What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
93
Sally: He was still being brainwashed by his teachers
and his father saying that basically Hitler was correct
(Years 10 and 11, WM2).
Yes as I said before, I think it is challenging that the
Germans are like that in general because actually it
makes you feel empathetic towards the Germans,
the German families, which I don’t think had been
done before because all other sources they use
Germans in a negative light, just because of the
Nazis, but this opens your eyes and tells you what
the actual truth is, I guess, in that sense
(Callum, Year 12, LON3).
The tendency for students to draw on historical
fiction as if it were a ‘window onto the past’ has been
explored by Seixas (1993a: 364) who found that,
when his respondents discussed the movie Dances
with Wolves, ‘they made statements about the film
as if they were discussing the past’. He goes on to
say that the film’s ‘effectiveness was based on its
being “realistic”, not on its being accurate’.
A similar process appears to be at work for the
participants in our research. Students are aware of
the more glaring historical inaccuracies of The Boy
in the Striped Pyjamas – they know it is a (historical)
fiction – but they still see it as, in the words of several
respondents, ‘truthful’:
I think the way they actually did the film was good,
because even though it was heartbreaking to see
what really happened, it was truthful for what they
were really doing and you got to know what it was
really like for Jews in World War 2
(Ife, Year 8, LON4).
So, an easy sense of understanding – a ‘feel’
for the period afforded by vague, reassuring
notions of the film as ‘truthful’ or ‘realistic’ that
are in fact susceptible to bias, misunderstanding,
misrepresentation and error – persists despite the
simultaneous understanding that the film is an
inaccurate fiction. The concern is that this view of the
film as ‘truthful’ may be consolidated by its use in the
classroom – according to several groups of students
it was being shown even in history lessons – where
the context may give the film a veneer of ‘official
knowledge’. This in turn may contribute to students’
contradictory reflexive and non-reflexive engagement
with the film.
As noted earlier, Cesarani (2008) worried that
the film had managed to ‘turn the Germans into the
victims of the Holocaust’. Similarly, Jensen (2013:
122) has suggested that, after watching the film,
‘one cannot help but feel pity and sympathy for
the perpetrators and bystanders; a subtle
form of “victimisation” of the perpetrators shines
through’. This effect appeared at play in some of
the comments made by students:
I feel sorry for practically everybody who was
under Hitler’s control. Like, they couldn’t do anything
about it because they were told what they could and
couldn’t do and basically got killed off if they didn’t
do what he said. And it doesn’t matter who was
the bigger victim, they were all still victims of Hitler’s
control in some shape or form.
(Erica, Year 11, WM2).
Yes, it is too easy to feel sorry for the Jews in
the film. I don’t mean that in a rude way, it is just
like, everyone is always, like Callum said, is going
to sympathise with the Jews in the camp, but
when you see it from like Bruno or the mother’s
perspective it seems a bit different because they
had to live with that in like Nazi Germany.
(Jack, Year 12, LON3).
Well we always think of the Nazis as the bad guys
and this shows that the Holocaust didn’t just affect
the Jews, it did mostly affect the Jews, obviously,
but the problems that Nazi families might encounter
and what their problems were, because it is good
showing all what the atrocities against the Jews
were, but we see that a lot now and it is true, they
were the worst, they came off the worst, but it is
interesting to see what might happen to a Nazi
family, if that happened (Dan, Year 9, LON3).
These comments contain a disproportionate
mode of equivalence – ‘I feel sorry for practically
everyone under Hitler’s control’ – and normalisation,
even trivialisation, of Jewish suffering – ‘it’s too easy
to feel sorry for the Jews’. This also normalises and
trivialises the extraordinary, unprecedented crime
that took place in the camps and demonstrates a
distorted understanding of the past. In almost all
the schools where this film was discussed, students
revealed a strong tendency to want to extend their
concern to the German population as depicted in
the film, including the members of the SS and
their families.
Although there were undoubtedly Germans who
resisted and even opposed the Nazis, and certainly
many who suffered under the Third Reich, these
comments reflect a comfortable and outmoded
perception of the past that places all blame on
Hitler – or on Hitler and a handful of elite Nazis – in
a process of ‘objectification’, as outlined in Chapter
3. This avoids the more troubling questions of how,
not so long ago, Europeans who were much like us
could participate on a massive scale in the planned
and systematic murder of their neighbours. This is
not only morally dubious but historically inaccurate.
As Jensen (2013: 123) argues: ‘the problem lies in
the reinforcement of outdated historical knowledge
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