"Pajamafication" (when book banners say they're going to replace a banned book)

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. I recently read

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and was greatly bothered by how it glossed over what was really going on.

I have not gotten around to reading Maus, but I'm very aware of the realities of the Holocaust and the camps, having read a lot about them, including the amazing book Treblinka by Jean-Francois Steiner which came out in 1966. I also visited Auschwitz on my honeymoon in 1980 -- I know, an odd place to go when on a honeymoon. My husband is Jewish, and all of his family came from that part of Europe.

In this country, no one ever takes him for being Jewish. He long ago learned how to signal to other Jews that he was one of them. In Poland, Jewish people would come up to us, ignoring me completely, and start speaking to him in English. He was always startled by that, and then they'd say, "You're Jewish aren't you?" One man had us follow him up to an attic where he and some others were trying to preserve birth and death records from before the war.