Let's Recommit to Holocaust Education

October 7 denial and revisionism is the logical result of a generation of undereducated and miseducated students, manipulated into believing layers of historical propaganda. We MUST change this, NOW.

When I was in 7th grade, I saw my first images of the Holocaust. I remember the lights turned off, the daylight coming in through the windows of I.S. 51 junior high in Staten Island. I remember the slide show…and the cognitive dissonance.

I was born in Germany, in Nuremberg to be precise, in the U.S. Army hospital that had been built by the Nazis. The building no longer stands; it has been replaced by a housing development.

U.S. Army Hospital in Nuremberg, where I was born.

When I was four, my mother converted to Judaism to marry my stepfather. But though I was raised Jewish, we never discussed the Holocaust—not once that I can remember. For us, it was about Jewish life here and now, in our liberal New York Democratic home, in our Reform synagogue with its terrible mid-century architecture. We followed the Mets, thank you very much, and ate turkey ham. With cheese. Why not.

My classmates in 7th grade knew these things. So it was shocking when one of them called out, in the middle of that lesson, in the darkened classroom: “Hey, Vesper, you were born in Germany. You must be a Nazi!”

Enter the cognitive dissonance. Yes, I was born in Germany, in the town used by Hitler for youth rallies, the town that gave the racial laws their name—the Nuremberg Laws—and the same town that witnessed the postwar trials of the perpetrators—the Nuremberg Trials. And yes, I came from a Jewish home. But was I a Nazi? Why would anyone say that? I remember leaving the classroom, going to the bathroom, and bawling my eyes out.

I’m not German; I was just born there. I was raised Jewish, but I’m not technically Jewish. These two realities were contained within me, and yet I was neither. It didn’t matter. Both of these things are part of who I am. This is true of many realities that make me who I am. It’s a strange phenomenon in my life—I’m this, but also that; this and that, but neither and both.

I have spent the last decade of my life in the field of Holocaust education. I didn’t go looking for this career. Since about 1995, I’ve been an illustrator. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I come to writing late, having begun my first attempt at fiction in my mid-30s. I wrote what would become my first published novel as a grad school project, attempting to fill a lot of the holes in my own knowledge. And that book was about the Holocaust.