"for the sake of humanity"… A small town American high school history project changes lives worldwide. These are the observations of a veteran teacher- on the Power of Teaching, the importance of the study of History, and especially the lessons we must learn, and teach, on the Holocaust. Click on "Holocaust Survivors, Liberators Reunited" tab above to begin.
WOW what a book, what a very well deserved tribute to those liberating soldiers – whose simple task of just doing our job – nonetheless
became the ANGELS OF OUR LIVES, and it is also a tribute for us, the ones who were liberated on that train on that fateful day of April 13 1945.
For me, it is an honor that you have found quite a number of words of mine from the Hudson Falls meetings and segments of my memoirs to
be worthwhile to include in this remarkable book.
author and leslie meisels, Nov. 2015
Without your work, without your inquisitive mind, without your beyond the call of duty and dedication to carry out the work what you are doing,
to which Frank Towers gave you his cooperation and support to the end of his life, this whole worldwide movement bringing us together
would have been lost in the annals of the horrors of the Holocaust and the chronicles of WWII.
Never in my dreams I thought that ever in my life I will meet those soldiers who gave me back my life with liberating the train. Through your work this
unimaginable new miracle happened to me. I have met seven of them developed warm friendship with Carrol and Frank and their families.
The sweet memory of their friendship will remain with me to the end of my life. I do not think that aside of a few coincidental happy occasions that
there are liberated survivors of the Holocaust who did ever met in person – or through our/your worldwide movement – the soldiers who liberated them.
And here we are hundreds of us thanks to you Matt.
You deserve all the accolade whatever is coming your way. I think George Gross describes it most eloquently – through his own lifetime experiences –
what it takes for a teacher to do the work what you are doing and the way you are doing it.
I am groping, looking, searching to find words to describe the feeling and gratitude what makes to us survivors to our children, grand and great-grandchildren to
– through you – belonging to this worldwide movement created and keep going by you.
I would be amiss if I would not mention the tremendous impact what your ongoing blogs do. It is constantly keeps all of us abreast of what is going on.
I hope and pray that you would be able to continue it for decades to come.
“The Holocaust is one of the most well-documented events in human history. And yet some people, driven by hate and antisemitism, try to deny it today.” -UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
ONE STAR! “Another great work from the Holocaust Factory run by zionist [sic] media. Any truth finder should read Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality as the beginning step to enlighten themselves!”
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The reviews for the new book are slowly coming in, and above is but one example. It was not unexpected. In fact, the first response I got after the book hit the market was an email at my school from a Holocaust denier, offering me a free book to ‘educate me’. That was very nice.
The fact that they call our American soldier–eyewitnesses liars just blows my mind. Below is the part of the chapter I wrote near the end on my experience with Holocaust deniers.
You’re an emotion [sic] and propaganda-susceptible gullible fool.
You’re ‘teaching history’ and not going into the fraudulently alleged homicidal gas chambers? Or do you subconsciously already know it’s bullshit?
There were NO fake shower rooms disguised as gas chambers. That’s a racist anti-German blood libel. Shame on you. The Bath and Disinfection 1 facility was just that!
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There were no ‘gas chambers’ other than delousing facilities to keep the prisoners healthy. Allied bombing causes [sic] disease and starvation because the camps could no longer be supplied by Germany.
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The ‘6 million’ number is a HUGE exaggeration. Jews use the holocaust [sic] to garner sympathy and provide cover for their war crimes against the Palestinians. We studied this in college.
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It comes with the territory, I suppose, that if you are passionate about teaching the Holocaust and attract high profile attention, the trolls will begin their attempts to worm their way into the narrative. It began immediately after the very first reunion in 2007. I had received hundreds of emails from all over the world in support of my project, but I also got my first taste of this aberrant phenomenon known as Holocaust denial. Three emails, out of over three hundred, spewed forth their hate, with one containing in the subject line: ‘SIX MILLION LIVES=SIX MILLION LIES’.
