In September, Jews around the world observed both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Around here school was in session, including at Avery Point, where I am an auditor, and the only mentions of the holidays I saw in The Day were a couple of letters to the editor expressing unhappiness that schools began on Sept. 7, meaning some children would miss the first day of classes, and the caption under a photo of three girls from a town near Hartford at the beach who were there because their school was closed on Sept. 16.

This made me think back many years to when I was teaching eighth-grade history at Fitch Middle. We were studying the 1940s, and one of the girls noted that there was only one paragraph in the text regarding the Holocaust. She looked at me questioningly and said, “There must be more to it than this.”

I told her there was, a lot more; and I was going to try to explain to her and the rest of the class how it came to happen. The Holocaust was a monumental event in world history and led to the creation of the modern state of Israel.

The textbook mentioned that six million Jews and millions of others died during the Holocaust. Those numbers are hard to comprehend. I asked the kids what was the largest crowd they’d ever been in. Some mentioned the Thanksgiving Day game at Fitch. One kid had been to Fenway Park. I told them that when I was their age I attended the Boy Scout Jamboree in Colorado where there were 56,000 of us seated in a natural amphitheater listening to President Eisenhower, who, as honorary president of the Boy Scouts, was wearing a Jamboree neckerchief.

But the concept of millions of people is hard to imagine. In order to get a visual image some groups have collected pop-tops from beverage cans with a goal of six million. I was totally turned off by that idea. As I said to the kids, if I lost a relative in the Holocaust, I wouldn’t want her represented by the pop-top from a can of Bud.

My suggestion would be to buy a packet of wildflower seeds, count and weigh them, and figure out how many packets would be needed for six million seeds. Then sprinkle those seeds over a meadow and wait for the flowers to blossom.

Given the difficulty of imagining huge numbers, I always began the Holocaust unit with a short video titled “Camera of My Family.” It is the story of a Jewish woman who was born in Germany in 1938, but along with some members of her family, was able eventually to come to the United States. The video, based on a book by Catherin Noren, makes use of several photographs from a family album in which she introduces her family, the Wallachs, one by one, in happier times before the Nazis came into power.

Ms. Noren, a photographer, returned to Germany some time after the war was over to view the places her family had lived, and died. One of the most touching parts of the video is a family group photo in which those lost to the Nazis are circled and named.

I was fortunate in that I worked for administrators who respected my professional judgment that the Holocaust deserved more than a single paragraph, and didn’t insist that all social studies teachers had to be on the same page of the same book on the same day. In fact, one principal asked if I would speak to a graduate class of educators that one of his friends was teaching on how to present the subject.

Groton teachers were fortunate that Fitch was the site of an afterschool presentation by the Anti-defamation League of B’Nai B’Rith dealing with Holocaust education. The presenters provided a number of resources, many of which I used in class. The workshop was open to all three middle schools and was not limited to social studies teachers.

I personally also benefited from a multiday conference at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where I learned a lot and came home with even more teaching materials, which I left for my replacement when I retired. One of them was a wonderful children’s book and video titled “Daniel’s Story.”

Most of my students realized that the Jews were the special target of the Nazis. But they weren’t sure why. A question I then asked them was, What is a Jew?

Inevitably, youngsters would tell me that a Jew was someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus.

To that, I would respond, then the majority of people in China must be Jewish. Definitions, I told them, must be given in terms of what something is, not what it isn’t.

I would then go on to spend some time explaining the history of Judaism from the story of Abraham and the beginnings of monotheism, to the death of Jesus. Who says you can’t cover 2,000 years of history in one class period!

The crucifixion of Jesus and the time immediately following, as described in the New Testament books of Luke and Acts, mark the beginning of Christian anti-Semitism, a prejudice which sadly continues to this day.

As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, Jews became targets of discrimination. They were often forced to live in ghettos and were restricted in what trades or professions in which they could be engaged. They often wound up as merchants and bankers.

However, by the early 20th century, many, many German Jews were assimilated into the mainstream society. A large number served in the Army during World War I.

That war was ended by the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918. Germany later was forced to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which demanded incredibly high reparations, and was also required to admit sole guilt for the war. Germany’s new, democratic government was called the Weimar Republic.

The inflation following the war is hard for adults to comprehend and especially difficult for young teens.

I explained that people used wheelbarrows to carry their money to the store and children made playhouses out of bundles of currency.

People were looking for a scapegoat for their country’s misery, and Jews were a ready target. After all, some of the leaders of the new government had been Jewish and, however reluctantly, had signed the treaty. According to the National Socialists, the country had been “stabbed in the back.”

Youngsters find it hard to believe that the Nazis won votes that put many of their members in the Reichstag, but such was the desperation of the German public. People were looking for easy answers. Once Hitler became Fuehrer and the party was in full control, anti-Semitism became government policy. Jews were looked upon as an inferior race. Race science was taught in the schools, which soon excluded Jewish students. In fact, Nazi ideology became, in large part, the basis of the curriculum.

One question that my students always asked, and people have been asking ever since, was how could folks do what they did to the Jews in the camps. The answer that was repeated over and over at Nuremburg was that they were only following orders.

When students said they can’t believe anybody would do that, I brought up the Milgram shock experiment.

In 1961 Stanley Milgram wanted to see how far normal people would go in following the orders of someone whom they recognized as being in authority. In a lab at Yale, he invited people to join in a learning experiment. A “learner” was strapped into a chair with electrodes placed on his body. The “teacher” was to read lists of word pairs and then test the “learner” on how well he could remember them. If the learner made a mistake, he was given an electric shock, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. If the “teacher” hesitated, the professor encouraged him to continue, as it is all part of the experiment, despite the increasingly loud groans and even shrieks from the “learner.”

Incredibly, many of the “teachers” were willing to go all the way to the last switch on the shock generator. Of course, as I explained to my kids, the “learner” wasn’t getting any shock at all, it was simply an act to see how far the “teacher” would go when he felt he was following the orders of an authority figure. What’s scary is that this experiment has been replicated with similar results.

One year I asked the kids to respond to a prompt in which I said that I hadn’t seen a lot of happy faces for a week. Did they think I should drop the unit and simply go with the one paragraph in the text? I remember the response from one girl in which she said that she had not enjoyed class that week, but I “shouldn’t dare not to teach it. It’s too important.”

She was right.

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton Public Schools teacher who lives in Mystic.