by joanne catz hartman
“You tell her,” my husband says to me.
“No, you,” I suggest, but I don’t really want him to. I’m just not ready. “Perhaps my mother should?” She did a pretty good job of explaining it to me.
We don’t want her to hear about it from a friend. Or worse, from a friend’s older sibling.
This is pretty much how it goes when my husband and I discuss having “The Talk” with our 8-year-old daughter.
When my friends mention “The Talk,” they’re referring to the one about the mechanics of reproduction. In my family, “The Talk” refers to something far more complex and difficult to explain.
The Shoah, the Holocaust.
We’ve already had the other discussion, the easy one. She knows how babies are made; we’ve told her simply and straightforwardly because the questions were asked. But just because she hasn’t asked about the Holocaust does it mean we shouldn’t tell her yet?
In response to a column that ran earlier this year, a j. reader wrote that he was shocked that I didn’t want to explain the Holocaust to a young child.
He believed “we have to teach our children and grandchildren about that terrible lesson that our grandparents went through.” And while I agree that the Holocaust needs to be taught and discussed so it will never happen again, I think the discussion needs to be age-appropriate.
Another reader felt that I had done the right thing by refraining from explaining the details of the Holocaust to my then-much younger daughter, and she cited an academic study where the children themselves had wished they’d been older before learning about it.
So, when is the right time for “The Talk”? And just how do I broach the topic and engage in a discussion about the slaughter of 6 million? I don’t know what to say or where to start — I’m tongue-tied when it comes to conveying the information that is part of our family’s history, stories that have the potential to trigger nightmares and set up horror and fear.
It shouldn’t be this difficult — I’m not usually hesitant about explaining most things. I’m a trained professional, with a teaching credential and a decade of experience behind me.
I’ve talked about this period of history with sixth-grade students when we read Uri Orlev’s book “The Island on Bird Street.” Sure, students were far more interested in discussing the boy’s pet mouse, Snow, instead of the details of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the reasons why he was hiding. So we focused on the concept of surviving on one’s own and explored and focused on the causes of intolerance. This was enough for 11-year-olds, and the background and exposure helped set the stage for two years later, when in eighth grade they read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and met Auschwitz survivor Ernie Hollander, who shared the story of his family’s capture and his own story of survival.
“Don’t rush it,” Morgan Blum, director of education at the Holocaust Center of Northern California, reassures me. There’s time; no need to schedule an immediate family trip to the museum.
She cautions that hearing too many graphic details could be traumatic. “Stressing life as opposed to stressing death” is important, she says, so children have a picture of what life was like before the Nazis, so that the tragedies aren’t the entire picture of a person’s life.
“Below eighth grade it can be confusing,” Blum explains. The center’s target audience is eighth- to 12th-graders. For sixth-graders she recommends stories like my mother’s, of the Kindertransport, and stories of hidden children. She advises being careful of exposing them to too much, like the details of extermination camps.
Frankly, I feel relieved.
With the information I now hold, and what I know about my own child’s capacity for understanding, “The Talk” will wait a few years, until my daughter’s older and a little less innocent; the details are now too much for her to understand. Perhaps then she’ll be better able to handle the scope and magnitude of this dark period of history. It’s OK that she gets it in pieces, in abbreviated versions, in watered-down stories.
And when the time comes to delve deeper and explain more, I’m glad that across the bay in San Francisco there’s a museum. And inside, willing experts well versed in “The Talk” are ready to help us.
Joanne Catz Hartman lives and writes in Oakland. She can be reached at jc_Hartman@comcast.net.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California