Still, some perspectives are worth teaching, especially those in our recent past. The voices represented in the list below would have been unwelcome just 70 years ago. I’m thankful that today we have gained enough distance from the suspicions and fears that gripped the world during World War II to be able to hear the stories of those we thought should categorically be our enemy. We can read the stories of the Japanese Americans who were rounded up and put in internment camps. We can see for ourselves the terrible toll nuclear war took on innocent lives. We can’t prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again unless we learn about them and are willing to admit that just as we were capable of doing it in the past, so we are in the future. I hope we never forget the cost of war, both the human casualties and the suffering inflicted on innocent people. I hope we humanize the past and stop talking about it abstractly as if such conflict could never happen to us nor be initiated by us. It can and it probably will, but maybe there’s a smaller chance of repeating the same mistakes if we just teach our children about them. Here are five children’s books to help start those conversations. For more recommendations, see Middle Grade Books About Japanese Relocation During World War II.
