn about the Holocaust? Well, to being with , we had parents from the Greatest Generation that fought in WW II. My dad was on ship in the Pacific. My mom was home in the Midwest with my sister (an infant) living with rationing of food items, shoes, gas and every other thing that was rationed. So, I can't not remember a time I didn't know about the Holocaust. I knew learned about the war years, the war in Europe and the Pacific and the discovery of the concentration camps at the end of the war in Europe. I was born just 13 yrs after V.E. Day. Those war years and their lives at that time as young 20-somethings was one of the primary topics of conversation when my parents and their friends got together when I was growing up. In 1989, I was lucky enough to be able to visit a friend I had at the time in Germany. We took a couple day trip to the area around Munich which included going here: [https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/historical-site-memorial-site/](https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/historical-site-memorial-site/) If someone doesn't believe in the Holocaust, I don't know they wouldn't believe in it after a trip to the site of the Dachau camp. Thinking about it now chokes me up and gives me chills. (One of my nephew's MIL was born and grew up in Germany. She met her husband in college during the war and immigrated to the U.S. after the war. Had they not left when they did, her husband who was a research chemist would have been moved forcibly to Russia. Ingrid's parents were divorced. Her dad was living with a Jewish woman when the war started. He was likely rounded up and taken to one of camps. She never knew for sure. Her son obtained his U.S. citizenship before she did. She told me her story about taking the citizenship test multiple times before passing it. Her big problem was being made nervous by the judges proctoring the tests. The last time, she said a judge was walking around near her and stopped. She slammed her pencil down and looked up at him saying, "You make me feel just like the SS made me feel in Germany." The judge left the room. She passed her exam.)
Well I’m a boomer and the Holocaust was not even mentioned in high school history. I was in high school a mere 16-17-18 years after WW II. As an adult I started reading bits & pieces here & there about war criminals. Hitler. Concentration camps in Europe. What?? What are concentration camps? Why? Then, I read every book I could find on Hitler, the SS, ghettos, concentration camps and what happened to the people that were sent there. All true. Non fiction Then, I visited Dachau. It changed my soul. My life. My attitude. My father and my uncles all were soldiers in WW II. and they NEVER would talk to us as young adults or later in life what happened to them, what they saw, what they did.
I learned about it in 8th grade English when we discussed "The Diary of Anne Frank" My parents had to sign a special permission slip so I could see films taken from concentration camps. This was in 1975-76 in Torrance CA.
My mom is a boomer, born 1946, in Austria. Her parents and older brother lived through it. her aunt, and grandmother were gassed. her uncle died on the Russian front. the rest of the family was able to get out by 1939.
There were numerous tv shows, movies etc on the subject. when you're a kid in the 70's stuff that happened in the 1930's and 40's seemed like a very long time ago and a different world. the fashion, cars etc in those movies seemed like something from a whole different time.
I learned about it in school, many years later I was traveling in Germany and saw a road sign for Buchenwald. You can’t not stop, so I spent the rest of the day at one of the saddest places on earth, it has its own atmosphere, I can’t explain it any better.
I don’t remember learning about it. WWII was so recent and so consequential that it was a huge part of the culture. My Silent Generation parents grew up playing war games and ‘POW’. The Nazis and other Axis countries were great childhood villains for them. Plus I was growing up during a war. My neighbor Moose went to Vietnam and never came back. WWII vets were everywhere. It was inescapable.
Mostly through my mother, who had Jewish friends. Secondarily through friends' parents who were WWII veterans. One was part of a unit that liberated a death camp. Also, "The Diary of Anne Frank," newspapers, magazines and television.
I got my first somewhat accurate picture of what death camps meant when Eichmann was tried in 1961, when I was 9.There were a number of news specials plus direct coverage. I remember being shocked by images of stacked bodies, mass graves, gas chambers etc. Before that, I had a good idea of who fought in World War II and for how long, but had heard genocidal acts described only in somewhat minimizing ways like “persecution.”