My knee-jerk reaction was to delete them. But in the years that followed, as my blog built a following, more detailed attacks began; I began to archive them to create lessons for my students on Holocaust denial. One man, or woman—a hallmark of online Holocaust deniers is to hide behind false identities—even built a fictitious ‘news’ website attacking the first reunion, at a URL beginning with ‘blockyourid.com’:
‘Tank Commander Saves Fellow Jews From Gas Chambers’
Who Actually Believes This Garbage?
Izzie Gross, a tank commander, whose Sherman tank faced down a ‘Death Train’, shows up at a local high school with three survivors. Oddly the dates are off, the camps were liberated four months earlier, but who are we to doubt?
Maybe the Nazis were going to break through the Russia[sic] lines, crash in Auschwitz, and gas these poor survivors?
The denier posted false photographs of the liberators and me, claiming that we were all Jewish co-conspirators, when the opposite was true. My students were horrified, though they got a kick out of the photograph of me, which obviously was not me. The website was so bad that it did have a comical element; even commenters in a notorious white supremacist chatroom wondered if the author ‘JudicialInc’ was losing his touch.
Holocaust denial began with the perpetrators, their euphemisms, their secret orders, and their penchant for destroying and trying to hide evidence of their crimes. Even with the film footage of the liberators, or Eisenhower’s admonition to future generations, and the importance of the evidence and testimony presented at the postwar trials, Holocaust denial increases as time passes. And let’s not forget state sponsorship of Holocaust denial in certain quarters of the world.
I remember well one student’s incredulous question, after witnessing survivor testimony, directed at the survivor who had just described his experience. The survivor replied, ‘You see, it is easy for people to deny the Holocaust, because no one can truly grasp its magnitude and scope.’ ‘Unbelievable’ is a word used by liberator and survivor alike. And it will take effort to not allow the memory of the original eyewitnesses to vanish in the rearview mirror of history.
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‘The Dangers of Denial’
If one can deny one of the most well-documented events in human history, what else can one get away with ignoring? Or supporting?
History has proven that when one group is targeted, all people become more vulnerable. In other words, a society that tolerates antisemitism becomes susceptible to other forms of racism, hatred, and oppression. And we are unfortunately facing a world of rising antisemitism.
The internet makes it easier than ever for all sorts of information — and misinformation — to spread freely. So it’s more important than ever to stand up to hate and spread the truth. -UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
Below is a recent short educational video, produced by the USHMM. Note the photo at the 36 second mark. You know where you saw it first.
Today I received two timely comments on the last book I wrote. You can get it here.
I just finished A Train Near Magdeburg. Very powerful and well written, I thought. Couldn’t help but think about recent events. Hmmm. A good day to finish it.
Veterans Day.
I’ve read and read about the Holocaust the last few years. To the point that family and friends have questioned whether or not it’s”healthy” to do so. So much death and despair. I’ve questioned myself, as well. But as this book has made me see, I’ve barely touched on the history of the Holocaust or WW2. With the world we live in and political winds shifting so much, it is important to learn and to teach. I loved this book and learned so much more and I would recommend anyone with an interest in this history or someone just stumbling across it to read it cover to cover. Thank you!!
As you may be aware, we had an election here in the United States this week. You may or may not be satisfied with the outcome, but in the end, there are plenty of lessons to be gleaned through the prism of time, of historical experience, of detached analysis, of serious study, and yes, maybe of immediate emotion. Some of my profoundest insights spring from moments of intense personal emotion.
Today I’m offering up a chapter near the end of the book, the genesis of which was written on my blog this summer as I studied in Israel. I’d like to think that there is a lot of food for thought in the book, and a lot of ways at looking at ourselves, too. Like a friend said when she paraphrased Churchill, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going. Otherwise you just stay in hell.’ A nod to the soldiers out there on Veterans Day. My guys in the book called themselves ‘fugitives from the laws of averages’ —’just keep going’ was their mantra. Their friends were being killed. They were killing. Their president had just died on them. And then they stumbled upon this mysterious train.
Maybe we need to remember that sense of purpose, even when we think we have none.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘What do you want the world to be?’
