What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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the US-based USC Shoah Foundation at the Institute
of Creative Technologies and the National Holocaust
Centre in Laxton, England – are working to develop
innovative methods harnessing the best available
digital technology in an attempt to maintain as much
of that intimacy as possible. Using advanced digital
film recordings and dynamic forms of simulated
interaction, they hope students of the future will not
only hear and see a survivor giving their testimony,
but also be able to ask the person questions and
hear their answers. In this way, they hope to maintain
as much as possible of the experience of meeting a
living witness in an attempt to preserve the voice of
Holocaust survivors for generations to come.
As already reported at the beginning of this
section, after making the Holocaust ‘feel more real’,
the next most common response in the survey was
that students found survivor testimony ‘upsetting’.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, but nevertheless
compellingly, it was clear in interviews that students
interpreted this as a positive impact. During the focus
groups, many students expressed how being upset
was an appropriate response to the subject matter
– the most direct way to demonstrate that they had
‘understood’ the Holocaust. Lenny (Year 11, LON1)
articulated this very clearly: ‘You understand by
being upset, in my opinion.’
In the students’ discussions the three answer
categories ‘more real’, ‘upsetting’ and ‘helped
me to understand’ overlapped at many points.
The Holocaust experienced as ‘more real’ was
‘upsetting’, and being upset gave some students
the sense that this meant they had ‘understood’
– at least on a personal level. It became clear that
many students considered being upset a meaningful
personal experience, an apposite response to this
history. At no point during any of the focus-group
interviews did any students suggest that they might
avoid the subject because it was upsetting, nor did
they recoil from the difficult emotions evoked by
survivor testimony in any other way. Rather, they
appeared to really value such experiences:
I did cry, but, because it was sad, but I think it’s
important to be upset about these things and if
you’re not upset, you’re not having empathy, for the
subject, and I think people should be upset about
it, because then, you know what these people
have experienced, and it makes you want to stop it
(Joanna, Year 9, SW1).
Interviewer: You say you felt emotion and you
were crying. Did the experience help you learn and
understand more about the Holocaust?
Geoff: Yes.
Interviewer: Why is that?
Geoff: You weren’t just having a history teacher just
at the front of the room just like telling you facts and
facts about the Holocaust. You have someone’s own
personal story, so you know that every single person
in the Holocaust had a different story but this way you
actually get to experience the person’s story and how
they actually felt and what their emotions were at that
exact moment. And it like really hits home
(Year 9, YH1).
Such comments speak to the importance
for students of having an affective and personal
response to the Holocaust. However, they provide a
relatively shallow basis for historical knowledge and
understanding for, as Weissman (2004: 201) insists,
being upset by something ‘neither requires nor
guarantees much in the way of historical and moral
comprehension’.
The young people quoted above do not really
know what survivors of the Holocaust went through
and nor do they get to ‘experience their story’ –
unless we understand such comments in the sense
that the telling of the story itself is something they
‘experience’. Furthermore, while students’ emotional
response to the Holocaust can be recognised as
an essential dimension of a meaningful encounter,
their being upset by the experiences of those who
lived through the Holocaust must be understood
in the context of significant gaps in key historical
knowledge and explanatory understanding (outlined
in Chapters 5, 6 and 7).
Some students themselves recognised the
necessary limitations of experiential narratives,
including testimonies, in this respect, and
emphasised the need to contextualise such accounts
as a (potentially privileged) part of a fuller picture:
I sort of disagree [that it helped me understand why
the Holocaust happened]. In the context it helped
the Holocaust feel more real, but why it happened?
I disagree, because why it happened, she [the
survivor whose testimony he had heard] can’t really
tell us why it happened, she can only tell us what
happened to her, she can’t tell us why it actually
happened (Henry, Year 11, LON1).
I personally still don’t understand how people
thought in that way, I don’t know, whether it was a
time thing or what it was, but I still think, in a lot of
ways, if anything, it highlighted to me how radical
and different the Nazis were. There was racism and
things, but they took it a lot further … So I don’t
think hearing her made it any clearer to me why,
personally, why a person would have thought that
was necessary. I don’t think that was cleared up to
me. I don’t know how that would be cleared
(Deborah, Year 12, LON1).
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust