A staff member at a D.C. elementary school made third-graders pretend to die in gas chambers and shoot their classmates in ghoulish reenactments of the Holocaust, according to The Washington Post. The instructor, who went unnamed in an email to the students’ parents from Watkins Elementary School’s principal, was placed on leave last week. The third-graders, who had been sent to a library class on Friday for a different self-directed project, were made to simulate the scenes by the instructor during allotted research time, Principle MScott Berkowitz wrote.

When asked by the students why the Germans had committed genocide, a parent told the Post, the school employee reportedly replied it was “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” The staff member also reportedly cast one student, identified as Jewish by another parent, as Adolf Hitler. The student was told to pretend to commit suicide at the end of the exercise. Another third-grader allegedly had to pretend to be on a train to a concentration camp.

The staff member apparently asked the students not to tell anyone about the reenactments once they were done, but they reported it to their homeroom teacher, according to a parent. “I want to acknowledge the gravity of this poor instructional decision,” Berkowitz wrote, “as students should never be asked to act out or portray any atrocity.”