New Comic To Be Used To Teach History Of The Holocaust

What do you do when you live in a country which, despite a rapidly-growing Jewish population and constant efforts to teach how wrong your ancestors' persecution of "undesirable" people, still has a lot of anti-semitic hate crimes occurring? Well, honestly, I'm not sure what the best thing to do is, but Germany's going to try teaching kids about the Holocaust and how awful it was with a comic book.

The comic, called The Search, is already available in the Netherlands and tells the story of a fictional survivor of Nazi persecution named Esther. By following Esther's experiences, readers will learn about events like the Night of Broken Glass, how Nazis ransacked Jewish homes and synagogues, and what life was like in the German concentration camps.

"There is not a major gap in the way Germany teaches the history of this era, but this is a new approach," said spokeswoman Melina Feingold, noting that the book could reach some of the children who are least interested in schoolwork:

"We hope the comic will get even underprivileged kids interested in learning about the Holocaust."

The 61-page book, already available in various European languages, will be used alongside worksheets in history classes at secondary schools in Berlin for six months, after which the project hopes to go nationwide.

While I applaud the idea of using innovative ways to educate kids about things they might not normally find interesting, I can only hope that it will actually prove to be effective and at least help reduce the number of hate crimes going on over there.

Germany launches comic book on Holocaust [Ynetnews]