I reached some of my final revelations in the summer of 2016 as the writing of this book drew to a close while I was studying in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. My fellow educators and I heard from dozens of excellent scholars and presenters in the field of the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; of antisemitism through the ages, and learned from the nuanced dissections what we thought we knew about the Holocaust. One of our final lectures was from was Dr. Yehuda Bauer, who at age 90 I consider to be the godfather of Holocaust historians. Sitting six feet away from me was a man who narrowly escaped the Holocaust himself, coming with his family in 1939 to the Palestine Mandate before the window closed. He became active in the resistance to British rule, and later fought in Israel’s War for Independence. Early in his career he was challenged by Abba Kovner to study the Holocaust when few others were doing it. He mastered many languages and it was he, after years of research, who concluded that the Holocaust was a watershed event in human history.
Dr. Yehuda Bauer. Palmach fighter, 1944-1949. Cow milker on Kibbutz, 41 years. Historian and I dare say, philosopher. Honored today to be in his presence.
Today, sitting in his presence, and listening to him, I got the feeling that I was listening to a philosopher, one who also had been milking cows on a kibbutz for the past 41 years.
So the question came, as it always does—
What is the overarching lesson that we should take away from the study of the Holocaust?
To paraphrase his answer, he simply said, ‘There is no lesson, except not to repeat it. The Shoah is used, all the time, for various agendas and causes…okay, fine. But there is no lesson.’
And I think I get it. When we talk about the Holocaust, its sheer magnitude and ‘unprecedentedness’ denies us the comfort of walking away with an overarching ‘lesson’. ‘Bullying gone wild’ it was not. Instead, he continued, ‘maybe the real question to ask yourself, and ask your students, is this—What do you want the world to be? And then, maybe it is time to introduce them to the study of the Holocaust, because maybe the Shoah is the exact opposite of what they envision for their world, unprecedented in scope and sequence—but it happened, which means it can happen again.’
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When we got back to the hotel to pack our bags and have a final evening to ourselves, we found out that for a few hours, we could not even cross the street to go back out—our hotel was now right on the route of one of the largest ‘gay pride’ parades in the world, right through Jerusalem. Security was tight; last year, a religious maniac stabbed six, and one teenage girl died here. But standing on the second story hotel balcony, I could hear Dr. Bauer’s words echoing in my ears, reminding us that democracy is not only very fragile, it is hardly even out of the cradle in the backdrop of world history. But what sets democracy apart from every other experiment in history, in its pure form and in theory, is its defense of minorities. It doesn’t exist yet, but maybe this form of government needs to be protected, and nourished. And maybe this is what the soldiers were fighting for. The world does not have to be united, and in fact it never has been and never will be. We argue and we disagree all of the time. That is as it is, and as it should be. At the end of the day, we either kill each other, or we live, and let live.
We decide.
Jerusalem, July 21, 2016.
I had never seen a so-called ‘gay pride’ event before, so as I watched, there was another revelation. For over an hour, my fellow educators and I witnessed miles and miles of this parade of young and old, of men and women, smiling and cheering and singing; I’m quite sure that many participants, and maybe even most, were in fact heterosexual. And for me, this experience became a metaphor for our common experience here in Jerusalem—from that hotel balcony, we were witnessing what in fact simply boiled down to a massive celebration of life. In studying the Holocaust together, we have plumbed the depths of the abyss that humanity is capable of, but not because of a fascination with evil and death; rather, it is because of the opposite, because of our commitment to humanity. For me also there is this burgeoning sense of righteousness in promoting the men who made a difference with their sacrifices in slaying the Nazi beast. And these American soldiers who encountered the Holocaust were not some kind of super-action heroes who arrived on the scene to save the day, just in the nick of time. As you have read, there was no plan, and they had no idea. What matters more is what they did when they encountered this trauma deep in a war zone with people still shooting at them, and later committing themselves in their sunset years to reaching out to others, so that, in Dr. Bauer’s words, the formally ‘unprecedented’ watershed event is not repeated. And maybe it’s time for a good long look at the world we live in today.
