Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not so far away.

Maybe it was Maus, the declaration of some Tennessee school board that a book I think the world of was off-limits for high school readers and classes. The board's justification made clear that none of its members were saying that the Maus was a bad book. It was just too bad for the district's kids. 

That idiocy brought back a time in my life when our school administration made my colleagues and me create a handout for our students to bring home to their parents, a notification that their children would be viewing and reading material that was particularly graphic. Greenway High School's administration thought it prudent to alert parents that their English teachers would be showing photographs that documented "man's inhumanity to man." Why? Some photos showed naked bodies.

It seemed somehow incongruous that we would ask parental permission to show full frontal nudity, when our motivation was to demonstrate just exactly how inhuman humanity could be, and was just 30 years before. My team-teacher was Jewish and proud--and angry. But we sent the note home. 

But to ban Maus from the curriculum seemed not only draconian but downright Nazi-like. Look for yourself. It's not particularly difficult to find photographs of German people, pre-war, burning books. Should some books be kept from the eyes of children?--of course. But Maus? It felt to me like a book-burning.

When I heard about the Auschwitz exhibition coming to Kansas City, one of only fourteen places in the world, I wanted to go--and did, last week. That's why what's behind me here is a week full of posts on the Holocaust. For a time in my life I thought I'd seen enough. One woman, responding to exhibition pictures I put up on Facebook, announced that one of her boys, after seeing pictures from any of a dozen concentration camps, promptly threw up. I know the feeling. I thought I was almost there when I read (and taught) a book a week in 1995.

But I also remember watching Diet Eman age. She was marvelously talented as a speaker, not because she was an artist with words, not because she knew how to fashion a narrative, but because she was so earnestly driven to tell the story, her story, an earnestness that grew from her commitment to make sure every last human being within the sound of her voice knew and understood that Holocaust wasn't some phony business. It happened. It didn't not happen, and she knew it happened because her fiancé, the only man she ever loved, the man she'd been engaged to before the blitzkrieg came to Holland, that man never returned from a labor camp named Dachau.

As she aged, she wasn't strong enough to continue to speak whenever requested--and the requests kept coming. Sometime in her eighties, she determined that she wouldn't speak to old people any more, only children because children didn't have the camps in their experience, only in their history books; and it was the young people, she used to tell me--they were the ones who needed to know, who needed to understand that what happened in the Netherlands and throughout occupied Europe must never, ever happen again. 

I ordered the exhibition book the night we returned from Kansas City, in all likelihood the first Holocaust book I'd purchased in years. And then, all week long, I've used this blog to return to a time in human history I once told myself I really don't care to revisit. 

But Diet Eman is gone now. You can hear her tell her story in dozens of YouTube videos, but that she's gone may be why I wanted to go back too, because she can't do what she committed herself to doing in 1990 or so, actually telling her story. She'd kept it bottled up in her for all those years, rarely mentioned it, let out little scenes from her resistance work in the Netherlands and a bit of her suffering, and then told me she'd realized one night in church that telling her children was something she had to do. 

So if you've been put off by five days of Auschwitz, I just thought I'd say I couldn't help myself. I experienced an exhibition that reminded me how ardent she was in making sure she did everything in her power to tell people it was real, the whole Holocaust horror wasn't a dream or a game or a façade. It was real. 

Have a look at that image at the top of the page. Just before the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz to the Russian troops, they tried to burn everything. They tried to burn down what they'd so meticulously engineered, but they couldn't erase what had gone on. Even what's burned tells the story.

The final scene at the Holocaust Museum in D. C., at least as I remember, is a series of videos of survivors telling their horrifying stories. Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away uses videos also at the end, videos that feature not the survivors but the victims in their lives before the Holocaust, a looping thread of home movies from 1935 or so, showing people enjoying life, having fun, swimming, gathering as families. Those home movies were projected on several walls so you couldn't really miss the joy, even though all those men and women and children--even babies--did.

And then this--