What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

92
Encountering representations of the Holocaust
pedagogic tool was ‘unfair’:
It seems a little pointless to criticise a movie for
historical [in]accuracy. You don’t really go to a
movie to get historical pristine accuracy, you go
to a movie to experience something. So if you are
going to criticise every single point of it you are
better off watching documentaries that are factually
accurate and only rely on evidence. This is more of
a story based on things that may or may not have
happened. It is not going to be ground in the dirt, it
is not going to be like accurate based on sources
(Lee, Year 10, LON3).
Jensen (2013: 119) makes a similar point when he
argues that, ‘In the end, it is meant to be a “fable” for
children to bring home some of the issues involved
in the Holocaust, not a documentary.’ However,
what the film is ‘meant to be’ and how it is used and
received are not the same thing. And so, while Lee
argues that it is inappropriate to judge any movie
on the basis of historical accuracy, elsewhere he
explicitly describes, The Boy in the Striped
Pyjamas as ‘kind of like a documentary’:
It is not that it didn’t seem real, it was just like we
didn’t really have it explained to us fully. It was kind of
like a documentary, it has shown you like all the proper
… it is not like a film, it is like Panorama, it is like they
have actually gone inside and shown you things you
are not supposed to see (Lee, Year 10, LON3).
Across all the interviews, a number of other
students of varying age groups described their
perception of the film and its relation to historical
reality in similar terms:
Because like … it’s a good film in the sense that it
shows you what happened during that time. But it’s
like … it’s quite sad, so it’s not something that you
would want to watch again and again. But it is a
good, it is a good thing to watch so you understand
like what really happened during that time
(Nkechi, Year 9, LON4, emphasis added).
Yeah, kind of like a documentary in a way
(Nathan, Year 10, LON3).
But there’s films like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
and the book and things like that which shows
you what actually happened (Max, Year 13, SE2,
emphasis added).
Of particular note in this context is the ‘film within
a film’ scene, in which Bruno’s father, the camp
commandant, is seen showing a propaganda movie
which portrays the camps as places of comfortable,
happy and productive labour to an assembled
group of Nazi officers. This is a clear deviation from
the historical record in that it conflates Auschwitz
with Theresienstadt, where the Nazi propaganda
film Terezin: A documentary film of the Jewish
resettlement was based. It also implies that Jews
were, en masse, tricked into voluntarily moving to
the camps, thus diminishing the brutality of
the deportations.
Most significantly, the film appears to be
propagating the discredited but popular idea that
most German’s didn’t know what was happening
or, in the words of Lilly (Year 12, WM2): ‘the Nazis
showed them what they wanted them to see’. This
is particularly concerning in light of the findings
outlined in the Chapter 3, and further explored in
Chapter 7, that the vast majority of students thought
that only Hitler and the Nazis were responsible for
the Holocaust and didn’t recognise that hundreds of
thousands of ordinary citizens were complicit in the
murder of their Jewish neighbours. Students referred
to the ‘film within a film’ scene in a particularly
uncritical manner and used it as evidence of German
ignorance. For example:
Well it’s sort of evidence of what happened because
you saw how, say, the one bit where the father had
made the film about what happened inside the
concentration camps and you saw the perspective
that the army and Hitler and followers of Hitler high
up kind of made, kind of showed people what they
wanted them to see (Lilly, Year 11, WM2).
Students often made what Seixas (1993a: 153)
describes as ‘seamless transitions’ between
talking about the film’s content and the history
of the Holocaust, despite their awareness of the
inaccuracies (and improbabilities) in its depiction of
the period and their stated awareness that the film is
fictional. It therefore appears that they engage with
the film both reflexively – acknowledging that it is not
a (re)presentation of (past) reality but an imaginative
fiction – and non-reflexively – drawing on the source
uncritically to make a personal ‘sense’ of the past –
at the same time.
In the following exchange, students who have
earlier identified and accepted that The Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas is a work of fiction premised on
historically implausible events then refer to how it
gives them an insight into not just what could have
happened but what actually happened:
Sally: Because if you’ve been … it was all bad …
even fictional films show the good side and the bad
side of it, so it gives you a wider perspective of what
actually happened.
Interviewer: What was the good side about it?
Sally: Well he befriended him, didn’t he? It just shows
that not everyone in Germany followed Hitler and
believed that Jews were bad.
Lilly: But he was young…