“Hey, I did have one question …” That was the tentative opening to an email I recently received from a high school teacher. The Ninth Candle, the Holocaust education organization I founded, had led some educational programs for her students, and the teacher and I had been trading emails for a few weeks since. Even teachers at schools with established Holocaust programs can be reluctant to get too close to the big questions about it. I sense a widespread but unspoken fear of being called insensitive or offensive — or worse, antisemitic. She only asked me her “one question” after a relationship had begun to form and after she had my repeated reassurance that nothing was off the table.

And the question?

She wanted to know if the Nazis had used human fat, rendered from Jewish prisoners, to make bars of soap. The class materials she’d been given said they had. She doubted it but was too afraid to challenge it. The answer is no, they didn’t. Despite the teacher’s apprehension, it was perfectly reasonable to ask.

This teacher shared more of her class materials with me as our exchange went on. Along with the “soap myth,” which academics are still untangling, there was a mess of small but significant factual errors: chronology, place names, victim numbers. We soon realized that Holocaust education at her school, like at many schools across the country, needed to be overhauled. A recent study revealed that our knowledge of the Holocaust is declining. Most millennials and Gen Z members surveyed don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered during the genocide, and half of those surveyed can’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto. Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents are surging.

One of the first things we can do to improve the situation is to uproot myths from our curriculums. This will involve discussing all those difficult questions. We also need to keep class materials updated because our knowledge of the Holocaust is still evolving. (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a good source for teachers who want to make sure their lessons are up to date.)

Read the full article about improving Holocaust education by Luke Berryman at Chalkbeat.