by Gina Cariño
Home >> Child in a Horror House
Berlin’s social, economic, and cultural crème de la crème, old rich and newer rich alike, also Gentiles and Jews alike, built villas here and partied together in harmony. The idyllic atmosphere of the place was captured in paintings by the impressionist Max Liebermann, who lived there until he could no longer.
The Nazis came to power and some of them took a liking to the place, too. They confiscated the villas owned by Jews for their own use.
One of the lakeside villas appropriated by the Nazis is truly notorious. As you walk through the gate, you think “oh what a lovely mansion.� When you walk out later, you no longer think of loveliness.
The house we know as the Wannsee Villa was the venue of the Wannsee Conference. Here, fifteen men, SS man Heydrich the highest-ranking among them, ever so neatly outlined the “final solution� to the “Jewish question.� Today it is a memorial and education center.
The matter-of-fact, businesslike character of the minutes and documents that can be viewed there is chilling to the bone. What is worse, the spontaneous pogrom of a stupid mob, or planned, systematic mass abuse and murder by educated people who love Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Wagner?
The plasticized pages of a thick black folder tell what ultimately happened to The Fifteen. Not all got their rightful comeuppance. I also took time, while staring at the garden and the lake beyond, to listen to translated recordings of interviews, interrogations, and trials. I forgot about my son and his playmate.
Eventually they got rowdy and I found myself chasing them up one of the twin marble staircases and into a library. Instead of a librarian’s scolding, I got an invitation to leave the boys safe in her hands “so that they don’t see the pictures downstairs.â€? I said, “Oh, they’ve already seen everything.â€? Still she insisted on babysitting and took out what I saw were illustrated children’s books that taught anti-racist values in cute, euphemistic terms.
But I was going to explain things to my 8-year-old anyway. I wasn’t going to just leave him there staring at close-up photographs of hanged Jews, developing ghoulish instincts. He had visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam the year before, so this was part 2 of his Holocaust lesson.
Back downstairs, another parent debated with the guard, who, like the librarian, spoke out for the protection of the innocence of children. My co-parent clearly shared my ideas in this respect, ideas held in view of unavoidable contradictions in the larger scheme of things.
As far as I’m concerned, my son’s innocence is intact.
Why show them only the pretty lake? Give them history, give them truth. It’s never too soon.
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I think you are very lucky indeed to have such an intelligent and sensitive son. Not every 8 year-old would have been able to assimilate the images and what they represent.
Today so many children are exposed to violent images on TV, on the ‘Gameboy’ and in their ‘Playstations’. My 8 year-old thinks Nazis are the enemy only in his copy of ‘Commandos: Destination Berlin’. He is desensitized to images.
It’s hard to explain to children who are part of a dominant culture that their position is, at best, the whimsy of Chance.
Hello Gina,
This is a tough question.
I think that a kid could see holocaust pictures as long as he understands what he’s seeing and he can digest it. Otherways it can get stuck somewhere inside and hurt him.
When we see these real pictures and stories, what are we after? What are we looking for? Knowing more history, knowing the truth, feeling happy for not living at that time, watching some blood, finding out the exact way people were killed ????
Like when we watch the news on TV and they talk about a terrible car accident or a murder, should they show the whole scene?
I personally prefer not to see it, which doesn’t mean that I choose to close my eyes, or maybe I do.
Regards,
Cristina
Hello Gina,
It’s a tough question, that’s true, but I think we musn’t be blind to the truth. Kids need our protection but how far must we take it, to the point of making them ignorant of their past history? I don’t have children myself so I’ve not suffered yet the uncertainty of not knowing if you’re doing the right things for their education and their future lives, but I hope I will be able of showing them the reality in a way they’re not hurt by it. Complicated, obviously.
To me, the main problem nowadays is that kids receive all the Knowledge through TV, Internet, videogames, etc. Both parents are working so they can’t be there when they receive that knowledge to explain what it means, to make them distinguish between right and wrong, reality and fiction. Who’s to be blamed for that? I guess everyone and noone, it’s the kind of society we’ve created.
So, what’s the conclusion? None. Do what you feel is right about your own kids and pray for it to be the right decision.
Paloma
What an interesting experience for your family!
I remember a TV program about three months ago when some holocaust victim said they were alive to have to know to young people all what happened in those death fields.