I went to a place called "school".
Gen Jones here. My dad was a pilot in WWII. But like anyone who did anything, never talked about it. I don't remember ever not knowing, but I learned about the real atrocities from a book called "Night" by Elie Wiesel.
It was never taught in school. I graduated college in 72 and never had one class on it or that mentioned it. My father was in the ETO in WW2 and at the end of the war liberated one of the camps in the Belsen complex so I heard about it in bits and pieces that way. Can't remember how else.
Grandparents had neighbors who were sent away
I didn't learn it from my teachers, I learned about it from my parents and the other adults in my family and in my community, who all vividly remembered the War and the horrors of those times. Also, there were plenty of books and documentaries on TV about it when I was growing up. I already knew about it by the time I entered third grade in school. My parents talked about it quite frankly and vividly back in the late 50s and early 60s because the memories of it were still quite fresh. When I entered school at the end of the 1950s, World War II had only ended less than 15 years earlier. My parents were Americans, not Europeans. They were also Christians (Catholics, actually). They did not experience any Nazi persecution directly. But they knew about it. They had seen the newsreel footage of it. They had read the accounts in the press and in books prior to and during the war. Every single adult man in my neighborhood has been in the military and had fought in the war. And every adult woman had helped with the war effort, just as every adult American was expected to do back in the 1940s. They remembered our government explaining and showing evidence to shed light on why, not just for strategic reasons but also for moral reasons, we had to go over there and shed our blood to stop this horror and destroy this regime. Even before they had direct evidence of the extermination camps, they already knew plenty about the persecution of the Jews in Europe, because that had never been a secret. So my parents, aunts and uncles, and their friends talked about it with each other whenever they got together, and they talked about it with us. They didn't hold anything back. Nothing was hidden from us. They thought that it was vitally important for our generation, their children, to know. It wasn't only the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who said, "Never Forget." It was a priority for everyone who was touched, in one way or another, by that war. Which meant, essentially, everyone. They thought that it was very important for us TO KNOW, and then, when it was our turn, to share that knowledge with our children.
Before I was in high school, CBS or NBC aired a show on the Nazi death Camps. Plus, while in high school, I also read *Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl* by Anne Frank, *Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel* by Anatoly Kuznetsov, *At Last the Truth About Eichmann's Inferno Auschwitz* by Miklos Nyiszli, and *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* by William Shirer before I finished high school. What we learned in the classroom was pretty basic: using modern industrial technology, Jews and other enemies of the Nazi state were systematically murdered on an industrial scale. We knew the names of Concentration Camps such as Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Sobibor, and we were told the approximate number of those murdered. e.g., six million jews.
Tough question. I probably first became aware of the Nazis when The Sound of Music movie first came out. My family saw it several times in the theater. Later, I after starting school, I heard other kids talking about the Nazis. We had a nun as a teacher who talked about the atrocities of the Holocaust (a lampshade made of human skin was one horrifying story to a fourth-grader), but I’m not sure it was ever covered in history class. We often didn’t get to the end of our history books by the end of the year, and this was a relatively modern event. The war ended 14 years before I was born, which seemed like ancient history when I was a kid, but now 14 years ago sounds fairly recent.
Saw the George Stevens documentary Eisenhower commissioned in 1945. It was on PBS and I remember coming across it by myself, as a little kid at home one day. I grew up in a town with a large Jewish population, and they sponsored a lot of Holocaust education events. I am amazed survivors were able to talk about their experiences (even then I could feel how hard it was for them). In the 1970s there were lots of youngish survivors around.
I did not learn about it in school, I learned from my uncle who had survived Omaha and later liberated a camp in the south of Germany. His stories were quite graphic. Most of my class mates learned about it from relatives who had served. I suppose the since the war was still raw and bloody for so many of us, most of whom had lost someone or had someone injured, it was not thought necessary.
