"Later he would begin one of the first courses in the nation on genocide, with Native American Studies professor Jack Norton, who applied the concept to the attempted eradication of native peoples in Northern California.
But in the early 1980s, something happened while Oliner was teaching the Holocaust course. After one of the first sessions of the term, a young woman came to him in tears. She was German, married to an American student. She had to drop the course, she told him, because it was too painful to hear 'what my people did to your people.'
'I was moved by this,' Oliner recalled. 'First of all, she had nothing to do with it, she was innocent. But her pain got me thinking. What else can we teach besides horrors and murder and torture? What else can we learn?'"
~ William Severini Kowinski
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