“...under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere…One is tempted to recommend the story [of Denmark] as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had."
-Hannah Arendt
How do you teach the Holocaust to grade school students? It’s the kind of question that makes you say “well that’s a real pickle.” There is no shortage of novels, including children’s novels, about an atrocity that seems unspeakable but still affects how our world works today, and that demands to be taught with historical accuracy and sensitivity and compassion and proper context, and unless you are a Florida state legislator, you can understand the importance of making sure that you approach this topic in schools with a great deal of preparation. My wife used to teach junior high language arts, and has a book called Holocaust And Human Behavior, published by the Boston-based nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves, which develops curricula that “uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate”. Their book about how to teach the Holocaust clocks in at a nice, concise 734 pages, including lessons on how human societies choose to create “in” and “out” groups, the repercussions of the first world war and how the choices made by the winners of that war affected Germany, the fragility of democracy demonstrated by the Weimar republic and the choices made by the people who lived in it, the rise of the Nazi party and their choices related to the growing anti-semitism in Germany, the impact of propaganda on the choices that German citizens made, the choices that other European powers made in response to Germany’s growing aggression, the choice of the global community to develop a legal framework to prosecute the architects of the Holocaust at Nuremberg, the postwar era and how we chose to memorialize the Holocaust, and finally what our responsibilities are to participate in the world as caring citizens.
To the extent that I can find a common thread in an exhaustively researched curriculum guide that is over 700 pages long, it’s this: everyone makes choices, and those choices add up. The choices we make affect other people and the systems in which we live. And here’s the problem: we do not always make choices using a solid framework or process, and sometimes we kind of half-ass our decisions based on incomplete information or our own internal inertia. But the choices still add up. The Holocaust happened because of choices people made, and I don’t mean that every single Nazi soldier woke up every day and said “I am looking forward to committing an atrocity today”. Most of them were told what to do, or were fed a story, and made the choice to just kind of clock in and go along with it. They weren’t monsters, they were ordinary people who did monstrous things, because that’s what everyone was doing, which has implications for us today, as we all will often make decisions without thinking too deeply, based on what everyone is doing. In one particularly revealing part of this curriculum guide, there’s an excerpt of a 1971 interview between journalist Gitta Sereny and former death camp commandant Franz Stangl. As Stangl put it, “of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again work.” When asked if he could have done anything to stop what was happening in the camps, he said “no, no, no. This was the system…it worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.”
Stangl was obviously very shaken during the interview, which Facing History included to show how, with enough time, a person could oversee and enforce an atrocity, and just think of it as “work” and think of it as “irreversible”. There was nobody around Stangl during the war that would have made him see the Holocaust as anything other than work. Had there been different people around Stangl, would he have made some of his choices differently? The best answer is in Denmark.
The Danish resistance to the Nazis was, to put it mildly, incredible. While Denmark basically had to surrender to Germany immediately upon being invaded - they didn't have any meaningful military strength that could resist an invasion and everyone knew it - the entire nation was united in their project of making sure the occupiers got as little done as possible. Sabotage and mass strikes were a regular occurrence throughout the country. The Danish people blew up their entire naval fleet all at once in 1943 so the German soldiers couldn’t commandeer their ships.The state church of Denmark, which did not have a particularly centralized structure or political slant, strongly denounced the occupation and any persecution of the country’s Jewish population. The Danish king and parliament were allowed to remain in the government during the occupation, but all of them resigned simultaneously the second that the Nazis tried to enlist them in relocating the country's Jewish population. But more importantly, an estimated 7,800 Jewish people lived in Denmark during the Nazi occupation, and over 7,200 of them were successfully, and secretly, smuggled out of the country to still-free Sweden, before they could be relocated to death camps, thanks in part to a leak from a double-agent German diplomat named G.F. Duckwitz. The fishermen who steered the boats to Sweden even carried handkerchiefs doused with cocaine to numb and throw off the German dogs sniffing for hidden human bodies in the hull. One of the fishing boats is on display at the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. The evacuation to Sweden was the most successful act of mass resistance by an occupied country during the second world war, and we see a glimpse of it in Number The Stars, the first of two 1990s Newbery winners from Lois Lowry. As she would do a few years later with her mythic-tier children’s novel The Giver, Lowry shows her complete mastery of tight writing - the entire novel is about 120 pages long with zero wasted words - and of managing tension and dread, in a Copenhagen where there are soldiers on every corner and banging on every door in the middle of the night, asking pointed questions about who you are and where you’re going, soldiers who are happy to shoot you in the head if you answer incorrectly.
