#as someone who lives in tennessee this is an outrage
When I was 14, it was a mandatory part of the history lessons to watch a holocaust document movie Escape From Sobibor. A few jews actually managed to escape from Sobibor’s concentration camp and it was their story, based on the escaped Jews’ experiences.
Teacher only warned at one point that “There’s going to be a bit bad scene next, close your eyes if you don’t want to watch”. Otherwise we watched it fully. Our class actually watched it twice - because we wanted to. Teacher only commented if there were some inaccuracies and answered our questions if we had any during the movie.
I can’t remember if I had read a book of a concentration camp survivor’s memoirs before that movie or afterwards. I think it was before, as I couldn’t watch the movie twice. I got a permission to sit in the hallway. I think the other students understood what the showers were and what was going to happen, but I had already read a book of the events and saw photos of the gas champers with permanent marks and stains from fingernails, vomit and shit on the walls.
It’s been a small life-time from the book and the movie but I still remember bits of it vividly. Especially from the book.
The woman was still a child in the concentration camp. I remember how she at one point got to peel potatoes with another woman. Whenever no one was looking, she ate the peel as fast as she could, eating faster than the middle-aged woman peeling the potatoes. She got angry with this girl and attacked her.
Another time she was taken to the line to the gas champers. When the guards weren’t watching, she dove into a ditch full of naked, dead bodies, and laid there still for 9 hours. That saved her life.
If we had lived closer to the central Europe, we would have visited the concentration camps like the local students do.
I would say that in the Europe, the holocaust’s memory is always present. We get to learn about it in very early age. Thus, from my perspective, banning Maus in Tennessee is nothing but antisemitism and trying to eradicate history and wash it cleaner. We DO know that Holocaust deniers exist, too, which is an insane concept to even comprehend.
Read Maus, especially if you’re American. Know that it will be triggering and hard to stomach - if that happens, congratulations. You’re a normal, empathetic person. I’m always upset for a long, long time when I get to read and encounter something horrible. I read a book of a Finnish famine - one of the worst in the history of the world - and the eyewitness testimonies of those two years, and I was horribly upset for 3 days. Even today, years later, I get really sad when I think about the events of that book.
That’s normal. You’re supposed to be upset when you encounter suffering and horrors of a fellow humans. I would be more concerned if you felt nothing!
Eventually, the upset will go away but the knowledge will not disappear. The knowledge is worth the upset, if you ask me (but you know yourself the best).
Life doesn’t arrive with trigger warnings and things can escalate to nightmarish if we’re not aware of the red flags - and banning Maus is one of the red flag.