In this program talked a very famous Spanish actress (MarÃa Galiana) who also told that the most terribly about this was people who participied in solving “the jew problem” weren’t monsters, they were normal guys as you or me that never questioned what they were doing.
It maybe too tough for children, but i think they’re lucky for knowing this horrible murder, because I think we have to learn from the History.
Best wishes,
Carlos..-
Hi Gina!!
This is a delicate issue.
Is it better to tell children all truth or hide it? In my opinion, I prefer to hide truth from children.
These days I am helping my neighbour to take care of their children, their mother is very very ill. It’s very hard to say that their mother is going to die in a few weeks. We have decided not to tell them the truth. I think that this decision is the best way to protect them.
Regards,
Leticia.
Hi Gina:
It’s a very interesting issue. I think that it is better for the kids to know everything about our history and its circumstances. That’s the best way to educate to our children about values for their future.
Guillermo
My mother always taught me not to hurt other people’s feelings. As far as I’m concerned, you can hurt a woman’s feelings if, despite not knowing her personally, you call her “arrogant”, “lamentable” or, even worse, a “child abuser”.
Isaak, it hurts my feelings when you attack my mother. She is exactly the opposite of how you seem to imagine her. I have been brought up by her in the same way she is now bringing up my brother. The three of us are completely normal people. I don’t think that we deserve such criticism. You don’t even know us.
Do not refer to my brother as if he was the Luka of Suzanne Vega’s song.
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Editor’s Note: The offending comments referred to in this message have been removed.
Thank you Paola.
Eamonn Doherty.
I don’t remember seeing any pictures of hangings. I think there was none. I remember seeing pictures of Nazis wearing Swastikas, and of Jews, including children like me, wearing Stars of David. There were also pictures of stores with doors marked with Stars of David. I related all this to the horrible and very sad story of Anne Frank. I visited her hideout behind a fake closet in Amsterdam on another trip, and after that, I read a lot about her and I wrote a composition that my teachers liked very much. I like history.
A tinky-winky, clowns-and-rainbows childhood is fine up until a certain age of intellectual maturity (children go to school because they can speak and rationalize). Children are indeed at a fundamental stage in their growth, but innocence and ignorance are not the same thing. Children are not stupid and though we should present things to them in a way that they can understand, they are still world citizens in the making, people who need knowledge. Certainly I wouldn’t sit down with my six-year-old and say “OK, today is the day we talk about the horrors of the Holocaust.” But if we happen to be in a place where this history was lived, why not explain to him/her what happened? A child knows when you are keeping something from him/her and if you don’t tell him/her, he/she will find out from someone else, wondering what the big secret was.
My jaded, morally and ethically “sound” childhood traumatized me more than finding out about the Holocaust, a normal part of history class. It’s funny how some parents and “educators,” Christians obviously, have no problem telling their children about the gruesome stoning of the martyr Stephen and how Christ’s back was beaten, literally, to a bloody pulp and yet they cover their eyes at the idea of finding out about genocide, something that happened, historically speaking, the day before yesterday.
Hi, the part 3 of the madness of the human race in the history, you could see near from Donosti, in Santillana del Mar. There are a Torture Musseum of the Spanish Inquisition. In the front door of the musseum there are an advertisement about childs under sexteen years old could not acced into the musseum alone, so, you must join with your child if you want that he see the musseum.
During the centuries XV, XVI and sucessive years, the Spanish Monarchy and the Catholic Church Principals, ideated a method to ‘purgue the soul of the impures’, and they thought up many different methods to do it, with the most severe machines to torture people. Only reading the inscription and the explaining to use any ‘gadget’, you can feel in your mind the same that those people felt in the past. I went out of this musseum with a very bad body, without colour in my face, and with a ‘knot in my stomach’.
You are doing very well in the education of your childs, showing them who are the people able to do for their ideology or their religion, and when your child is young, maybe is good that he pass a bad moment watching this musseums, becouse in the future he will not use this methods to achieve his objetives.
Hi Gina
I think is very difficult to explain to an eight years old child the terrible history about holocaust. But I think it’s necessary, because it was real, it’s a part of the history of the world. I don’t understand why some people prefer to hide them the truth. Nowadays our children are, day by day, watching violence on tv, on videogames,etc.
Gina. I agree is wrong to make children adult to fast. Just because they may be have to fight when adult, this no mean to beat on them now. is no good for them. Let children be happy children – time to be adult later.
