The Holocaust Comes to a Vote

PHOENIX—In the wood-paneled chamber of the Arizona House of Representatives, facing canvases depicting scenes of the Grand Canyon and other Southwestern themes, Republican House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers presided on a recent Thursday morning over a special gathering. There were students, teachers and clergy, and among them a handful of extraordinary activists: all elderly and frail, all wearing matching black baseball caps with yellow lettering that read “Holocaust Survivor.”

They had come for the opening of an exhibition on the Holocaust in the adjacent Old State Capitol, but they were also there to lend their voices to a new bill, one that would require Arizona public schools to teach the Holocaust.

Ensuring that one of the most tragic and central events of the 20th century be part of the history curriculum might seem like an obvious “yes” vote, a ceremonial day at the State House. But the vast majority of American states have no such requirement, and those that do are largely dominated by the Democratic Party or home to the largest Jewish populations.

The Arizona bill is part of a push over the past few years to get Republican-leaning states on board, motivated by a recent rise in anti-Semitic violence and new polls showing alarming numbers of Americans either know little or nothing about the Holocaust. The movement to fill the gap has brought together leaders of varied religious faiths and, often, opposing political blocs—and Arizona has emerged as something of a test case.

With its history of bucking convention on social issues, Arizona might seem an unlikely place for advocates to rest their hopes. It never adopted daylight savings; for several years it infamously refused to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday when it first became a federal holiday.

So far, however, the Holocaust bill appears to be a model of how different parties can find some common ground by looking through their own distinct lenses. It was introduced by a Democrat, 26-year-old Rep. Alma Hernandez from Tucson, and won the early support of the Republican House speaker, Bowers, who represents the conservative bastion of Mesa and has been a favorite target of the political left for some of his views on social issues. “I literally did not have him on the list as being an ally, but he has been,” Volker Benkert, a professor at Arizona State University who studies the roots of genocide, told me in his office in Tempe recently. “He clearly cares.”

Another surprise supporter was state Rep. John Fillmore, the Republican vice chair of the Education Committee, who was elected on a platform to “stop this mad dash towards socialism.” He found his way to backing the bill by couching his vote in libertarian terms, citing the need to heed the lessons of granting governments too much power over their citizens (in this example, the Nazi regime). “We as Americans take for granted so many of our freedoms and our liberties and don’t understand how close to tyranny we all are when we have overbearing governments,” Fillmore said before voting for the bill.

The bill sailed through the Education Committee in late January, passed the full House in late February and is now headed before the state Senate’s Education Committee on Tuesday, where if it passes it will go to the full Senate.

For supporters, the bill has an urgency that goes beyond the unsettling prospect that American kids don’t know about a horrifying event in living memory. As other states consider similar bills, Holocaust survivors themselves are dying off. The very youngest are now entering their 80s and there is a fleeting opportunity for the cause’s most convincing advocates to help make the case. Says Sheryl Bronkesh, president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association and the daughter of two survivors, “We had to plan for the moment when our survivors could no longer speak.”

The procession of stories at the recent House Education Committee hearing gives a sense of the power those advocates hold. Alexander White, his hands shaking, shuffled to the lectern: “My name was on Schindler's list,” he told the panel, relating how he was saved from the Nazis by industrialist Oskar Schindler. “I was in the concentration camp of Krakow-Plaszow, the last survivor of my family.”

White, who was born in Poland as Alexander Bialylwos-Weiss, told lawmakers that his main message when he shared his experience with young people lies in some his father’s final words to him.

“Promise me something,” his father requested. “I pray to God that you will survive. And if you do survive, promise me you are going to be a mensch—a decent human being, kind, charitable, a good citizen.”

Another survivor who testified that day is Oskar Knoblauch, who spends much of his time sharing with students his experience as a Jew in Poland who was saved by what he calls a number of “upstanders,” including a Nazi officer.

“I show them on the screen nasty pictures,” Knoblauch told members of the Education Committee. “They need to know this. They need to know the truth. Let’s not hide the truth. Let’s teach it openly. Let them know this. Let them become better citizens. Let them create a better country.”

White is now 96 and Knoblauch 94. They are among the rapidly dwindling number of survivors with adult memories of the Holocaust. As their cohort dies off, historians see this moment as a turning point in how the Holocaust will be remembered.

“We are moving from a kind of communicated memory—we can talk to witnesses of the time, victims, perpetrators, bystanders, they’re still around—to kind of a cultural memory, something that is constructed by folks like me, frankly," Benkert, the Holocaust researcher, told me.

Benkert worries that without the survivors, and the immediacy they lend, all the commemorating and chronicling of the Holocaust—the memorials and museums, the films like “Schindler’s List”—will still fail to keep the horror and its lessons sufficiently alive in the public consciousness.

