Welcome back to Circa 1945: Breaking the Machine,

A podcast about genocide as infrastructure,

and the counter-infrastructure we must build to prevent it.

This episode, I want to focus on the power of narrative storytelling as genocide prevention infrastructure.

There’s a reason so many Holocaust survivors have shared their stories.

In autobiographies, in the USC Shoah Database, in hours upon hours of documentaries. To remember is to understand, and to understand means to possibly prevent.

In that sense, we owe it to both the past and the future, to get it right.

With this in mind, I want to examine two very different examples of children’s fiction about the Shoah.

Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Number the Stars.

Image Source: ⁠https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47281.Number_the_Stars