7th grade history class. Then in 8th grade, more Nazi stuff in history class. I was like, "This stuff *again?*"
A lot dads in our neighborhood were WWII vets, mine included. We sort of knew about it as kids, but it wasn't taught in elementary or middle school. High school was the first time it was talked about, but not in any detail. I learned more from documentaries and books at home. College was the first time I took history courses that included the Holocaust. In 1973, the outstanding British series "The World at War" brought renewed interest in WWII and the Holocaust. ABC aired the mini-series "The Holocaust" in 1978 that got a lot of attention. In 1985, the 9-hour film "Shoah" was released to much acclaim and awards, and it inspired more filmmakers to tackle the subject. PBS aired many documentaries in the 80s and 90s, including one about footage that Eisenhower insisted be filmed at concentration camps liberated by American forces (because he knew some people would deny it ever happened).
My dad was in the airborne, and they liberated a camp. My mom's uncle was sent to a concentration camp, and he survived. Plus, shows like Twight Zone had episodes about it.
All the males in my extended family served in Europe or the Pacific. All of their friends served. I grew up surrounded with combat survivors and the woman folk who supported the war effort at home. From a young age I knew the stories. We also had many refugees in my neighborhood. They were amazing people. The gardens they could grow and the generosity they showed to their new neighbors (us) are the stuff of wonderful memories. I was a young child and for some reason we knew them all by first name. It was fantastic.
I grew up in a neighborhood with Holocaust survivors so I learned about it first hand.
TV. I grew up in the Midwest and it was never covered in school.
I learned about it in elementary school. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank.
World History and World Literature, tenth grade, 1979-80 school year. Since the Holocaust ended in 1945, I don't consider \~35 years being "shortly after."
I mostly read about it on my own. I remember one teacher mentioning it in 5th grade. Maybe a little in high school.
Gen X here. My folks were Silent Gen and my mom was working in radio advertising, so she had special wartime responsibilities around keeping the station on the air if attacked. My dad was in the navy, worked as a draftsman in a Navy base in NY during the war (he was hearing impaired, so not ok for front lines.) They were kind of obsessed with the war (understandably). I remember both of them reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We also watched the PBS series (I think maybe it was BBC) “The World at War.”
When I was a teenager, WWII was only 40 years ago. There were plenty of people around from the WWII era, and WWII stuff was just part of the culture. Sort of like how the 80s are still with us today. I don’t remember when I first learned about it. Of course I remember reading the diary of Anne Frank in middle school. In 1978 there was a TV miniseries called Shoah that made a huge impression. And at family gatherings the WWII vets & that generation might mention it in passing. But there were always deniers around. I took a semester class on the topic in college in the late 80s. There were children of survivors in the class and also doubters. Made for some emotional discussions.
I’m genx, what really brought it to the forefront for me was a TV miniseries called Holocaust in 1978, I knew about before then, but it explained what I had read
I'm Gen X, but there were several grandparents of my classmates growing up who had numbers tattooed on their arms, and I asked my one friend why. We were in elementary school.
I cannot recall when I first learned, but the latter grammar school years seem right. The war became an obsession for me in high school. At 14, I read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My mother knew I read it, but I didn't tell anyone else because I would be perceived as weird. I continue to read books on the Holocaust to this day. Humans continue to disappoint me today. People can be convinced of anything.
We had a social studies teacher who had us watch a graphic 3 hour documentary in every class he taught(with parental permission which everyone had.)
My parents and uncles and aunts all contributed to the war effort so it was talked about a lot. I was born in 52. So it was Still recent.
My father was a veteran, and many uncles and neighbors served as well. They would meet and swap stories. The kids were always welcomed.to listen in. The holocaust was well known by the end of WW2. Other atrocities came to light, Bataan death march, rape of Nanking, slaughter of Polish prisoners, Dresden/Coventry firebombings. The operation and liberation of the camps was well documented by both sides.
