Denying History Through Book Bans

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How old were you when you first learned about the Holocaust?

I remember the first time I heard about what the Nazis did to Jews, but only in the vaguest terms. It was at a family gathering when I was quite young, maybe 6 or 7. There were a couple of older men sitting off to one side. I noticed the numbers tattooed to their arms and asked my mother what that meant.

The men had survived prison, she said. They were not criminals. They were imprisoned because they were Jewish. I nodded. And that was that although the memory survived. One of my oldest.

That was that until 1960.

In those days parents could send their young children to the movies without supervision. Saturday matinees had always been part of my sister’s and my life. One Saturday when I was 10, my 8-year-old sister and I saw two movies. I’m certain my folks thought we would be seeing a Disney film. But at the box office, I chose a different double feature.

The first film was “The Last Voyage,” about a shipwreck, and loosely based on the Andrea Doria disaster. It was intense, scary and way above our understanding.

But it was the second feature that still haunts me.

Movie about Nazi atrocities

The film was a post-war noir, “Verboten,” about the hunt for a Nazi gang trying to resurrect the Third Reich in post-war Berlin. In black and white it was dark and moody. Then there came a point in the film where Nazi hunters showed a courtroom audience some grainy films of the German extermination camps and their liberation. There were pictures of Nazis shooting Jews, throwing them to dogs, burying them alive. Films of the gas chambers and of bulldozers pushing piles of emaciated and rotting corpses into open graves.

I was not just stunned, I was utterly shattered. Back at home, it took my parents some time to calm us down, to explain as best they could what the Nazis were about and how our people, the Jewish people, had been nearly exterminated in Europe. I had been too young to know the details, they said. But now I had to know and try to understand.

Not long afterward, the bully boy next door, son of a man we later learned was a former Nazi official, led a gang of mini-thugs as they chased me down the street, tied me to a tree and whipped me with willow sticks while calling me a “dirty Jew.”

That was when I came to understand that some little bits of the Holocaust survive in the same way that a deadly virus can lie dormant only to emerge periodically to wreak havoc on the living.

When and how did you learn about the Holocaust? For most American students, at least those in public schools, the lessons come in late middle school or, more often, in high school.

For American Jews, the lessons come much, much earlier and never easily.

Memories flooded back

All of those memories have come flooding back in the last few weeks as I read about the Tennessee school board that removed the graphic novel “Maus,” from the district’s eighth-grade Holocaust module.

“Maus” is an incredible, one-of-a-kind graphic novel in which Jews are depicted as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, and so on. It is a memoir that defies simple description. Author and artist Art Spiegelman began the novel in serialized form hoping as he worked to better understand his father, a Holocaust survivor, and his mother, a survivor who had committed suicide when Spiegelman was 20.

I read the first volume sometime after its publication in 1986. The second, concluding volume, was published in 1990.

The books were a revelation.

We try to understand the Holocaust on a macro level. But the scale of inhumanity is so great, the numbers so outside our ability to imagine that it is easy to forget the Holocaust was about individual people living, dying, and sometimes surviving amid the worst conditions evil men can impose.

“Maus” is intimate and personal. So are “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and Elie Wiesel’s brilliant “Night,” documenting his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I read both later. In so many ways, for me, “Maus” was the first book to put a face on the Holocaust.

It is one thing to say “never again” while thinking in terms of six million Jewish dead and untold millions of others. But intimate memoirs like “Maus” tell us in powerful ways that the Spiegelmans, the Franks, the Wiesels, and so many others, should never again face such evil.

So, news that “Maus” had been banned wounded in ways I did not expect.

Why? How? What are those Tennessee school board members thinking?

There is a larger issue here.

Wave of book banning

As The New York Times reports, we are in the midst of a book-banning wave not seen for decades. Most frequently targeted are books about gay and transgendered people and about sex and sexual identity. Also targeted are books some conservative Christians believe are satanic or demonic, such as the Harry Potter novels.

Other condemned books are about race, racial identity, slavery, and civil rights. In some parts of the country state legislatures are using the “critical race theory” boogeyman to attack books and curriculum that mentions Jim Crow or even Martin Luther King Jr.

Those who would ban, or worse, burn books, are trying to homogenize education and whitewash history, trying to deny the humanity of those unlike themselves. And too often the banning – or burning – is rooted in religion, the efforts of conservative Christian groups to impose on the rest of us their faith and notions of morality.

Look at the CNN video of Tennessee Pastor Greg Locke burning books last weekend. It is a terrifying video, not at all different from the images of Nazis throwing books on their pyres.

It is past time for mainstream denominations to take a harder stand against the fringe conservatives, who are no longer so fringe, and who would weaponize Christianity against manufactured threats. It is one thing to offer sympathies after the fact. It is past time to be pro-active.

When the fringe elements mob school boards, the mainstream needs to be there to counter the madness with reason and tolerance. When the fringe elements mob legislative hearings, the mainstream needs to be there to counter the madness with reason and tolerance. When the fringe mob starts drafting legislation, the mainstream needs to be there first.

Anything less than that is, to be blunt, un-Christian.

A living testament

In the late 1990s, I was privileged to spend an hour with Elie Wiesel before a talk in Colorado Springs. Through the years, as a journalist, I have been able to spend time with a good many famous, powerful men and women. But Wiesel was the only one who left me awestruck, speechless. He was a living testament to survival and love as weapons against the darkness.

I do not remember all of what he said. But I do remember him telling me that the lesson of the Holocaust is not the story of man’s inhumanity to man, but rather the survival of humanity – and the survival of hope – in the face of unimaginable evil. That is also the story of “Maus.”

Ban books like “Maus,” and all you are left with is that evil. And evil cannot be banned without a fight.

Steven A. Smith is clinical associate professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho having retired from full time teaching at the end of May 2020. He is former editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., and serves on the board of Spokane FāVS, from which this article is republished with permission.