House wants Holocaust education

INDIANAPOLIS -- Legislation requiring Indiana's public schools to teach students about the horrors of the Holocaust has overwhelmingly passed the Indiana House.\nThe House voted 91-0 Friday in favor of the bill, which was inspired by Eva Mozes Kor, a 72-year-old Indiana woman who survived a concentration camp and operates a Terre Haute museum dedicated to teaching about the Nazis' World War II killings of some 6 million Jews in Europe.\nUnder the bill, which now moves to the Senate for consideration, Holocaust lessons would be required by law as part of U.S. history courses starting in the 2007-08 school year.\nThe legislation would also require schools to teach the importance of respecting the dignity and value of others.\nRep. Clyde Kersey said it's needed both because people persist in denying that the Holocaust occurred and because many Indiana classes never get around to teaching about it, even though the state's educational standards already direct history teachers to do so.\nHe said it's important for students to learn about the Nazis' mass exterminations in the Holocaust of about 6 million Jews, as well as the number of Gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, political prisoners and other "undesirables" that were killed. \n"I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you don't learn the lessons of history, you are bound to repeat them," said Kersey, D-Terre Haute.\nKersey recounted Kor's story to his colleagues. She and her family were taken from their home in Romania to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, in 1943.\nKor and an identical twin sister, Miriam Mozes Zeiger, who died in 1993, never saw their parents again. At Auschwitz, they were subjected to the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele's genetic experiments. They survived the ordeal and were liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945.\nHouse Minority Leader Brian C. Bosma, R-Indianapolis, a co-sponsor of the bill, urged support. He noted that his father served in the Army during World War II and witnessed the shocking conditions found at Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany.\nHe said the eyewitnesses to those horrors are growing increasingly rare. For the first time, he noted, there are no World War II combat veterans in the Indiana legislature.\nFive states -- California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York -- have laws requiring teaching the Holocaust, while 24 states, including Indiana, included the Holocaust in education standards as of 2004, according to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.\nWith some in the world denying that the Holocaust occurred -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently described the Holocaust as "a myth" -- Bosma said it is appropriate for Indiana to require its students to learn the truth.\n"They must know, so it never happens again," he said.