Recent surveys claim to show that Americans lack knowledge of the Holocaust. These surveys aren’t wrong, but they do miss the point. It’s not that we don’t know about the Holocaust. It’s that almost everything we know about it comes from entertainment.
Holocaust education in the United States is unbelievably poor. There are 21 states that don’t require the Holocaust to be taught at all, while the 29 that do often fail to give teachers sufficient guidance or materials.
Holocaust entertainment, on the other hand, is booming. Recent Holocaust movies have won multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes. “Holocaust tourism” — visiting memorials and former extermination sites — is now a billion-dollar industry. Holocaust jokes and memes are proliferating on social media. We’re finding new ways to entertain ourselves with the Holocaust all the time.
But the Holocaust is impossible to represent accurately in entertainment. It was a massive genocide with millions of victims from dozens of countries. They were murdered on thousands of sites spread across a continent, with guns and gas, and through slave labor. The perpetrators came from all walks of life, and they had a range of backgrounds and motivations.
This means that Holocaust entertainment always oversimplifies its subject. Three dangerous myths are born in the process. The first is the Jews who died were weak and went to their deaths without protest. The second is the Nazis were motivated by bloodlust rather than racist ideology. And the third is the Holocaust had a silver lining. It was sad, but it ended with survival, and so it carries hopeful messages about the strength of the human spirit.
These myths can be seen in everything from documentaries to blockbusters to best-selling novels about the Holocaust. They distort our knowledge, sometimes in ways that are antisemitic. For example, Jewish suffering in Holocaust entertainment saddens us, but it also leaves us wondering why the Jews can’t see what’s coming and questioning why they don’t fight back.
Omitting history that can’t be draped in ‘hopeful messages’
This encourages a strange mix of pity and disgust. Holocaust entertainment also encourages us to see the Nazis as antiheroes. In portraying them as full of bloodlust, it makes them seem strong and ruthless, which can be overawing.
This may explain the many recent incidents of children drawing swastika graffiti in schools across the U.S. In my experience as an educator, such acts are almost never motivated by political beliefs.
Holocaust entertainment doesn’t just distort what we know. It also imposes limits on what we know.
Events like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which Jews took up arms and fought the Nazis for weeks on end in 1943, rarely appear in Holocaust entertainment because they contradict the myth that Jews died without protest.
Questions about what Nazism was, why it was born in Germany after World War I and why so many people bought into it are rarely addressed. It’s easier and more exciting just to show the Nazis as immaculately-groomed psychopaths who murder for pleasure.
Holocaust entertainment also tends to omit anything from the Holocaust’s history that can’t be draped in hopeful messages. These include massacres like the mass shooting of orphaned babies at Bila Tserkva in Ukraine in August 1941, or sites like the Belzec extermination camp, where only two out of 500,000 victims survived and gave testimony after the war.
On top of all this, like the entertainment industry generally, Holocaust entertainment is naturally inclined to repeat any formula that’s commercially successful. The bestselling novel “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” (2017) spawned a range of copycat titles, for example, “The Saboteur of Auschwitz” (2019), “The Violinist of Auschwitz” (2020) and “The Midwife of Auschwitz” (2022), to name just three.
In the end, Holocaust entertainment lets us think the Holocaust happened to people who were nothing like us, it was perpetrated by people who were nothing like us and it happened in a society that was nothing like ours. It allows us to think we’re engaging with the Holocaust even when we’re turning away from it.
Today, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust entertainment is preventing us from facing a terrible truth: Ordinary people, just like you and me, accepted an ideology so hateful that crimes of unimaginable proportions unfolded right in front of them, sometimes with their active participation.
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 — with a convicted felon and far-right populist installed in the White House, seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship, end diversity programs, turn away all refugees and instigate mass deportations of some of the most vulnerable among us — the need to face this truth could hardly be more urgent.
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