I have been on a journey that has consumed half the career that I never even set out to have. I have been joined by many along the way, and I thank the reader for also sharing it with me; that afternoon in Jerusalem, I parted with my educator friends with a final word in our closing discussion:
We are the new witnesses. We bear an awesome responsibility when we become aware, when we teach, when we communicate with others; now, more than ever, what we do matters, especially in entering this world of the Holocaust—because there is no past, and it is never over.
We are shaping human beings. We are cultivating humanity. There are always the children, the young; there is hope amidst all the darkness in the world. The tunnel can lead to the light.
WHY I LOATHE ‘THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS’By Matthew Rozell | TeachingHistoryMatters.com [revised and updated from the ten-year-old original-most-read-post-on-this-blog, May 1, 2026]
I want to start with an admission. I originally put off writing this post for a long time, because I was worried about coming across as a know-it-all — the teacher who can’t let people enjoy a book without turning it into a lesson. That is genuinely not my intention, and if it comes across that way at any point, I apologize in advance.
But something has kept happening at my book signings that I can no longer stay quiet about.
Time after time, someone picks up A Train Near Magdeburg mentions that they first learned about the Holocaust through The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and seems genuinely surprised — sometimes startled — when I mention that it is a work of fiction. Not based on a true story. Not a fictionalized account of real events. A fable — the author’s own word for it — written by Irish novelist John Boyne, who completed the first draft in roughly two and a half days.
One woman at a signing described scene after scene to me in vivid detail before I gently let her know that none of it had actually happened. She was grateful to be told. Another time I could predict what was coming before the person opened her mouth — sure enough: “It’s like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” I said, as kindly as I could: “But you know it isn’t true, right?” She did not.
I am not alone in finding this troubling, and I will get to what the scholars and major Holocaust institutions have actually said in a moment. But let me first explain the problem as plainly as I can, because I think every teacher, administrator, and parent who has encountered this book deserves a clear and honest accounting.
WHAT THE STORY IS — AND WHAT IT CLAIMS TO BE
In the two decades since its release, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the 2006 novel by Irish writer John Boyne, has seemingly become a bellwether of sorts, some middle school rite of passage in “learning about the Holocaust”. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and it is the book that has ‘introduced’ millions to the subject, and apparently not just children, though it is used in tandem with the horrific 2008 film based on it in literally thousands of classrooms across the country. So, I’ll get right to it—
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is NOT a book about the Holocaust and to deploy it in the classroom to ‘introduce children to the subject of the Holocaust’ is pedagogically unsound on several levels.
For those who haven’t read it: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a 2006 novel subtitled A Fable, later made into a major film in 2008. It tells the story of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of a Nazi commandant who has just been placed in charge of Auschwitz. Bored and isolated at his new home near the camp, Bruno wanders the perimeter fence and strikes up a friendship with Shmuel, a Jewish boy on the other side. In the final scene, Bruno crawls under the wire, puts on a striped prisoner’s uniform, and is led with Shmuel into a gas chamber, where both boys are killed as Bruno’s frantic parents search helplessly outside.
The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold over 11 million copies worldwide, and has been used in thousands of middle school classrooms across the country. USA Today called it “as memorable an introduction to the subject as The Diary of Anne Frank.” For millions of young people — and, as I have learned at signing after signing, many adults — it has become their primary introduction to the Holocaust.
That is the heart of my concern.
WHAT IS HISTORICALLY IMPOSSIBLE ABOUT IT
I want to be careful here, because I know that many teachers who have used this book care deeply about their students and are doing their best with limited time and resources. Nobody can be an expert in everything, and what follows is an observation, not an indictment of anyone’s intentions.
But the story is built on historical impossibilities, and teachers and parents deserve to know what they are.
