**Jane M. Bloom is available for book events of any dimension and duration, and would love to hear from you, your school, your library or your house of worship!  Please contact her @ "Contact Us" above.

        I am excited and pleased to offer The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown as a unique library and educational resource for middle and high school educators.  A Curriculum Guide may be downloaded here:

--     The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown Curriculum Guide NEW YORK.docx; 

--    The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown Curriculum Guide.docx.

        This allegorical novel has intrinsic educational value across the disciplines of literature and social studies. Not only is it a refreshing example of the literary genre of allegory for English classes, its subject matter and themes are exceedingly relevant today in the contexts of social studies, civics, government and history.  This book serves as a launch pad for discussions about governmental systems (democracy vs. autocracy); the moral challenges we face as citizens to ensure the protection and well-being of all members of our communities, including those who are marginalized; and specifically, the Holocaust.   

        On its surface, The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown is a straightforward adventure story about a girl who struggles to save her elderly dog in a town that’s slating all dogs for a tragic end.  But the story borrows carefully from the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as from true accounts of resistance and courage in the face of the unspeakable evils of the Nazi regime.  

        With the passing of the last survivors of the Holocaust upon us, it is our urgent responsibility to teach the next generation about our not-too-distant history in any manner that reaches them.  The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown thus is intended as a supplement to -- not a replacement of -- classic Holocaust literature, as it provides a level of intimacy for its readers that factual accounts, of remote people in distant lands and times, often cannot.

        We see worrisome events today that remind us that we are never too removed from our potential to commit new atrocities against those we consider "the other."  That's why this book is both timely and timeless.  Studying our past is the best prophylactic, as “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

        In addition to the Curriculum Guide (above), the following research materials and background are offered as a starting point as you embrace The Thing at the Edge of Blundertown for use in your classroom.  

CHAPTERS OF BLUNDERTOWN   

Parallels to the Holocaust

        The Nazis in Germany adopted an unfounded belief that they – Germans, or Aryans -- were the superior race over all others.  Thus, they targeted all those they deemed “inferior,” including primarily Jews, but also Roma, homosexuals, the mentally ill, the disabled, etc.  But it was the Jews whom the Nazis singled out the most by far, to the extent of their failed extermination plan known as the “Final Solution.”  The references below are limited to the extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazi era.

Ch. 1 

        Signs, "Jews Not Wanted Here," or "Jews Not Admitted" were posted along roads and on doors of stores, theaters, parks and hotels in Germany in the 1930s.  The Holocaust: A History of Courage and Resistance, Bea Stadtler, revised ed. 1994, Ch. 3.

Ch. 2            

        During the early 1930s when the Nazis rose to power, Germany was experiencing great economic and social hardship due to their defeat in World War I, including severe inflation, economic instability and unemployment.  “Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat, blaming them for Germany's economic and social problems. The Nazi party promised to resolve these issues.”  Background: Life Before the Holocaust, The British Library/ Learning/ History/ Voices of the Holocaust

Ch. 3            

        Under Nazi rule, new mathematic textbooks were introduced and included “social arithmetic,” which “involved calculations designed to achieve a subliminal indoctrination in key areas - for example, sums requiring the children to calculate how much it would cost the state to keep a mentally ill person alive in an asylum."  Geography textbooks were produced that "propagated concepts such as living-space and blood and soil, and purveyed the myth of Germanic racial superiority".  Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (2005) p. 265.

Ch. 4            

        The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, thus depriving them of most rights. 

        Anne Frank wrote in her renowned diary on June 20, 1942:  

        “After May 1940 [when Germany invaded Holland where she and her family lived], good times rapidly fled. . . .Anti-Jewish decrees followed each other in quick succession.  Jews must wear a yellow star, Jews must hand in their bicycles, Jews are banned from trams and are forbidden to drive.  Jews are only allowed to do their shopping between three and five o’clock and then only in shops which bear the placard ‘Jewish shop’. Jews must be indoors by eight o’clock and cannot even sit in their own gardens after that hour.   Jews are forbidden to visit theaters, cinemas, and other places  of entertainment.   Jews may not take part in public sports.  Swimming baths, tennis courts, hockey fields, and other sports grounds are all prohibited to them. Jews may not visit Christians.  Jews must go to Jewish schools, and many more restrictions of a similar kind.

        So we could not do this and were forbidden to do that.  But life went on in spite of it all.”

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

Ch. 5

        Adolf Hitler formed the Nazi Party in the 1920s before he came into power.  It was an unpopular, fringe political party, and “most people thought Hitler was a crackpot.  He was the butt of many jokes.”  After his first unsuccessful attempt to gain control of the government, he was convicted of treason and sent to prison, where he wrote his rambling anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”).  It was considered the work of a “maniac,” but once he was in power, Mein Kampf became a required textbook in all German schools. 

