Victory Day 2012 - An exercise in explaining atrocities to children

I don't know about others, but I find it difficult explaining historic atrocities. Victory Day in Russia is a celebration of their victory over the Nazi invasion of their country...which cost them 28,000,000 lives. In order to explain the significance of the victory, it was time to explain what the Nazi movement was. No matter how you simplify the message, there is no preserving their innocence while informing them of the lives lost due to hatred.  So I turned to the internet as a guide for explaining things from a perspective of a child, how the Nazi movement affected children back then. While it was informative and helped my children to gain some perspective on what children and their families endured, it was awful to be the bearer of such awful news. I have always been very protective over the things my children see on tv, especially the news, which is filled with violence and depressing details of poor choices made by people in the world (sometimes closer to home than I would like them to be aware of). I was spared knowledge of those things as a child and enjoyed the innocence of it...allowing me to be a child. A time was going to come in the future where knowledge of those things would come. I treasure my childhood and hoped to do the same for my children. However, I have found it to be much harder to protect them from those things these days. Media is so much more prevalent than when I was a child. So the dilemma presented itself - hear it from me now, or wait until the discover it on their own and hope that they will ask questions about it. After prayerful consideration, I opted for letting them hear it from me first, so that they can hear it as delicately as possible with some perspective on why it is important to learn from past mistakes so things like that don't happen again. There is always a moral lesson to be learned from it and I choose to focus on that instead of the mistake that led to such atrocities. The more we talked about it, as they empathized with the victims and were enraged by the awful things done, I found it easier to explore ideas about how we can make choices every day that can lead our world in a direction that will not repeat those mistakes. And the choice we can make was very simple...to love instead of hate. Kids have a wonderful way of seeing things very clearly. Hate brings about bad things. Love brings about good things. I am sure that we will have more 'learning opportunies' in the coming future and this foundation will prove to be a good one.