Jewish children who arrived at Auschwitz were almost invariably sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival. They were not assigned to labor details, not given striped uniforms, not allowed to move about freely. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum’s own historical records, as a rule all children under sixteen were sent directly to be killed upon arrival. Of the more than 230,000 children deported to Auschwitz, only about 23,500 were ever registered as prisoners — meaning roughly 90% were murdered immediately, without ever being assigned a number, a uniform, or a place in the camp. They did not wander the grounds. They did not sit by the fence. They did not make friends. They were dead within hours of stepping off the train.The notion of a Jewish child sitting at the perimeter fence, bored and waiting for a friend, bears almost no relationship to how Auschwitz actually operated. The idea that the commandant’s young son could wander undetected through the camp, put on a prisoner’s uniform, and be herded into a gas chamber without a single guard recognizing him is not dramatic license. It is a fantasy.
Beyond the physical impossibilities, there is another problem the book glosses over entirely. Bruno and his family are depicted as essentially ignorant of the nature of what surrounds them — naive, sheltered, almost innocent bystanders. But as scholars have pointed out, a high-ranking Nazi officer’s family in 1942 would have been steeped in antisemitic ideology from birth. German children were indoctrinated through the Hitler Youth and the school curriculum. The idea that the commandant of Auschwitz had a son who knew nothing of the Final Solution, who called Hitler “the Fury” because he couldn’t pronounce Führer, is not charming naïveté. It is a profound misrepresentation of how ordinary Germans participated in, and were shaped by, the Nazi regime — and it lets them off the hook in ways that are historically and morally troubling.
Boyne has been honest about the gap between his story and historical reality. In a 2006 interview with Bookreporter.com, he explained that because he was changing aspects of concentration camp history to serve the story, he felt it was important not to pretend it could actually have happened. In his own words in the Irish Times, he has always described it as a fable — a story that relies more on moral truth than historical accuracy. That is a reasonable artistic position. The problem is that readers — especially young ones — do not always register what “fable” means, and they walk away believing they have just learned what the Holocaust looked like.
This matters enormously, because the Holocaust is already under relentless assault from people who deny it happened or call it exaggerated. Introducing the subject through a story its own author says prioritizes emotional truth over historical accuracy is, at minimum, a risk worth thinking very carefully about.
Holocaust Centre North in the United Kingdom is straightforward: there are many survivor accounts accessible to young readers, and novels more accurately grounded in fact, that teachers could and should use instead.
WHOSE GRIEF IS THIS, EXACTLY?
Here is what troubles me most, and it goes deeper than the historical details.
After the film’s final gas chamber scene circulated widely online, students began posting their reactions in the comments. I want you to read these carefully:
“My heart felt like it was getting slugged by a bowling ball when the mother was crying.”
“The sad part to me was when Bruno says ‘don’t worry we are just in here to get out of the rain.’ Poor boy.”
“I watched this in my school today and everybody cried.”
Notice who they are grieving for. Bruno — the German boy, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. The story is so skillfully constructed around his innocence and his tragedy that many students finish it having shed their tears for the perpetrators’ family, while the Jewish victims remain, essentially, a backdrop. Where is Shmuel’s story? Who were his parents? What was his life before the deportation, the cattle car, the camp? What did he love, fear, dream about? The book has almost nothing to say about any of that, because Shmuel exists in the narrative primarily as a mechanism for delivering Bruno to his tragic end.
A New York City English teacher and Holocaust educator wrote in Chalkbeat that rather than centering actual Holocaust victims, the tragedy as the story sees it is that the protagonist was not supposed to be killed. By the end, readers are left feeling sorry for Bruno’s grief-stricken father — who was, to be clear, in charge of running Auschwitz. Jewish Chronicle columnist Tanya Gold wrote in her 2022 review that Jews in Boyne’s work are reduced to landscape rather than real characters — props to a writer’s vanity and his readers’ desire to experience the Holocaust through the prism of a fictional Nazi who cannot be harmed by it. “This is not memorialisation,” she wrote. “It is certainly not teaching. It is erasure.” New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis was equally unsparing, writing in her 2008 review of the film that it “trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked [the Holocaust] for a tragedy about a Nazi family.” It is an emotionally charged story. It is not an honest one — and some of the most respected voices in journalism and Holocaust scholarship have been saying so for years.
