Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

"In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II."

History . . . of warnings ignored. We can only speculate about why. As for me, I suspect it was entirely about "political expediency" - a plan that would have been inconvenienced if not ignored .<sigh>

There is another take-away, imho, in the article, perhaps in that play, that being Strathairn's observations about the dilemma of what and when to dump knowledge of "real life horrors or atrocities" into the lives of children i.e. at what age and to what extent.

Anyone with children in their lives faces a similar dilemma about many topics. Parents need to contribute input about their opinions to the folks who create the curriculum. School Districts? State Department of Education? Federal Standars? Teachers often feel like they are not heard, their opinions not valued in curriculum planning - yet they are with a classroom full of children for the school year so in a position to provide valuable insight.

Mention of historical atrocities in school, especially those in which people who experienced them are still living, provides opportunity for parents to decide whether or not to discuss more details at home about reality - if they know - depending on a child's interest and maturity level.

I don't know how it is these days, if what is taught in schools only touches on events without the fully whammy of inhumanity also being presented. That perhaps is still left for students who are academically inclined to do their own research, if they have an interest; for those in debate class (we only had an extra curricular debate club) and the teachers to wrestled with addressing. These issues too are the far-reaching after effects of armed conflict and/or victimizing of any targeted demographic

excerpt:
"If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.

“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.

“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?

“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”

Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity."