I can relate to them in a "Look at the horrible things that were done to people who like me"

This is a complete tangent, but one of the more chilling moments I've had recently was viewing some of those photographs that came out a few years ago of SS guards on their time off. One of the guards looked so much like the picture of my dad in his Army uniform in 1951 that it gave me chills--how could evil look like someone as good as my dad? I mean, logically I shouldn't have reacted that way. Dad was a tall blue-eyed blond of northwestern European descent, and in that picture he's wearing a uniform with the same basic lines as European uniforms of the 40's. Of course there were Nazis who looked like him. I'm sure I could easily find RAF pilots or Norwegian resistance fighters who resembled him just as strongly. But it still sent uncomfortable shivers down my spine.

You can see people who look a lot like me guarding the gates that keep people in the Gaza strip trapped and starving. As are those dropping the bombs on Gaza. Of course the people launching crude rockets out of Gaza that kill Israelis (including Israeli babies) also look a lot like me...

Re: Sir Arthur.

Damn. That's a whole era of history gone now.

It wasn't as bad as I thought - no one in the main family died, they didn't lose their land, and while horrible things happened and were done to them, the ending didn't make me feel sad.

Reading this I realise that whether it happened to the main family or not didn't matter, and if they lost their land or not it didn't matter, and I am pretty sure I pushed the ending out of my mind within days of finishing the book.

It gutted me and still guts me because it doesn't have to be the title characters. It happened to people beyond the scope of the book. Some works are like macros of man's inhumanity to man. Or any implacable horror. I can't distract myself from the reality of the pain suffered with the narrative. The storyline won't trump history.

When I was in England I saw reports on the arrest of a Ulster loyalist paramilitary/terrorist leader who shared my last name, and I couldn't help wondering if he was a distant cousin.

I really can't explain why the picture of that SS guard bothered me so much. Maybe it even had something to do with the fact it wasn't long after my father died, because it was almost an angry reaction--sort of, "how DARE that Nazi look like my dad?"

some of those photographs that came out a few years ago of SS guards on their time off.

There was a bit on this topic in the New Yorker, just a week or two ago. Reprinted a couple of the photos, and gave the background on the discoveries of the two different batches of photos. The creepy part is, the article shows you a picture, of people fresh off the trains being sent right or left -- it's weirdly artful, composed such that a woman turning left is directly in the center, facing the camera -- and then tells you two pages later that the woman who found that cache of photos is the same woman. She knew what the photos were because she recognized the people in it: her neighbors, her family members, herself.

I have been looking into historical children's lit lately, because I've been looking into history, and I've come to the unpleasant conclusion that many of the annoyingly crushing depressive novels that constitute school curriculum are at once melodramatically excessive and sanitized. Like, they're all about suffering, often in a lurid way (often in a totally OTT way, thank you Edith Wharton for attempted-suicide-by-sled), but they don't tend to contextualize that suffering within the worldview very well. I just read Mary Pope Osborne's Adaline Falling Star, about Kit Carson's half-Arapaho daughter, and it was so thoroughly... way too feminist, for the era; way too modern in its portrayals of parenting; way too active and individualistic and can-do.

But who wants to read a story about an "American hero" who sent his daughter to live with relatives in St. Louis at a very young age, and didn't send for her till she was 15? At the time, that was good parenting, because he (was widowed and) had no stable home.

You can see people who look a lot like me guarding the gates that keep people in the Gaza strip trapped and starving. As are those dropping the bombs on Gaza. Of course the people launching crude rockets out of Gaza that kill Israelis (including Israeli babies) also look a lot like me...

Aren't those all you??

It gutted me and still guts me because it doesn't have to be the title characters. It happened to people beyond the scope of the book. Some works are like macros of man's inhumanity to man. Or any implacable horror. I can't distract myself from the reality of the pain suffered with the narrative. The storyline won't trump history.

Absolutely.

I admit, I honestly don't know how to respond to that because I don't quite have a grasp on what I want to say or how I want to say it. I wonder if reading it as an adult and being somewhat ... not jaded per se and to say "used to it" is wrong also ... prepared for the horror of it made me concentrate on just the book and the narrative and the family. The discussion in class will go way beyond the scope of the book. My personal feelings go way beyond the book. But to get through the book so I can do my responses and talk about beyond this book, I had to be able to read it almost with blinders on.

Gah. Does that make any kind of sense or am I just Bullshit in a Sweater?

There have been some discussions in the Jewish press lately about the best way to teach Jewish kids about the Holocaust. When I was a kid, it was pretty graphic -- we were shown films of bulldozers pushing over piles of naked dead bodies when we were around fourth grade or so. It seems that the trend in Holocaust education now is more stories about kids who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and things like that.

I'm not sure which is the better approach. The kind of lessons that we got were really too much for us to process at that young an age, and we felt horribly guilty if we closed our eyes or turned away. But the new books, all about people who fought back and survived, seem to paint an inaccurate picture.

You can see people who look a lot like me guarding the gates that keep people in the Gaza strip trapped and starving. As are those dropping the bombs on Gaza. Of course the people launching crude rockets out of Gaza that kill Israelis (including Israeli babies) also look a lot like me...

Aren't those all you??

First two are Israeli army. Third is Palestinian militants.

Does that make any kind of sense or am I just Bullshit in a Sweater?

You gotta do what you gotta do. I'm chronically incapable of disengaging, so I intend to avoid the subject matter entirely. Can't imagine what would make me watch Schindler's List, for instance.