Outside in the hall the bells rang, and Ben heard the sounds of class doors banging open and students flooding into the corridors. It was peculiar how students always left class so quickly but somehow arrived at their next class at the speed of snails. Generally Ben believed that high school today was a better place for kids to learn than it was when he went. But there were a few things that bothered him. One was his students' lackadaisical attitude about getting to class on time. Sometimes five or even ten minutes of valuable class time would be lost while students straggled in. Back when he was a student, if you weren't in class when the second bell rang, you were in trouble.
The other problem was the homework. Kids just didn't feel compelled to do it any more. You could yell, threaten them with F's or detention, and it didn't matter. Homework had become practically optional. Or, as one of his ninth-graders had told him a few weeks before, “Sure I know homework is important, Mr Ross, but my social life comes first.”
Ben chuckled. Social life.
Students were starting to enter the classroom now. Ross spotted David Collins, a tall, good-looking boy who was a running back on the football team. He was also Laurie Saunders's boyfriend.
“David,” Ross said, “do you think you could get that film projector set up?”
“Sure thing,” David replied.
As Ross watched, David kneeled beside the projector and went to work nimbly. In just a few seconds he had it threaded. Ben smiled and thanked him.
Robert Billings trudged into the room. He was a heavy boy with shirt-tails perpetually hanging out and his hair always a mess, as if he never bothered to comb it after getting out of bed in the morning. “We gonna see a movie?” he asked when he saw the projector.
“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.”
The film was over. A student near the door flicked the classroom lights on. As Ben looked around the room, most of the students looked stunned. Ben had not meant to shock them, but he'd known that the film would. Most of these students had grown up in the small, suburban community that spread out lazily around Gordon High. They were the products of stable, middle-class families, and despite the violence-saturated media that permeated society around them, they were surprisingly naive and sheltered. Even now a few of the students were starting to fool around. The misery and horror depicted in the film must have seemed to them like just another television programme. Robert Billings, sitting near the windows, was asleep with his head buried in his arms on his desk. But near the front of the room, Amy Smith appeared to be wiping a tear out of her eye. Laurie Saunders looked upset too.
“I know many of you are upset,” Ben told the class. “But I did not show you this film today just to get an emotional reaction from you. I want you to think about what you saw and what I told you. Does anyone have any questions?”
Amy Smith quickly raised her hand.
“Yes, Amy?”
“Were all the Germans Nazis?” she asked.
Ben shook his head. “No, as a matter of fact, less than ten per cent of the German population belonged to the Nazi Party.”
“Then why didn't anyone try to stop them?” Amy asked.
“I can't tell you for sure, Amy,” Ross told her. “I can only guess that they were scared. The Nazis might have been a minority, but they were a highly organized, armed, and dangerous minority. You have to remember that the rest of the German population was unorganized, and unarmed and frightened. They had also gone through a terrible period of inflation that had virtually ruined their country. Perhaps some of them hoped the Nazis would be able to restore their society. Anyway, after the war, the majority of Germans said they didn't know about the atrocities.”