Dear Germany: Have you learned anything?

This is only my one little anecdotal tale, dealing with ordinary German citizens, but, its all I have to go on, and I would just assume it is not representative of all Germans, but certainly representative of some...

When my boys were in grade school, my older boys class was studying WW11, and specifically the Holocaust...each student was assigned a specific subject, and had to do extensive research on that subject, and then they had to present it to the class...

My sons specific topic of research was Adolph Eichman, and I do remember that he had a lot of books, taken out of the library, ,dealing with the Holocaust, and I also had a few paperback books, in my own personal library, dealing with the Holocaust..and fortunately for my son, I had one old paperback book, falling apart practically that dealt only with Eichman...in the middle of the book, there were pages and pages full of pictures of concentration camps, and gruesome pics of the crematoriums, of people who were hung, of firing squads, and lots of pics of naked dead bodies, piled up by the hundreds....it was all very hard to look at, yet it was the truth of the matter, and my son was very intent on studyint these pics, and just full of questions, of "Why"..."Why and How could such a thing be allowed to happen"

My son had all these books on spread out on the kitchen table, and he and I were discussing these matters, when my younger son(4yrs younger than the older boy) and his little friend came into the house, and wanted to know what we were doing, and they looked with interest also, at these gruesome pics...and the were full of questions as well, and I explained to them what these pics were and what they meant, as best as I could, considering their age range, which was probaby around 9yrs old...the older boy being 13...

And I thought nothing of this...but the next day, the mother of my younger sons friend, came storming over to my house, demanding to know why I dared to show her son such pics, and how dare I mention, that this happened in Nazi Germany(she was a woman born in Germany, married an American GI, and then came to the USA)....

I explained to her, the interest all the boys had in these books and pictures, and had just assumed, quite unwisely, that her son knew something about the history of his mothers home country...

Apparently I was mistaken...this woman just floored me...she was convinced that the whole story of the Holocaust was overblown, that very few Jews were slaughtered, that Hitler and his henchmen were not really as bad as Americans made them out to be...and that I should not be telling such tales...

I politely told her to get the hell out of my house, and not to come back...she was just outraged....she really did think she could bully me, into her warped way of thinking...it was clear that she did not wish for her son to be informed of such things...wonder how she thought she could prevent him from learing about WW11, and the Holocaust...sooner or later, he would learn about it in school, or from his own personal reading...

To this day, I have never been able to understand why she thought this way....I wondered about what she had learned about her country in school, or from her family, and was she just in denial and deluded...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.