Too bad Isaak!!!. It would have been enough to say that you didn’t agree. I wouldn’t have shown those pictures to my 8-year-old son either. But the fact of disagreeing doesn’t give us the right to insult other people.
JC
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Editor’s Note: The offending comments referred to in this message have been removed.
Gunther Grass once wrote – about 45 years ago – that Berlin is the city which most closely reflects the realities of our times; half a century later, now with bits of the Berlin Wall in collector’s hands all over the world, his statement is as true as ever. And like Oskar beat his tin-drum in the middle of the frightful turmoil, exposed to the cruel bloodshed in which Europe then waded, only makes me think of the atrocities shown on TV – every day anywhere, with or without parental guidance.
Mutilated bodies being pulled out of car wreckage, massacres in Rwanda, or wherever – not to mention Irak – as well as some of those beastly computer games which are all violence and not much else, is the daily menu for many youngsters, whether they like it or not.
I teach children: and the worst of them are those who are precisely over-protected and shielded by their parents; they lack personal initiative of any kind; some of them, 12 to 14 year olds, do not even know how to take the local city bus to go to school or come to my classes, in a small, safe, provincial town in Spain. Over-protectiveness is entirely negative for youngsters, especially given the hedonistic age in which we live – and you may change “hedonistic� for “hypocritical� if you wish.
No, Isaak: you have got your sums wrong. A mother is the person who can best decide what her child should see or not see, especially as we are talking about a mother with a huge multi-racial and cultural background and up-bringing. The lop-sided retort from one who can see only one angle, just cannot convince anybody.
I am not Jewish, but lived nearly a year in Israel, back in the sixties, and even learnt some Hebrew. I was well aware of the holocaust and the totally unjustified slayings of millions of Jews. And the best way to avoid anything like that ever happening again, is to make people aware of these terrible genocides taking place all over the world even today. History cannot be brushed under a carpet and forgotten: and a mother is the right person for knowing what her child can assimilate – and nobody else, not even you may say anything to the contrary.
Keith
History is very subjective and it all depends on whose or which point of view is expressing it. There is absolutely no black and white argument when it comes to analysing history, especially if it involved heinous crimes committed against humanity. Children in general should already know what happened in the past as soon as they can read and comprehend basic values. In the Philippines, we have a collective disorder known as Cultural and Historical Amnesia, where people deliberately forget issues and generally forgive the past misgivings of our former leaders (i.e. Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law, where many people were disenfranchised and Cory Aquino’s People Power, where Aquino basically restored the oligarch that Marcos disenfranchised). They just turn a blind eye so they can continue to perpetuate the damages that they have inflicted or exist in a society with an indifferent attitude. It is never too soon for children to know their history, and its enlightened analysis. Because these children will soon become adults and in due time, will be a part of a bigger society. I salute mothers like Gina who not only sustains the basic material needs of her children, but nurturing them with a very good mental diet, that will prepare and propel them as soon as they leave their nests. The world is filled with philistines and parents like Gina (and Juantxo, of course) helps curb its growth.
Ige Ramos
I would now like to say the ff:
1) This piece is like my previous article titled “A Four-Letter Word.” That is, it is half-fiction. The librarian did not “insist.” We had a friendly chat about anything under the sun. She was bored, so welcomed the appearance of the kids. It was my friend Christophe chatting with the guard downstairs. Etc. The article was written to stimulate students of English to practice writing. The controversial line “My son’s innocence is intact” was turned into one of the questions for students to answer: Is the son’s innocence intact? The idea was for students to answer either “I agree because…” or “I disagree because…” As simple as that. It is not necessary for anyone to pounce on every single word and comma of these Weekly Letters, much less any non-student or non-tutor. The Weekly Letter is not here to solve the world’s transcendental problems. They are written for students to practice reading and writing English and to get to know one another and their tutors a bit.
2) An anonymous commentator says “let children be happy children.” Oh, my son is a happy child alright. Very much so. That he is well-read, well-informed, and well-travelled doesn’t make him an unhappy child. Not at all. And my children are quite sweet. Anyone who knows them would agree.
3) I have been criticized, too, for taking him to see the Cirque de Soleil in Bilbao or Aïda in the Metropolitan Opera House!
4) So disagreement was expected. But nice disagreement. People have a right to disagree, but not to assume that my son is scarred for life. My children are quite normal and sweet and playful, and well-adjusted, and empathic and thoughtful and considerate, and compassionate, really.
