The Wave

"No, dummy," said a boy named Brad, who especially enjoyed tormenting him. "Mr Ross just likes to set up projectors for fun."

"Okay, Brad," Ben said sternly. "That's enough."

A sufficient number of students had arrived for Ross to start handing out the homework papers. "All right," he said loudly to get the class's attention. "Here are last week's papers. Generally speaking, you did a good job." He walked up and down the aisles passing each paper to its author. "But I'm warning you again. These papers are getting much too sloppy." He stopped and held one up for the class to see. "Look at this. Is it really necessary to doodle in the margins of a homework paper?"

The class tittered. "Whose is it?" someone asked.

"'None of your business." Ben shuffled the papers in his hand and kept handing them out. "From now on, I'm going to start lowering grades on any papers that are really sloppy. If you've made a lot of changes or mistakes on a paper, make a new, neat copy before you hand it in. Got that?"

Some members of the class nodded. Others weren't even paying attention. Ben went to the front of the class­room and pulled down the movie screen. It was the third time that semester he'd talked to them about messy homework.

2

They were studying World War Two, and the film Ben Ross was showing his class that day was a documentary depicting the atrocities the Nazis committed in their concentration camps. In the darkened classroom the class stared at the movie screen. They saw emaciated men and women starved so severely that they appeared to be nothing more than skeletons covered with skin. People whose knee joints were the widest parts of their legs.

Ben had already seen this film or films like it half a dozen times. But the sight of such ruthless inhumane cruelty by the Nazis still horrified him and made him feel angry. As the film rolled on, he spoke emotionally to the class: "What you are watching took place in Germany between 1934 and 1945. It was the work of a man named Adolf Hitler, originally a menial labourer, porter, and house painter, who turned to politics after World War One. Germany had been defeated in that war, its leader­ship was at a low ebb, inflation was high, and thousands were homeless, hungry, and jobless.

"For Hitler it was an opportunity to rise quickly through the political ranks of the Nazi Party. He espoused the theory that the Jews were the destroyers of civilization and that the Germans were a superior race. Today we know that Hitler was a paranoid, a psychopath, literally a madman. In 1923 he was thrown in jail for his political activities, but by 1934 he and his party had seized control of the German government."

Ben paused for a moment to let the students watch more of the film. They could see the gas chambers now, and the piles of bodies laid out like stove wood. The human skeletons still alive had the gruesome task of stacking the dead under the watching eyes of the Nazi soldiers. Ben felt his stomach churn.. How on God's earth could anyone make anyone else do something like that, he asked himself.

He told the students: "The death camps were what Hitler called his "Final solution to the Jewish problem". But anyone — not just Jews — deemed by the Nazis as unfit for their superior race was sent there. They were herded into camps all over Eastern Europe, and once there they were worked, starved, and tortured, and when they couldn't work any more, they were exterminated in the gas chambers. Their remains were disposed of in ovens." Ben paused for a moment and then added: "The life expectancy of the prisoners in the camps was two hundred and seventy days. But many did not survive a week."

On the screen they could see the buildings that housed the ovens. Ben thought of telling the students that the smoke rising from the chimneys above the buildings was from burning human flesh. But he didn't. The experience of watching this film would be awful enough. Thank God man had not invented a way to convey smells through film, because the worst thing of all would have been the stench of it, the stench of the most heinous act ever committed in the history of the human race.

The film was ending and Ben told his students: "In all, the Nazis murdered more than ten million men, women, and children in their extermination camps."