THE CRITICAL THINKING IRONY
Here is something that genuinely surprised me when I first came across it. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas appears in the New York State Common Core State Standards materials as a sample student essay — held up as a model of strong analytical writing. The essay compares the book to the film and concludes that the story is about “an incredible friendship that triumphed over racism.” It is presented as rigorous critical thinking.
Nowhere in that essay — nowhere in the entire assignment — is it acknowledged that either the book or the film is a work of fiction. The most basic question you can ask about any text used to teach history — is this actually true? — was never raised. The Common Core held this up as an exemplar of analytical excellence, and the fiction at its heart went entirely unexamined.
I have actually used TBITSP in my own classroom, but deliberately, and for the opposite purpose: to have students identify the historical fallacies embedded in the story and practice the critical thinking the Common Core assignment never actually required. That, I believe, is a legitimate use of the book. Using it as a sincere introduction to what the Holocaust actually was is a different matter entirely — and one that requires students to already have solid historical grounding before they can begin to interrogate the fiction they are reading. If they had that grounding, they would not need the book in the first place.
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY — AND NO, YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THINKING THIS
I want to be clear: the concerns I have been raising for years are not just one teacher’s opinion. The weight of serious Holocaust scholarship — and the judgment of the institutions built to preserve this history — falls squarely on the same side.
Michael Gray, author of Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education and Teaching the Holocaust: Practical Approaches for Ages 11–18, conducted an empirical study of 298 students and published his findings in the peer-reviewed journal Holocaust Studies. His conclusion — and again, this is a scholar’s word, not mine — is that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is principally a curse for Holocaust education. Having looked at the evidence he marshals, I find it very hard to argue with that word.
The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education — the leading Holocaust education research body in the United Kingdom — has published research finding that many young people draw mistaken and misleading conclusions about the Holocaust directly from their engagement with this story, and that over a third of teachers in England are still using it in their lessons. Their Programme Director Ruth-Anne Lenga has said directly: “As a work of fiction and drama this book and associated film may have some worth, but as a resource for teaching this important history it is flawed. The potential for giving young people the impression that ordinary Germans were in some way ‘victims’ of the Holocaust is insensitive and dangerous. With the rise in antisemitism, this book could potentially do more harm than good.”
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum — the institution built on the actual site where over a million people were murdered — stated publicly in January 2020 that the novel “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.” Their specific criticisms include the book’s portrayal of Jewish victims as one-dimensional, passive, and unresisting — a depiction that reinforces exactly the “sheep to the slaughter” narrative that the historical record so powerfully contradicts. That is not a mild reservation from a distant institution. That is the place where it happened telling educators: do not use this book.
The data on what students actually believe after reading this book is perhaps the most sobering finding of all. According to the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, the novel and the film are the most-read book and most-watched film about the Holocaust among students aged 12–18 — with 75% of students who had read anything about the Holocaust having read this book, and 84% of those who had watched anything having seen the film. Those numbers surpass Anne Frank’s diary by nearly 60 percent. A separate 2009 study by the London Jewish Cultural Centre found that 70% of readers thought the novel was based on a true story. And — this is the one that stays with me — many students believed that the death of Bruno brought about the end of the concentration camps.
Read that last sentence again. Students walked away from their Holocaust education believing that the death of a fictional German boy ended the concentration camps.
Art Spiegelman, author of Maus — the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir widely considered one of the most important works of literature of the past fifty years — was asked about the book at a public event in Chattanooga, Tennessee in February 2022. He said he had no objection to teachers replacing Maus with a different Holocaust book in their curriculum — so long as it wasn’t The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. “The guy didn’t do any research whatsoever,” Spiegelman said. Even Boyne himself, asked to compare the two books, acknowledged that Maus is “better, no question about that. And a much more important book.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum does not single out the book by name in its public teaching guidelines, but its framework for evaluating Holocaust texts and films is unambiguous: materials that oversimplify the Holocaust, represent only one perspective, distort historical reality, or risk conveying the impression that it was inevitable rather than the result of human choices should be avoided. Scholars have described the film specifically as a false narrative that can distort people’s understanding of the Holocaust. The USHMM’s teaching resources remain the gold standard for any educator approaching this subject, and I encourage every teacher and parent to consult them before selecting any classroom material on the Holocaust.
