Education: House votes to require Holocaust lessons in high school

The Indiana House voted 91-0 in favor of House Bill 1059, requiring Indiana's public high schools to offer lessons on the Holocaust in U.S. history classes beginning in the 2007-08 school year.

In addition, the bill requires schools to teach the importance of respecting the dignity and value of others.
Rep. Clyde Kersey, D-Terre Haute, said the bill is needed because people persist in denying that the Holocaust occurred, and many Indiana classes never get around to teaching about it, even though the state's educational standards already direct history teachers to do so.

Under the bill, the lessons would be required by law.

"I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you don't learn the lessons of history, you are bound to repeat them," Kersey said.
The bill was inspired by Eva Mozes Kor, a 72-year-old Terre Haute woman who survived a concentration camp and has founded a museum in Terre Haute dedicated to teaching about the Holocaust.

Kersey recounted Kor's story to his colleagues. She and her family were taken from their home in Romania to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, in 1943.

Six million Jews died in mass exterminations in the Holocaust at the hands of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party.
House Minority Leader Brian C. Bosma, R-Indianapolis, a co-sponsor of the bill, urged support. He noted that his father served in the Army during World War II and witnessed the shocking conditions at Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany.

He noted that such eyewitnesses are increasingly rare, as those who survived those camps or liberated them are dying. For the first time, he noted, there are no World War II combat veterans in the Indiana legislature.

With some in the world denying that the Holocaust occurred -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently described the Holocaust as "a myth" -- it is appropriate for Indiana to require its students to learn that, in fact, it did, Bosma said.

"They must know, so it never happens again," he said.
The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

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