Did I ever mention my daughter's sixth class (sixth grade) history book? I think I did, but I can't find the reference anywhere. I also can't find the book in our house these days. Regardless, I remember what I read.
One day (this was about 4 years ago) I was thumbing through her book and stopped when I got to the section on WWII. My memories are vague now, but basically the description of the war was pretty limited, which I didn't think inappropriate given that it was a book for 12-year-olds.
What struck me was one section where they had written a brief account from the perspective of an old woman remembering the war. The old woman recounts that the war was terrible, but she focused on the bombing of Hiroshima as a particular evil. She was supposedly particularly shocked by the bombing.
Of course, I hit the roof. I started ranting about how the use of the atomic bomb was simply inevitable given the speed at which weapons were developed and hardly remarkable given all the other weapons developed and used during the war. And, of course, as I shouted then, the gas chambers were far and away the most horrific development of the war. The intent, the scale, the execution of the plan to exterminate a race of people was beyond anything else done in that war or since.
If the publisher wanted to focus on one war event as particularly shocking, the opening of Auschwitz (or any camp) was the only real choice. I remember calling the publisher to complain, but getting no satisfaction at all. I only wish I could remember the publisher now. I'm nearly sure it was Folens, but I could be misremembering. And, boy does it matter.
Albert Folens was, according to an RTE program, a member of the Gestapo before he landed in Ireland and founded his educational publishing company. Beautiful, huh? How many Irish children were slipped little capsules of Nazism down through the years? Folens only died in 2002 so I would expect his influence in that company to have been immense and continuing.
I'm going to ask my kids' schools to avoid Folens books from now on. At a minimum all their history books should be unwelcome in any Irish school.
