“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill.
It was Holocaust Remberence Day this week. And the story of a school board banning a book ran rampant through Social Media. In one of the states in our great country, close-minded School Board members felt the material contained “…rough, objectionable language in this book.” Apparently too rough for Eighth Graders. For easy math, those are students roughly 14 years old. The year I turned 14, ‘Romancing the Stone’ came out. It is wall-to-wall “rough and objectionable language.” If anything, 14-year-olds are exposed to even more questionable content just looking at tiktok. So what are they really trying to suppress?
If you have never read Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale I would encourage you to do it. The art is as fantastic as the story telling. Here is an excerpt of the book description:
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.
We can’t hide our children from the atrocities that were committed in the past. If anything, it is our duty to make sure they understand the horrors so they are never perpetrated again. Self-proclaimed pundits continually downplay the holocaust and make reference that “[This demographic] should be rounded up and put into concentration camps.” They haven’t a clue. While I have studied it, and seen films of the liberation of camps in World War II, I don’t have much of one. But, if books like this are banned, then teenagers, young-adults, won’t have a clue either.
Please do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book. Not just because it is a great book, but to stop the censorship by little minds who want to suppress students from learning history, so that those in power can repeat it. I’ve included a link to the first graphic novel. Or, if you want to go all in, get both in a great boxed set.
Get the book here: