What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Encountering representations of the Holocaust
You need to learn about the factual information
before you can connect to it emotionally so,
like, Holocaust survivors are there to allow you
to understand an individual story and help you
comprehend it, but you first of all you need to
know, like, the historical background to it, you
need to understand like why it happened and how
many people died and sort of what the conditions
were, so it sort of allows you to put yourself in that
position and then meeting a Holocaust survivor
brings out all the emotions (Natalie, Year 12, LON2).
This does not diminish the value of testimony, but
it highlights the importance of embedding survivors’
personal accounts within a detailed understanding
of the socio-historical context of the events
described – as one would with any experiential
narrative. As Natalie was able to appreciate, such
context enriches young people’s reception of
testimony just as testimony enriches young
people’s capacity to relate to the historical record.
However, survivor testimony did not only offer a
personal, affective connection to these events. Many
students reported how the testimonies they heard
provided greater detail and insight into everyday life
before, during and after the Holocaust and, as such,
enriched and deepened their knowledge of the times:
That’s how I felt at times, the books and things you
read in class, is very much focused on the dead
and what happened there, you don’t really get to
see what happened afterwards, I wouldn’t have, in
class I wouldn’t have had any idea, when the camps
were liberated, what the survivors did from that
point onwards, because a lot of them wouldn’t have
had their families and their homes left, and that sort
of thing, where she said how she went to – was it
Switzerland or Sweden, or was it a refugee camp?
– and things like that, and you don’t think about
things like that in lessons, how they progressed from
that point onwards (Deborah, Year 12, LON1).
He told you where you could and couldn’t go, so
it wasn’t everywhere, and he told you about time
differences when half of France was taken over then
almost all of it. So it just shows a bit more depth of
the time periods that it was happening in
(George, Year 9, SW1).
Given that the Centre’s research with teachers
revealed a concerning ‘lack of emphasis on Jewish
life and culture before the war’ (Pettigrew et al.
2009: 42), and textbooks reaffirm the primacy of
perpetrator narratives with scant attention to Jewish
agency or life before or after the war (Foster and
Burgess 2013), survivor testimony may be adding
important historical detail. Wieviorka (2006a:
132), speaking about the impact of testimony on
professional Holocaust historians, cautions against
making too much of this – survivor’s stories are not
the same as historiography – while acknowledging
the deep affective potential in these narratives:
[They] can read, listen to, and watch testimonies
without looking for what … is not to be found –
clarification of precise events, places, dates, and
numbers, which are wrong with the regularity of
a metronome – but knowing also that testimony
contains extraordinary riches: an encounter with the
voice of someone who has lived through a piece of
history; and, in an oblique fashion, not factual truth,
but the more subtle and just as indispensable truth
of an epoch and of an experience.
The young people in our research are clearly
drawn to and moved by testimony. There is an
intensity of learning that arises from it that is
extraordinarily rich and affecting. While accepting
that testimony is not the same as historiography, it
is important to acknowledge the distinctive forms of
knowledge and understanding that a face-to-face
encounter listening to a Holocaust survivor
can facilitate.
What impact does The Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas have on students’
understanding of the Holocaust?
[A]ll fiction about the Holocaust inevitably imposes
the artifice of style, point of view and personification
upon its subject matter. This artifice, Lang [(1990)]
claims, distorts the Holocaust’s singular features,
such as the collective agency of its perpetration
and the depersonalised objectified conditions of its
victims (Levi and Rothberg 2003: 325).
As described earlier in this chapter, the survey
asked students if they had read any books about
the Holocaust (see Figures 4.6 and 4.8), and 43.0
per cent indicated that they had. Of these, 74.8 per
cent had read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (see
Figure 4.10). This was significantly more than those
who had read the perennially popular Diary of Anne
Frank (59.1 per cent) or the general category ‘school
textbooks’ (42.5 per cent). Even more significantly,
of the 76.2 per cent who stated that they had
‘seen any films or television programmes about the
Holocaust’, 84.4 per cent had seen the film The Boy
in the Striped Pyjamas. This far exceeds the general
category of ‘a TV documentary’ (50.9 per cent) and
the once hugely popular Schindler’s List, which had
been watched by only 30.2 per cent of students in
this sub category.
The ubiquity of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is
potentially concerning because both the book and