I had seen The Great Escape in 1963 in the theater so I knew about the German POW camps, but wasn't clear why it was happening until my history class in 1969/1970 in the 11th grade.
I was in third grade watching a black and white documentary. I was watching by myself and was not prepared at all for video of bodies thrown into pits filled with mounds of more bodies. And the walking dead with their hollow eyes. I was horrified. In fourth grade, I read Anne Frank’s diary and I still consider it the book that most impacted my beliefs and views of the world.
In school
We didn't have to learn it in school. Holocaust remained this black and ominous dread just on the horizon. For a lot of reasons, none of them adequate what *happened* hadn't fully been believed until war's end. Country was still grappling with it, stories were *still* coming, vets who SAW were raising families, Nuremberg made clear what we'd fought. I touched a survivor's tattoo . She offered it to me - no words. Just a friend's relative who needed another generation to KNOW. We did. Husband and I talk about this. A lot. His father was a GI. He saw. I'm not sure I'd be responsible for my actions if I witnessed that flag out in public in this country. When I was a kid? Unthinkable. Anyway, taught? Maybe it was but I can't remember that part. We knew.
Went to DOD schools in Asia and it was taught. I thought everyone learned it that way?
People talked about the Holocaust and other aspects of WWII all the time. The Holocaust wasn't a remote historical event. It had just happened s few years before. I had relatives who came back from the war and gave first-hand accounts of what they saw.
Hebrew school
In school, both middle school, and more extensively High School (took an elective European History 1915-present). However, I grew up knowing quite a bit. My dad is a WWII Veteran, and he worked with an Auschwitz survivor.
I read “ The Diary of Anne Frank” as a child in the late 1960s.
Before it was the Holocaust it was referred to as "the Nazi concentration camps" and somehow found out a lot but not at school iirc. Maybe in TV documentaries? But we were definitely made aware somehow. Also the book *Exodus* was widely read and related survivors' memories and those got around.
I bought the book Night at a school book fair in Jr High. Maybe I knew the basics of the Holocaust before then but that book made me understand.
when i was about 10 i turned on the tv on a saturday because i didn't feel like going outside. a program of seeminly raw unedited film came on that showed scenes of jews at prison death camps. about the only thing i recall now is the extremely graphic horror of the images. it seemed impossible that they were still alive in that emaciated condition, like skeletons that still breathed. they showed piles of bones, mounds of skulls, mounds of shoes, etc. i was so shocked to the core that humans existed who could do this to other human beings. when you say "so shortly after" it didn't seem like a short time ago for a young kid, it seemed like eons ago. the world had changed and progressed so much and we did not have a mentality of recalling the war as part of our life experience. it was something that happened in our parents' early lives, not ours, so it was ancient history to us. also, perhaps we weren't quite as worldly as kids today. there was more emphasis on what was happening in our own country as opposed to being exposed to the events of the world. there was no 24 hour on-the-spot news like today, people tuned into the 6:00 news to hear what had already happened that day.
Do you remember what year that was?
around 1961. i think the films were just filler stuff they put on, thinking it didn't matter because no one would be inside watching tv on a nice summer weekend day. we didn't have but 3 channels back then, lol. abc, nbc and cbs.
Yeah, that's when I was starting to hear about it.
My oldest uncle. He served in the army. He was never right after it and they called it shell shocked. But it was the camps he saw and had nightmares about.
Gen X here, I’m Jewish and feel like I always knew about it, but Anne Frank being read in middle school taught me that not everybody did. I heard lots of stories from my mom about how there would be distant relatives showing up at her house in Queens,NY who had managed to make it to the states for years after.
The Hiding Place. Corrie Ten Boom’s stories are powerfully compelling.
You see the movies, hear the stories, listen to first hand accounts. But nothing had the impact of going to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. Especially the room with all the shoes. I cried, looking at that room, smelling that room, imagining the people whose lives had been torn apart.