What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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the film, in subtle and not so subtle ways, deviate
from the historical record and misrepresent the
period. The British historian of the Holocaust, David
Cesarani (2008: 3), has insisted that the story of
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ‘is utterly implausible
… a travesty of facts … the book amounts to a
distortion of history’. He describes how ‘the filmmakers
manage to turn Germans into victims of
the Holocaust’. And Olaf Jensen (2013: 118) is so
concerned by the film’s representation of the period,
he notes – apropos of the film’s popularity in schools
– that ‘even though bad films can serve a good
example to study, this is worrying.’
Given that both the book and the film have been
so critically received by leading scholars in the field
of Holocaust studies and Holocaust education, our
study sought to gain an understanding of how this
story was being received by young people, how
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was contributing
to and possibly distorting their knowledge and
understandings of the Holocaust.
Students were selected for specifically targeted
focus-group interviews if they had seen the film
and thought they had a good recollection of it.
Each focus group began with a discussion of the
meaning of four words – ‘history’, ‘evidence’, ‘fiction’
and ‘historical fiction’ – in which students were
encouraged to provide their own definitions and
the discussion was recorded. If the groups failed to
come to a consensus, or if that consensus contained
marked misunderstandings of any term, a working
definition was provided by the facilitator. As well as
functioning as an ice breaker, this process allowed us
to define some key parameters for the subsequent
discussion and, importantly, to ensure that all the
participants were using these terms to refer to the
same, or at least similar, concepts. Students were
then asked to discuss which of these concepts
were useful for trying to know about and make
sense of the past.
Students’ ability to position the film
as a work of historical fiction
Across all the interviews exploring students’
responses to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas only
one participant believed that the film was based on
a true story. The majority of students across all age
groups – and certainly all those who had studied the
Holocaust in history – recognised that The Boy in
the Striped Pyjamas was a work of fiction based in
a historical epoch.
When probed it became apparent they understood
that the story was predicated on clear historical
inaccuracies and implausibility. Students across
all schools were aware that a Nazi concentration
camp was a much more tightly guarded and severely
regimented place than shown in the film. As demonstrated
in Chapter 3, concentration camps are a
central component of many young people’s conception
of the Holocaust, and while they may have only
limited knowledge and understanding of the different
camps and of differences between camps, they were
easily able to pick up on the historical implausibility
and narrative inconsistencies in the plot.
The discussion that follows took place among a
group of Year 8 students who were yet to formally
learn about the Holocaust within school:
Ife: I don’t know why, but I don’t think, er, you know
the boy who goes under the fence, I don’t think in
those times they would have even let the children in
there, the Jews, because they didn’t like them did they,
so why would they let their children near to it, that’s
something that I don’t really think … I think that was
not believable, you know, how the boy went with the
Jewish boy inside the concentration camp. One of them
would have [been] spotted, because, don’t they do like
checks? They shave their heads, even though the boy
had a cap, when they were going inside, didn’t the boy
remove it? I find it really hard to believe that someone
was in there when [he] normally wasn’t in there.
Esosa: Also there would have been people watching
and guarding the place to see if anyone would come in
or out. So the way the rich boy was just going in and
out, I think it wasn’t that reliable because someone
would have been watching.
Abena: It also seems quite unbelievable because if
Bruno can get under the fence, why can’t the boy, the
Jewish boy get under the fence [to escape] as well?
(Year 8, LON4 )
At another school, a group of Year 9 students
who had recently studied this history, shared further
examples of some of the film’s most egregious
deviations from the historical record:
Claudia: Prisoners wouldn’t have been able to have
slacked off enough to sit by a fence.
Alessia: It would have been protected, not just a very
thin barbed wire fence that people can dig under,
because that’s really bad.
Claudia: They would have had barbed wire, then a
fence then another fence.
Rosalyn: Surely as soon as he came to the camp he
would have been killed, because he was too young?
(Year 9, LON9)
In this way, most students drew on The Boy in
the Striped Pyjamas as a work of fiction, or historical
fiction, and showed awareness of the key points at
which it clearly deviated from the historical record.
Further, several students argued that they had
engaged with the film ‘as a [feature] film’, and so felt
that to criticise it for not being a documentary or a
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