Day 20: Learning About the Holocaust
We went to the library to pick out some books today. I thought it would be a great opportunity for Cambria to check out some good books - especially since she'll have so much free time this weekend as she'll be grounded...her acting out behavior has been met with understanding and patience for a while now and it's time to get real with the consequences.
Anyway, I picked out a few books that I thought would be good for her, and I let her pick out some books herself. When we got home, we crawled in my bed and decided to do some reading. We got to one of her books, "The Search," which unbeknownst to me was about the Holocaust. I encourage learning about different world events, even the horribly tragic ones. So Cambria began reading it out loud and it started off fine. It's depicted through a comic style so it really kept her engaged. But then she started reading about how the main character's parents died - they were murdered. And Cambria just burst out crying. With huge tears rolling down her cheeks, she expressed her painful sympathy for the main character. She couldn't possibly imagine how sad that must have been for her. And she said how incredibly sad she'd be if that ever happened to her.
I gave her a hug and let her know how sad I was that the whole thing had happened too. It was truly one of the worst things that's ever happened in the world and there was a world war because of it, and we eventually won. But I asked her to take a break so I could read some of the book first. I scanned through the rest and decided that this was too much for Cambria at this age. I wasn't sure that she'd be able to handle learning the details about this right now - how millions of women and children were murdered as well. And for what? Because some idiot decided to convince a massive number of people that Jews were rats and the scum of the Earth? That the elite race was people with blonde hair and blue eyes? That everyone else was SO bad they deserved to die? How do you explain this to an 8 year old?
I told Cambria that I felt it was best for her to wait a couple years and then she could learn about this. That it was just too sad for her. But she insisted - literally started crying because she wanted to read it that bad. She kept promising me that she wouldn't cry if I'd let her read the book. Of course I giggled and told her she was already crying...so she'd have to get a hold of herself first.
So I made a really tough choice. How much do I protect my little girl from the harsh realities of the world? How do I know whether she can handle it or not? And then I thought about all the kids who don't have a choice. They have to learn extremely tough lessons early on in life and not from a book - from experiencing it themselves. I decided I would let her read the book. And I sat next to her the whole time.
She said she wishes she could go back in time and change this from happening. She said if Martin Luther King Jr. were there, he'd find a "peaceful way to kill all the bad guys." She said she heard that people have been working on making a time machine for awhile now and hopefully when they do, they can go back and save all those lives. Of course we haven't talked about how that would effect the present or the future. And I haven't mentioned that while it seems unfair and it's incredibly tragic, everything does happen for a reason. Who wants to hear that after learning about something like this anyway.
But I did tell her that we can only control ourselves. We can't control anyone else, but we get to decide how we feel, how we act, how we think and what we believe. The people who had to go through that horrific event were some of the strongest people ever. The survivors have told stories of being prisoners and how they dealt with it. Very often this theme will come up - the guards had control over many things, but they could never control what happened on the inside. Many survivors were able to live with peace on the inside, despite what happened on the outside. And this is remarkable.
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