Today is Pearl Harbor Day

We're studying World War II era in my classroom, gearing up for our unit on the Japanese Internments of Bainbridge Island residents in 1942. It's been an interesting mode of study, looking at the climate of the nation (and world) at the time, the war from the perspectives of children from various parts of the world. As a class, we just finished reading "The Cay", by Theodore Taylor. It's a vivid narrative of a young boy's self-discovery after having been stranded on a Caribbean island with a local black man. It's not so much a tale of war, though it takes place amid German u-boats that lurk off shore of the Dutch Antilles at Curacao, just north of Venezuela. I'm also reading the book, "Snow Treasure" aloud to the students. I remember reading this book as a child and being riveted by it. It's a (likely fictional) tale of a group of Norweigan children who traffic gold bricks away from the village bank to keep it out of the hands of occupying Nazis. It's not as powerful as I'd remembered, but the students seem to be enjoying it. One interesting item: I have a student whose mother is German and there has been some discomfort in our discussions of Nazi Germany, reconciling a shameful part of one's heritage. I can relate to this well. It's been a good discussion, an opportunity to talk about the difference between government factions and representatives vs. the common citizen, that often our identities are dragged through the mud in the interests of the person at the top, the "leader" who uses his underlings to do his dirty work, to attain some selfish goal, cloaking it all in the banner of "patriotism".