At My Daughter's School, Kids Forced to Reenact Holocaust

Last week, the librarian at my daughter's school -- Watkins Elementary School in Washington, D.C. -- instructed a class of third graders to "act out" the Holocaust. She instructed the children to pretend they were on a train going to a concentration camp and to pretend to shoot each other, dig mass graves and die in a gas chamber. One child was told to take the role of Adolf Hitler -- and to pretend to die by suicide. My daughter is a fourth grader at Watkins, and so her class was not directly involved in this horrific "lesson." We both found out simultaneously when The Washington Post ran an article on the incident two days after it happened. A friend texted me a link to the Post's article, and I burst into tears as I read about what the children were made to do. My daughter was scared to see me cry and asked what was wrong; overcome with emotion and unable to think straight, I showed her the article.