There Is A Kinder Holocaust

On January 10, 2022 the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee unanimously voted to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, from the eighth-grade curriculum for “rough, objectionable language” and depictions of nudity. This vote came in the wake of school district legal counsel informing the Board that (due to copyright issues) objectional language and nudity could not be redacted, which the school board had initially sought to do.

In a PBS interview on the matter, Spiegelman said “they want a kinder, gentler holocaust to present to their children.” His implication was that truth is being sacrificed for sensitivity.

Spiegelman’s words rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason I could not place, I felt he was wrong. While I agree that we cannot shy away from the horrors of the holocaust when teaching it to our children, I also find the images in Maus distasteful. Maus is not a book I would want to be included in my children's classroom instruction, even if the curse words and nudity were redacted.

I struggled to understand my own uneasiness. Spiegelman depicts piles of bodies, and mass hangings; things I myself had seen photos of when learning about the holocaust in school, and something I would not have a problem being shown to my children. What, then, was the problem with Maus?

Upon much reflection, I was able to identify the source of my discomfort when I thought of the books that I had read when studying the holocaust as a boy. The Devil’s Arithmetic describes the horrors of the concentration camps, but Hannah Stern—the book’s main character—notes the swallows flying around the smokestacks above the crematorium and remarks that beauty and freedom can exist even in the midst of such unbelievable suffering. In Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl notes that in the concentration camps individuals were able to sacrifice for others, sing songs, tell jokes, find new meaning, and experience joy amid suffering.

In A Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom—a Dutch Christian woman—hides Jews in her home to protect them from Nazi occupiers in Holland. Her family does this at great personal risk. When caught, they are interred in concentration camps. Mrs. Ten Boom’s father and sister do not survive the ordeal. Yet, upon being liberated, Ten Boom dedicated her life to touring Europe and America, preaching forgiveness despite cruelty through the power of Jesus Christ. During one of her speaking engagements in Berlin, she was approached by one of the very guards who was cruel to her at Ravensbruck, and he asked her to forgive him for his actions. She forgave him, taking his hand in hers, and shaking it. In these stories, the atrocities of the holocaust are punctuated by goodness, love, and beauty.

By contrast, in Maus, there is only evil. In Maus there is sin, but no redemption. It is saturated with self-serving behavior, betrayal, despair, and cowardice. While there is no doubt that these events are true, real, and horrid, they neglect the selflessness and sacrifice that are also historic facts of the holocaust.

The holocaust was undeniably horrific. If we were to list the cruelties of the holocaust, libraries could not contain all the volumes we could assemble. Is there not more to be learned from the history of this event other than that humans are cruel?

I assert that there is. Forgiveness, endurance, and the power of the human will despite adversity. Our children deserve to learn about human goodness as well as human wickedness.

In short, there is a kinder holocaust. It is the one in which Viktor Frankl emerges from Auschwitz and uses the lessons he learned from his suffering to relieve the psychological agony of countless people. It is one where Corrie Ten Boom takes the hand of her persecutor in a forgiving grasp. And it is one where tens of thousands of others rose triumphantly from the ashes of war and sought to restore love and honor to a ravished world.