The Washington Post | February 3, 2022 | By Caitlin Gibson
During Paul Regelbrugge’s 12 years as a middle school English teacher, he saw firsthand the power of teaching Holocaust history through literature — not just for the adolescents in his classrooms but for their families, too. His former students and their parents still write to him, he says, to share how certain works — such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a memoir of Wiesel’s experience in concentration camps, and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice and Nazis are depicted as cats — have stayed with them, often revisited in family discussions.
So when news spread that a Tennessee school board had voted unanimously in January to remove “Maus” from its 8th grade curriculum, citing objections to nudity and profanity in the text, Regelbrugge, who is now director of education for the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, found himself receiving messages from former students once again. This time they were forwarding news stories about the ban, along with their own astonished reactions: Have you heard about this? How could they do this?