Being a reader from a young age, I learned about the Holocaust before most of my classmates due to my mom’s encouragement to read her heroine, Corrie Ten Boom’s book, “The Hiding Place,” a novel about her family’s experience in Germany under Adolf Hitler’s rule. From the moment I read about the Holocaust I was horrified that evil on that magnitude could ever have existed in the world I knew as an elementary school student.
When my class learned about Anne Frank, my fellow students asked the same question I had — how could it have happened?
To answer this question, our teacher had us watch the 1981 made for TV movie “The Wave.”
Directed by Alex Grasshoff, the movie is based on the real life Third Wave Experiment conducted by a high school teacher named Ron Jones in an effort to show his students just how easy it is to get caught up in a popular movement and the gradual, incremental steps one takes to excuse the wrongdoing they see.
The movie first aired October 4, 1981, and then again as an afterschool special on ABC two years later. Bruce Davison played the real-life teacher Ron Jones and, in the movie, conducts a social experiment in his high school social studies class after showing his students a film on the Holocaust and then being faced with the inevitable question from his own students — Why did the Germans allow the Holocaust to happen?
Feeling as though he cannot answer the question, he decides to offer his students simple advice on fashion. He then begins to instruct the students on how to have better posture and slowly begins introducing new rules into the classroom under the guise of being more “efficient.”
The students, who respect their teacher, love the new rules and start following them excitedly. Soon, Ross announces a secret club called the Wave that is only for select students with a special handwave and membership card to identify its members. An unpopular student is giving the new responsibility of Hall Monitor and filled with pride, carries out his new duties all too efficiently.
A popular football player becomes a member and from there the Wave spreads throughout the school with everyone now wanting to be a member of the special group.
Other teachers take notice and try to dissuade Ross from continuing his experiment as they are afraid he has ignited a movement he cannot control.
I won’t give away the whole movie for those who may be interested in checking it out, but I will say my fellow classmates and I gained some insight into 1933-1945 Nazi Germany.
Through “The Wave,” we felt the truth in the quote largely attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”