- April 19, 2024
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Palm Coast mom Toni Baker likes to keep an eye on what her kids are reading, and when she picked up the latest book her 12-year-old daughter was assigned for seventh-grade advanced English at Indian Trails Middle School, she was appalled.
“I wouldn’t let my child watch a History Channel show this graphic, and to me, reading this material is more graphic than watching,” she said. “Especially because it’s real. Real people being burned, being starved.”
The book was “Night,” Nobel Peace Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical record of his own torment as a teenage boy in Auschwitz. One of the most widely-read first-person accounts of the Holocaust, it is often taught in the eighth through twelfth grades — and sometimes, as in Chloe Baker’s class with teacher Paige Beamesderfer, in the seventh — and sometimes used to fulfill the state of Florida’s Holocaust education requirement.
But although “Night” isn’t long — about 100 pages, depending on the translation and printing — and its prose makes use of many short declarative sentences and is often rated at roughly an eighth- to ninth-grade reading level, it is not a children’s book.
“’Night’” is a harrowing story,” said Oren Stier, director of the Jewish Studies Program and Florida International University. “It has some disturbing imagery in it, particularly in the grappling with religion and identity and family. All of those issues are central to the Holocaust experience, but they don’t have to be conveyed through ‘Night.’”
Stier, whose research has often focused on Holocaust memory and representation, teaches “Night” regularly to his university students at FIU.
“I wouldn’t be teaching it younger than 12, for sure,” he said. “I’d generally say 13 is the age at which you can start teaching the realities of the Holocaust.”
In “Night,” Wiesel describes watching people trampled to death on forced marches, the smell of the smoke from Auschwitz’s crematoriums and the tortured death of family members. He describes his inability to reconcile a belief in God, so central to his boyhood in a religious Jewish family in Sighet, Transylvania, with the mass murder and cruelty he saw in the death camp.
The book is a powerful recounting of history, but Baker feels her daughter just isn’t ready for it.
“This is like, you can smell the flesh burning off,” she said. “My children don’t even play video games. I don’t think they should be required to read this. I read it, and I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Baker complained to the school administration. Why couldn’t the kids read something less graphic, like the diary of Anne Frank? she asked.
Chloe was pulled out of Beamesderfer’s class, she said, and told to choose something else to read on her own in the school library. She said she’s not supposed to be in the classroom when "Night" is being discussed.
State requirements
Florida teachers are required to teach their students about the Holocaust, but teachers and schools use their own judgment to select books for their students.
Beamesderfer declined to comment for this story.
Indian Trails Middle School Principal Paul Peacock said the school didn’t send parental permission slips home with children before assigning "Night" because it is listed on the Florida Department of Education website as approved for seventh and eighth grade.
“I wouldn’t want to make a unilateral decision as a teacher or a principal to make that call,” he said. “There are guidelines for choosing those books.”
But Florida Department of Education officials said there really aren't: There is no such department-approved list.
The list Peacock cited is an appendix of “professional resource books” in the State of Florida Resource Manual on Holocaust Education, and it lists “Night” alongside books clearly intended to educate educators, like the National Council on Disability’s “The Education of Students with Disabilities: Where Do We Stand?” and Donna M. Gollnick and Phillip C. Chinn’s “Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society.”
It was also produced by the Commissioner’s Task Force on Holocaust Education, not the Florida Department of Education itself, and aligned to outdated Sunshine State Standards, said Florida Department of Education spokeswoman Cheryl Etters.
“The Holocaust Task Force is an autonomous organization,” she said. “Any reading lists are not approved by the department.” The Task Force doesn't list "Night" on its current recommended reading list, Etters said, but that doesn't mean a teacher can't select it.
The Flagler County School District doesn’t have recommended reading lists or set rules for selecting Holocaust texts for children, either, said Jill Lively, Flagler School District curriculum manager for middle school reading.
“We don’t have district standards for what books are taught in Holocaust education,” she said. “There is a state statute that Holocaust education has to be implemented; it has to be age- and readability-appropriate.”
Books can be rated for readability using formulas that look at sentence and paragraph structure and length, but judgment on what material is age-appropriate generally falls to individual schools and teachers, and varies considerably.
The Commissioner’s Task Force on the Holocaust Education website includes a database of lesson plans, and one recommends “Night” for a ninth-grade audience. A lesson plan for 10th graders analyzing “Night” is available on the Palm Beach County School District website. The Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education at Florida Atlantic University, one of a number of research sites that supports the Task Force, has a suggested reading list and includes “Night” in the list for ninth through 12th grade.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s online set of guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust lists grade six as the age at which students “demonstrate the ability to empathize with individual eyewitness accounts and to attempt to understand the complexities of Holocaust history, including the scope and scale of the events.”
When a teacher assigns a book, and a parent decides they don’t want their child reading it, the general practice is to do what Indian Trails did with Chloe: pull the student out until the class moves on to something else.
“We’re very parent-friendly, and we work to accommodate parents who have an objection,” Peacock said. “We’’ll find a way to accommodate them.”
But for Chloe, Baker said, the arrangement has spared her daughter the experience of reading “Night” when she may be too young for it, but it also denied her the experience of learning about the Holocaust in a classroom setting.
“I have no problem with teaching kids about the Holocaust. It’s important,” Baker said. “But it has to be appropriate. There are other books out there.”
Reading list
For more information on teaching children about the Holocaust, see the following resources:
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum resource page for educators: ushmm.org/educators
• The Florida Atlantic University Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education curriculum: coe.fau.edu/CentersAndPrograms/CHHRE/curriculum.aspx
• The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center: hdec.org
• The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida: holocaustedu.org/education
• The Commissioner’s Task Force of Holocaust Education’s “State of Florida Resource Manual on Holocaust Education: Grades 7-8: teachinflorida.com/Portals/0/Documents/Holocaust%20Manuals/HolocaustGrades78.PDF
