Genocide education guidelines.
From Holocaust Museum Houston.
Not advised for children under age 10 to visit the museum but exploring the site now and here’s the Group_Student_Tours_Guide.PDF
Reviewed the Anne Frank books from the library, before they are ready for the actual diary these are good. In order of younger kids (K to 2nd-ish in my estimate) then older elementary (3rd to 5th) and the third book I would say 6th grade and up, depending on your child’s temperament and ability to handle this knowledge: Anne Frank by Josephine Poole, a picture book that is very gentle in how it handles things. Good for early elementary age. Who was Anne Frank? by Ann Abramson is illustrated and tells the story and would be good for reading in later elementary, before the journal itself. I’ve only skimmed it but the drawings are not scary and they handle the situation directly but without detail – “At the camp most people were put to death right away. Life for those who weren’t could hardly be called life at all. Survivors say it is impossible to describe how awful it was.” The Importance of Anne Frank b John F. Wukovits has some of the story interwoven with the broader historical context and photos – one of children (looking very healthy, oddly enough) in a concentration camp, an emaciated survivor dying after liberation, and a very shadowed picture of a boxcar with bodies (that appear to be sleeping.) This would probably be a good read alongside the diary but I would NOT present this to children until later elementary and would not yet show it to C at 9 years of age. These images were very benign compared to photos I saw at the concentration camp we visited when I was 11 or 12 years old (photos that are forever burned into my memory) but would still be very disturbing for kids – even more so if they are aware of the context. Still a good book but one to be used later.
I don’t know how good a judge I am of when to present this, either, since I visited a concentration camp when I was later elementary age and took a field trip to visit Anne Frank’s home in 5th grade so I was seeing the images and a lot more detail than kids probably get stateside. I want to teach my children these things but I want to do it when I feel they are able to emotionally handle the complexity of the topic… and at nine years old we’re sticking to the generalities right now, I’m not going into detail and I’m not showing him any images that are going to cause nightmares.