DO TEACHERS WHO STILL USE IT HAVE A POINT?
In fairness, I want to acknowledge the other side, because there are thoughtful people who disagree, and I do not think they are acting in bad faith. Good teachers have used this book and defended it, and their concern for their students is real.
Some educators argue that the book functions as a gateway — that it gets students emotionally invested in the Holocaust who might otherwise disengage, and that a skilled teacher can use that emotional opening to guide students toward more accurate material. Boyne himself has said he has always been clear with young readers that it is fiction, and that if it has encouraged some of them to explore the subject further, that is perhaps its most significant achievement. I understand that argument, and I don’t dismiss it out of hand.
But I think the gateway argument collapses when you look at the UCL data honestly. The research does not show students being led through this book toward deeper and more accurate understanding. It shows them leaving with fundamental misconceptions firmly in place — misconceptions that will need to be entirely dismantled before genuine learning about the Holocaust can begin. You cannot use a text to correct the misconceptions it is simultaneously creating. That is not a gateway. It is a detour that costs classroom time we do not have.
And there is something else worth saying plainly. The Holocaust faces denial and distortion every single day, in classrooms, on social media, in legislatures. In that environment, introducing the subject with a story that frames German families as innocent victims of their own circumstances — that asks us to grieve most deeply for a Nazi commandant’s child — is not just a pedagogical problem. It is, however unintentionally, a contribution to exactly the kind of muddying of the historical record that Holocaust deniers exploit. The UCL’s Ruth-Anne Lenga said it directly: with antisemitism on the rise, this book could do more harm than good. I believe she is right.
There are better books. There are real stories. They are more powerful, more honest, and more respectful of the people who actually lived and died through this history.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers free, extensive, age-appropriate teaching guidelines — including a rubric for evaluating any text or film under consideration for classroom use. I strongly encourage every teacher and parent to read them before choosing any Holocaust material. The USHMM suggests three guiding questions worth keeping close before selecting any text:
Why should students learn this history?
What are the most significant lessons they should take from studying the Holocaust?
Why is this particular book, image, or film the right medium for the topics you want to teach?
Those questions, applied honestly to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, provide their own answer.
For an annotated guide to appropriate Holocaust reading for students in grades four through eight, see Karen Shawn’s What Books Shall We Choose for Our Children? — available here as a PDF, with an article of mine beginning on page 94.
For serious teachers of the subject, Essentials of Holocaust Education: Fundamental Issues and Approaches by Totten and Feinberg (2016) is an invaluable guide to the whole field.
I lost a book sale the day I first published this post. The woman I was speaking with set my book down and walked away, and honestly, I understand. Nobody likes to be told that something they found moving is not what they thought it was, and I have never wanted this piece to feel like an attack on readers who loved the book or teachers who used it in good faith.
But here is what I keep coming back to, after decades of conversations with Holocaust survivors, liberators, and the families of both. The real children of Auschwitz — the ones who actually died there, whose names are on record, whose families were torn apart and destroyed — deserve to be known as themselves. Not as a backdrop for someone else’s story. Not as the supporting cast in a fable about a German boy’s innocence and a Nazi father’s grief. They deserve the full weight of honest history, told as carefully and truthfully as we can manage.
The Auschwitz Memorial said it. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education said it. Holocaust Centre North said it. A peer-reviewed academic study called it a curse. Art Spiegelman said it. And I am saying it too — not because I think I am smarter than anyone, but because twenty years of sitting with survivors and listening to what they endured has taught me that their real stories are extraordinary enough. They do not need to be replaced by a fable. They do not need to be filtered through the grief of the people who ran the camps.
They kept their promise to remember and to bear witness. The least we can do is tell the truth.
Matthew Rozell taught history and Holocaust studies at Hudson Falls High School in New York for over three decades. He is the author of A Train Near Magdeburg and the Things Our Fathers Saw series. The feature film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production, coming 2027. Visit MagdeburgTrain.com to follow its progress.
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