“I had always thought that this construction of Holocaust memory is pretty much set in stone,” he explained. “In fact, it is set in stone. There's this big Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It is much a memorial to Germany's shame as it is a memorial to some sort of success in remembering it. It's a whole city block. But at the end of the day, that memorial, or even ever-more visitors to the Holocaust museum in Washington, is meaningless unless we gain this transmission again and again and again. Right now, we’re not winning.”

The data is steadily more troubling. A 2018 poll showed that two-thirds of millennials are not familiar with Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where historians estimate that from 1940 to 1945 more than 1 million people—Jews and non-Jews—perished.

More recently, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found a majority of Americans don’t know key facts about the Holocaust, including that 6 million Jews were exterminated. “This raises an important question,” Pew’s report says. “Are those who underestimate the death toll simply uninformed, or are they Holocaust deniers—people with anti-Semitic views who claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests?”

Benkert sees a more comprehensive effort to teach the Holocaust to a new generation of young people as among the most promising ways to make sure the truth survives—and the Holocaust doesn’t slip through the cracks of collective memory.

In the United States, Holocaust education was first mandated in California’s school system in 1985, followed by Illinois in 1989; New Jersey in 1991; and New York and Florida in 1994. That first wave was followed by a long lull. Then in more recent years, grassroots movements pushed to get such a requirement adopted in Rhode Island (2011); Pennsylvania (2014); Michigan (2016); Connecticut (2018); and Oregon (2019).

Until recently, however, only one strongly Republican state had passed such a law: Indiana, in 2007. But in 2018, after a 13-year lobbying effort by a Catholic middle-school teacher and his students, Kentucky’s Legislature adopted a mandate to teach all public school students about the Holocaust. And last year, Texas joined the group after a lawmaker was “shocked” by the public opinion polls indicating how little young people know about the Holocaust.

The legislation now being considered in Arizona, House Bill 2682, is one sentence long. “The State Board of Education,” it reads, “shall include a requirement that pupils be taught about the Holocaust and other genocides at least twice between the seventh and twelfth grades.”

The main sponsor Hernandez had was a schoolteacher, Theresa Dulgov, who was rescued from the Nazis by Catholic nuns in Hungary. She says she proposed the bill because she believes requiring the Holocaust be taught is now more important than ever. She told me in the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Old State Capitol that she was spurred to action by “the rise of anti-Semitism and everything that is going on—the hatred not only against the Jews but other people.”

Indeed, other advocates of teaching the Holocaust in Arizona have drawn parallels between the early phases of government-sanctioned xenophobia in Germany in the 1930s to some of the harsher detention policies for undocumented immigrants in recent years in the United States.

“The whole thing that drives me crazy is the border,” Elly Orrin, 88, told me at a recent luncheon for Holocaust survivors at Phoenix’ Beth El Synagogue. “I’m what, a hundred miles from it? These are people that we are holding—live people, that feel the same way we do. As if anyone has anything to do with where they were born.”

While it might seem hard to raise objections to teaching the Holocaust, the legislation being debated in Arizona has also triggered an awkward conceptual debate over whether it should take precedence in schools over the history of other genocides—including of the Native Americans, whose eradication was much closer to home.

Some on the left of the political spectrum express concern that it’s privileging one group’s suffering over others. “There are giant gaps and voids in our history,” Rep. Geraldine Peten, a Democrat who represents the Phoenix suburbs and voted in favor of the Holocaust education bill, said at the Education Committee’s hearing. “Let’s begin with slavery, the Trail of Tears, the genocide of many Native Americans. Our history is sanitized, often to make other people feel comfortable.

“My hope is that at some point this country can come together to create an authentic, comprehensive curriculum, not just highlighting certain areas,” she added.

Meanwhile, more conservative skeptics have raised the slippery-slope concern that after the Holocaust every ethnic or religious group will want a mandate to teach students about their collective experience with discrimination—what some have come to call “the persecution Olympics.”

Michael Beller, a co-founder of the nonprofit Arizona Teaching the Holocaust and another leading organizer of the push for a mandate, has a ready answer for why the Holocaust is unique. "The Holocaust is different,” he told me over lunch. “It involved 50 countries, on multiple continents, and there were direct policy decisions the U.S. made that led to the deaths of primarily Jews. It was also industrialized, mechanized hate.”

It is a line of reasoning that so far seems to be getting through on both sides of the aisle—in Arizona, as well as politically diverse states like Colorado and Wisconsin, where similar efforts are also now underway.

Speaker Bowers, as he presided over the special gathering in the House chamber with Holocaust survivors, shared that he recently read “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” the 1996 book by Daniel Goldhagen, a former Harvard professor, that he described as a lesson in how average citizens can acquiesce to “their lesser angels—to become without conscience.”

“Small and simple things multiply and become massive,” Bowers said. “That can be for good or ill.”