        “Whoever has the youth has the future,” he wrote.  By 1936, all “Aryan” children in Germany over the age of six were required to join a Nazi youth group, and at 14, boys and girls were promoted to the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, respectively.  Many young people were eager to join, “drawn by the sense of belonging and importance they felt as members of these groups.”  Stadtler, ch. 1.

Ch. 6

        See Ch. 5 notes.  Shortly after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Parliament building was set ablaze purportedly by “Communists,” paving the way for the legislature to enact Hitler’s emergency decree ceding total control to the Nazis for the “protection of the people and the state.” (Evidence shows that it was the Nazis themselves who burned the building in order to create the predicate emergency.)  Within weeks, democracy in Germany officially ended and Hitler became a dictator, swiftly taking control of the press, radio, education and culture, and plotting to take over the world.   Stadtler, Ch. 1.

Ch.  7           

        The Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, effectively marked the beginning of the Holocaust. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, nearly every Jewish synagogue in Germany was destroyed, as were Jewish businesses, shops, offices and homes.  Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the orchestrated violence by the Nazis. Yet, the Jews were blamed for the destruction and held personally responsible for the costs of the damage.  Some 30,000 Jewish males were arrested and sent to local prisons.  Aggressive anti-Jewish legislation followed. Stadtler, Ch. 2; USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Ch. 8            

        German opposition and resistance groups recognized that it was impossible to stage any kind of open political resistance – “not because the repressive apparatus of the [Nazi] regime was so all-pervasive that public protest was impossible, but [r]ather. . .because of Hitler's massive support among the German people. . .  .”  Some Hitler opponents came to believe that “a regime so totally dominated by one man could only be brought down by eliminating that man – either by assassinating [him] or by staging an army coup against him.” Others believed that Hitler could be persuaded to moderate his regime, or that some other more moderate figure could replace him. Many, particularly army officers, felt bound by the personal oath of loyalty they had taken to Hitler in 1934.  Wikipedia, German Resistance to Nazism.

Ch. 9            

        Many, but too few, risked their own lives to hide Jews during World War II.  In her diary, Anne Frank describes her experience living in hiding for 2+ years in an attic in Amsterdam before being discovered and sent, ultimately, to her death at the age of 15.

Ch. 10         

        Many Jews deported to Auschwitz were forced to write false postcards to their family or friends informing them that they were in good health and feeling well.  The postcards were sent from “Waldsee,” a fictitious name for Auschwitz.  Yad Vachem Archives

Ch. 11

        In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night (1958), the author is forced to witness absolute evil as a teenage prisoner in Nazi Europe, shattering his faith in God.  

Ch. 12         

        Countless resistance efforts from the outside:  They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl (1967); Statler.

Ch. 13         

        In August 1944, a small group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz death camp smuggled a camera under the false bottom of a soup bucket into one of the crematoriums where Jews were being gassed to death and burned. The three photographs they took appear to be the only existing photos depicting the extermination of the Jews in real time. They Fought Back, “Underground Assignment in Auschwitz,” pp.189-195.

Ch. 14         

        Under pressure following the deportation of Danish Jews to a ghetto camp called Theresienstadt, the Germans permitted representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross to visit in June 1944. "It was all an elaborate hoax. The Germans intensified deportations from the ghetto shortly before the visit, and the ghetto itself was 'beautified.' Gardens were planted, houses painted, and barracks renovated. The Nazis staged social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries. Once the visit was over, the Germans resumed deportations from Theresienstadt, which did not end until October 1944.”  USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Ch. 15         

        Resistance efforts from the inside:  They Fought Back.   Denial and acquiescence from nearby: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne (2006)

Ch. 16         

        See notes Ch. 12, 13.

Ch. 17         

        See “Revolt in Sobibor,” Alexander Pechersky, They Fought Back pp. 7-50.

Ch. 18         

    “After the war, the top [22] surviving German leaders were tried for Nazi Germany’s crimes, including the crimes of the Holocaust. . . before an International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany, where judges from the Allied powers—Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—presided over the hearing[s].. . . The United States held 12 additional trials in Nuremberg of high-level officials of the German government, military, and SS as well as medical professionals and leading industrialists. The crimes charged before the Nuremberg courts were crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes.

        In all, 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg, 161 were convicted and 37 were sentenced to death. . . .The defendants generally acknowledged that the crimes they were accused of occurred but denied that they were responsible, as they were following orders from a higher authority. 

        Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the final days of the war, as had several of his closest aides. Many more criminals were never tried. Some fled Germany to live abroad, including hundreds who came to the United States.”    USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia

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MARCH 23, 2020

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