Misuse of Holocaust Education

SPEAKER 1: So as numerous as the examples are, the sheer weight of it says to me, no wonder people want to spin out some happy ever-after ending, no wonder people want to come up with some alternate narrative of these things. It's too hard to bear.

LAWRENCE L. LANGER: And that's the great danger because the tendency in Holocaust education today is to find snippets of what I call feel goodness out of the feel badness. What's not understood is that the Jews of Europe were not murdered because people were intolerant-- has nothing to do with intolerance. People were murdered because they were Jews. There was an ideology that declared them as inferior.

FRANK S: The greetings were changed from Salvete, discipuli and Salve, magister. It was changed to Heil Hitler. He came in, and he said, Heil Hitler, students. And we had to stand up and say, Heil Hitler, teacher. OK, so we stood up and we said, Heil Hitler, teacher. And then we had a different curriculum because we had this Rassenkunde, which is a raceology. That was a regular subject that we had, and we were supposed to learn what an Aryan is, the Aryan race. Opposed to the Aryan race, we were the Jews. And the students were to learn what makes the difference between a blond, blue-eyed, pure Aryan to a Jew.

And I hated this biology teacher with a passion. He always pulled me up on my sideburns, and he put me in front of the class, and I see, now here's a Jew. And he started to describe my nose and my cheekbones and my hair and my features and how to recognize a Jew. And I was very humiliated, and I hated it, and I felt terrible about the whole thing.

LAWRENCE L. LANGER: The Holocaust is not a result of the failure of people to get along. I mean, that's a myth, and that's an illusion.