It's a common misconception that to make history palatable, it must be re-enacted or fictionalized. Nothing could be more dangerous.

When I was about 10 (barefoot and carrying a hobo sack), I played the American nurseryman Johnny Appleseed,. What I learned about history from the experience could be summarized in half a sentence.

If we want to serve students (and our society as a whole), we should (as soon as humanely possible) show then raw, unedited footage of skeletal concentration victims being bulldozed into trenches. Sure, the experience will for many be traumatizing--but that's the point. Why should anyone be spared the horrors that survivors and non-survivors (as well as the troops that liberated the camps) suffered?

RFK Jr.'s recent reference to Anne Frank illustrates what happens when someone promotes a sanitized view of history. If Kennedy had been accurate in his analogizing, he would have realized that the situation of Anne Frank was parallel not to him and his idiot followers, but to those who could not escape from the contagion engendered by vaccine deniers, and that Kennedy et al. embodied the pernicious privilege felt by concentration camp staff and their enablers in the general German population. And he would have felt shame.

There's no need to re-enact the horrors of anti-Semitism when we have so many living testimonials in our midst.