5) History is daily fare in my family. We like history. So a visit to the Wannsee is just following up on what my son already knows a bit of through books and travel. His first exposure to the Holocaust and World War II was through a kids’ encyclopedia published by VOX.
6) Enough for now.
Hello Everyone,
I think that one thing we share in this web forum is respect for other people. I think we shouldn’t give all these attention to a nasty comment.
So Gina, there was no need to give so many explanations about the article, but thanks anyways !!!!
Regards,
Cristina
Hi Gina!
I think it is always very important to tell children the true about different circunstances and realities, but the most important thing that we have in consideration is to tell them that reality, in terms they can understand and It is esential to be delicate with their feelings,depending on the situation.
History is history and the true is “here”, is another item about their education. It is not only refering to good stories, there are also bad stories, but it is the reality and they must know it.
Conchi F.
Hi everyone
It’s very interesting to visiting places and see the city from all points of view, the place from the view of an adult and from the view of a child. Children must to know the world have lived.
1. The place is really a study place full of thick folders to read. That’s why the boys got rowdy and ran upstairs. BTW, Christophe’s son was 5.
2. We did so many other things in Berlin: hang out in the Tiergarten, go up the new dome of the Reichstag, all those wonderful museums in the East, eat curry sausages… We are a perfectly normal loving and fun-loving family.
3. There are other blogs more fit for pouncing on every single syllable and comma, other sites better designed for arguing for arguing’s sake in lengthy discourses and diatribes that, by discouraging students from practicing their English, only defeat the purpose of this website. It is absurd to do that here. Direclty or indirectly, we all know one another here, students and tutors and friends of. The atmosphere is friendly. We jest, we converse…
Hello Gina:
I know you said we now STOP but since i am just reading all these now, I had to put a word in. As you know, I have no children, so I cannot EXACTLY relate. However:
1) You are the Mother and you know what’s best (and what’s not) for your kid and I trust your maternal instincts.
2) Your son is travelled, read, etc. You are raising him to be well attuned with, and have a keen sense of, history. Better that are with him and can put CONTEXT, rather than him reading about it through the Internet by himself.
3) This issue is not exactly black and white, it depends on the situation, but in this instance, I agree we cannot overprotect our children’s innocence when all around us there are horrible things going on.
OK, I’ve said my piece.
Cheers
Raissa
Another thing. The librarian did not exactly offer to babysit so that the kids wouldn’t see pictures. She offered to babysit so that I could take my time reading the documents and studying the displays of objects, etc. So there! There really was no need to pick on every breath and colon of a half-fictional essay that had its specific purpose. There are other blogs for that.
Another thing. Someone was telling me yesterday about this PlayStation game where the objective is to gun down old people. Isn’t that worse than teaching history to your child? For the record: my son owns no such games.
Another thing. When someone writes an article like this, I give them the benefit of the doubt and LISTEN.
Hello Gina,
An insteresting an sure article that bring debate.
We appear if we to have or not to teach to our children the atrocities committied by the Nazi.
Really it’s history and it’s necessary that our children know her.
“It’s never prompt to count the truth, not later to count the atrocity”
The Society bombards us with violent TV programs, playstation, all kids information, for this fundamental reason, to educate in the responsability our children must know the told history of form responsable and adapted to his age.
Bye Reyes.
I have two children and I think they are not prepared to look at horror. I think that is a parent’s matter to teach one’s children that there are terrible things that can happen because of hate, wars and so on. But sometimes it’s too hard to see. Words can soften what is completely horrible but images become a part of your brain and the worst of the nightmares.
This is the other (only) face of war, the stupidity of men. With the power in theirs hands they make this things.
I think like you because the view of war’s time is no good for children and it’s better to do focus on scene of Wannesee, the pretty hoouses, and other things.
Childrens are children and they’ll learn other this trought the history. And the past history, if it’s bad history with wars, better remember mildly.
Regards
Carlos
Excuse me, I forgot log in
This is the other (only) face of war, the stupidity of men. With the power in theirs hands they make this things.
I think like you because the view of war’s time is no good for children and it’s better to do focus on scene of Wannesee, the pretty hoouses, and other things.
Childrens are children and they’ll learn other this trought the history. And the past history, if it’s bad history with wars, better remember mildly.
Regards
Carlos