It’s against this backdrop that Lowry places Annemarie Johansen and her friend Ellen Rosen. The Rosens are Jewish, and therefore in terrible danger as the Nazi occupiers are about to begin their attempt to relocate all of the Danish Jews to a concentration camp. The Johansen family takes Ellen in as their own as Ellen’s parents get connected with the Danish resistance fighters separately, and the entire Rosen family is successfully smuggled onto a boat to Sweden. In the book’s climactic moment, Annemarie delivers one of the cocaine-doused handkerchiefs to the fisherman smuggling her best friend to freedom.
Number The Stars is outstanding as a historical fiction novel for children, in terms of its structure, pacing, and characters. But learning about the Danish resistance, both through this novel and through Lowry’s afterword where she explains which parts of the novel were most firmly rooted in the historical record, was jaw-dropping for me as an adult. I had no idea about any of this. And I think that’s a very important part of what you can teach children about the Holocaust: not only the kind of person that can be complicit in great evil, but the kind of person that can end up becoming a hero.
Hannah Arendt is the historian who gave us the phrase “the banality of evil”. She coined that phrase while on assignment for The New Yorker, writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust. Eichmann's evil was banal: he didn't spew anti-semitic hatred from the stand, and he didn't seem to be motivated by genocidal mania or any kind of hatred at all. His boss asked him to find the most efficient way to murder millions of people, and he kind of shrugged and got to work because that was his job. In his trial, Eichmann, part of the brain trust that engineered an unspeakable atrocity, didn't even come off as intelligent, or all that interesting; Arendt noted that he was boring and dim on the stand. It's the same point we want to teach others today when we put together lesson plans about the Holocaust: atrocities are not committed by a large group of monsters. They are committed by a small group of monsters and then a much larger group of people who choose to clock in and go to work every day. That's really important, because you clock in and go to work every day right now, and I do too, and we have to make sure we're aware of everything that we're clocking in for, and that we push ourselves to be brave enough to stand in the way, to make a different choice, if the wrong people start telling us what to do when we clock in. Evil is not dramatic. Evil is boring, evil is spreadsheets, evil is a job, and because of that, the choice to be complicit in evil doesn't always feel like one.
That's easily the most famous takeaway from Arendt's reporting, but it's not the only thing she wanted to communicate. She wanted to tell her readers that "it could happen here", but she also stated, very explicitly in the quote at the top of this essay, that "it did not happen everywhere". If evil is a job, you still need people to do that job, and it’s very hard to do your job when you’re surrounded by an entire nation that agrees that your job is evil. That’s what happened to the German occupation of Denmark. The unwavering dedication to carrying out the Nazi mission wavered, because someone resisted, and someone else saw them resist and decided to do it too, and someone else saw that, and the Germans found it a lot harder to do their work with the same ruthless efficiency they were practicing elsewhere in Europe, and not just from the perspective of material effectiveness. In other parts of Europe, the Nazis had been able to easily convince themselves that what they were doing was just work, just part of an irreversible system, and the collateral damage was worth it; they had found it easy, morally speaking, to clock in every day and do their jobs. The Danes would not let them feel like this was easy, and every hesitation and qualm and misstep from the Nazis helped save lives in Denmark. And then, before you knew it, the Danes were blowing up factories, shutting down the economy, and evacuating their Jewish neighbors. If anyone can be complicit in evil, anyone can stop that evil and inspire others to do the same.
That’s what Lowry says in her afterword to Number The Stars. The Danish resistance was made up of “the very young and the very brave”, like every resistance movement throughout history, and they helped keep the world from sliding into irreversible horror. I can still be heroic like them, and you can too, if we’re brave enough to say when something is wrong, to refuse to clock in, to stop people from doing the job of evil. As Lowry put it, “the gift of a world of human decency is one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.”
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2017 medalist, The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill.