They had nev­er heard of the Holocaust. 

I was stand­ing in front of four hun­dred and fifty kids— fourth, fifth, and sixth graders — in Phoenix, Arizona.

And they had nev­er heard of it. 

I was in Chan­dler, a wealthy neigh­bor­hood of Phoenix. I’d spent the morn­ing watch­ing the sun­rise from Hole in the Rock, the most famous red rock for­ma­tion in town. I’d seen two teenagers — who maybe had been up all night — stum­ble up the scree slope to get a perch look­ing east­ward. They climbed with arms wrapped around each oth­ers’ waists, laugh­ing sweet­ly. The girl wore Doc Martens and bag­gy jeans and her hair had streaks of magen­ta. The boy had tight cropped hair, skin­ny jeans, and a semi­au­to­mat­ic pis­tol hol­stered at his side. 

After my morn­ing vis­it, I ate lunch at a pri­vate golf club near the school, as it seemed the most like­ly place to find a sal­ad. Most of the cars in the lot were white, many were BMWs. From my table in the shade I watched retired men prac­tice their putting and then sit around tables with beer and gourmet burg­ers. I imag­ined that they were ami­ca­bly debat­ing the new tar­iffs levied against Mex­i­co and Cana­da, but I was too far away to hear for sure. 

I was ner­vous about the talk I was plan­ning to give that after­noon. I would be pre­sent­ing my new book, Max in the Land of Lies, a sto­ry about a Jew­ish boy who escapes Nazi Ger­many only to return as a spy. His pri­vate mis­sion is to try to find his par­ents, but his offi­cial assign­ment is to infil­trate the Funkhaus, the cen­ter of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da. In addi­tion to try­ing to write a grip­ping spy thriller (I hope!), the book asks the ques­tion: ​“How did a whole nation of mod­ern, edu­cat­ed peo­ple become Nazis?” And my talk in par­tic­u­lar would focus on one girl, Meli­ta Maschmann, a mid­dle class Ger­man girl not much old­er than my audi­ence, who had devot­ed her life to Nazism and had spent the war with a whip in one hand and a Ger­man shep­herd on a chain in the oth­er, get­ting Poles and Jews out of their homes and onto trains. I would show them this pic­ture of her:

I would tell her life sto­ry. And then I would ask them to reflect on how a girl their age, like them in so many ways, could have played such an active role in eth­nic cleans­ing and mass murder. 

I was par­tic­u­lar­ly ner­vous because I had been giv­ing this talk typ­i­cal­ly to mid­dle school­ers. I wasn’t sure how aware of the his­tor­i­cal back­ground the fourth and fifth graders would be. 

It turned out that I was right to be ner­vous. The school was pub­lic and the phys­i­cal ameni­ties did not match the serene wealth of the sur­round­ing neigh­bor­hood. But the librar­i­an was love­ly — as just about every librar­i­an is — and as the kids filed in and I intro­duced myself to them, I was struck yet again by how con­sis­tent young people’s behav­ior is, whether they live in Brook­lyn or Phoenix or Ban­ga­lore. Kids is kids is kids. 

I start­ed by talk­ing about my oth­er books. And then I showed them this photo: 

That’s me, with the cute bel­ly, and Michael Stein­berg, a close friend of my family’s. Then I showed them this photo:

It’s a pic­ture of Michael Stein­berg when he was ten years old, in Berlin, 1938. His moth­er had just put him on a train that would take him to a fer­ry that would take him to Eng­land, a coun­try he’d nev­er been to, where he bare­ly spoke the lan­guage, and he’d live for eight years with­out know­ing if he’d ever see his moth­er again. And then I asked the stu­dents if they had a guess about why his moth­er would put him on this train that would take him to England. 

Right away, some­one sug­gest­ed World War II. I said that was close, but the war hadn’t start­ed quite yet. There were oth­er guess­es. (Inno­cent lit­tle girl: ​“He was poor?” One wise guy: ​“His moth­er didn’t like him very much?”). Final­ly, some­one men­tioned the Nazis. 

“Right,” I said. And then, as I always do, I gave them some back­ground, so we were all on the same page. I men­tioned Hitler. Nods all around the room. They’d heard of him. I men­tioned the Nazis. Few­er nods, but still plen­ty. I told them some of what the Nazis believed: that they hat­ed Jews, immi­grants, non-white, LGBTQ+, and dis­abled peo­ple. Pret­ty much any­one who wasn’t a Nazi. The nods fad­ed. The kids’ faces began to look uncom­fort­able and upset. Some, I imag­ined as I watched the trans­for­ma­tion, because they iden­ti­fied with the groups I was nam­ing. Oth­ers, per­haps, because they rec­og­nized the rhetoric from home, the neigh­bor­hood, or the news. I am not sure of this. But anti-immi­grant speech in par­tic­u­lar had been pret­ty heat­ed in Chan­dler, Ari­zona. And every­where else in the Unit­ed States. 

Next, I told them that between 1939 and 1945, peo­ple from all these groups, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Jew­ish peo­ple, would be round­ed up and put in con­cen­tra­tion camps — which were like giant pris­ons, I said — and then many of these peo­ple were killed. There was an audi­ble gasp. Dozens of mouths fell open, or were cov­ered with a hand. (My moth­er once com­plained about my writ­ing that I some­times have someone’s mouth ​“fall open”; ​“Does that even hap­pen in real life?” she demand­ed. It very lit­er­al­ly did in Chan­dler.) I said, ​“Mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple were killed.” The mouths stayed open, their faces stricken. 

If it had been just the fourth graders who act­ed so shocked, maybe I would under­stand. But fifth graders and sixth graders, too, stared at me like I had shown them a ter­ri­ble truth that they could nev­er unsee. I hadn’t shown them pho­tos of Auschwitz, or even piles of shoes. I’d just said that hatred had turned to murder. 

How did we get to a point where a major­i­ty of kids in a school in Ari­zona have heard of the Nazis — and yet were com­plete­ly blind­sided by the fact of the Holo­caust? Have we turned the Nazis into such car­toon vil­lains, such tropes of Hol­ly­wood sto­ry­telling, that the nature of their vil­lainy has been erased from the pub­lic memory? 

And what can we do to remind the young peo­ple of our nation — strike that, the peo­ple of our nation — strike that, the peo­ple of our world—that rhetoric leads to hatred, and hatred leads to murder?

One thing we must do is stop hid­ing uncom­fort­able truths from our young peo­ple. When we ban a book because it might make a child uncom­fort­able, we are excis­ing from our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry a wrong that, for­got­ten, we are liable to repeat. We Jews like to say, ​“nev­er again,” but if stu­dents in Depart­ment of Defense schools can no longer read 1984 or Fahren­heit 451, if the stu­dents of Chan­dler don’t know why it’s ter­ri­fy­ing when a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date says ​“one more child to sac­ri­fice on the altar of open bor­ders” (for the record, because accu­sa­tions of chil­dren sac­ri­ficed to immi­grants is inspired by the Blood Libel), if we pre­vent pro­test­ers who make us feel like the bad guys from point­ing out that, from time to time, we may in fact be the bad guys… then ​“nev­er again” becomes an emp­ty phrase. And the Holo­caust and its hall­marks — demo­niza­tion, mass roundups, incar­cer­a­tion with­out tri­al, vio­lence against a scape­goat­ed minor­i­ty — will hap­pen again. If kids don’t learn what hap­pened, in hon­est, uncom­fort­able detail, it will not only hap­pen again — it’ll be much clos­er to home this time.